115 | Inbox Overload to Email Excellence | Mastering the Art of Business Communication | Kim Arnold

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

We tend to move into formal, posh, you know, I've got my top button done up, I've got my jacket on, and I'm not going to crack a smile here. And people are starting to realise that that doesn't always create relationships, it doesn't create connections. It doesn't build bridges with people because we sound like a robot.

Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of Building Better Cultures with me, Scott McInnes. Lovely to have you back again. Um, the usual two things before we kick off. Firstly, if you are listening on Apple, um, a little 5-star rating and a little comment would be very much appreciated. It does really help to get the podcast out and about. And then the second usual thing is, uh, thanks to our partner Workvivo for their ongoing sponsorship. Brilliant news today. If you aren't listening in real time, it's currently April 2023 and they've just been acquired by Zoom. So that's all very exciting for the team down in Cork. Today we are talking about something that's very close to my heart, words and the use of words and how we can use them most effectively, particularly when it comes to email, which is the bane of many of our lives and probably will continue to be. Before we get onto today's guest, I was having a little dig about with some stats recently. There was a 2019 survey conducted by Adobe that said we'll spend 52,000 hours, yes, you heard that right, in our working lifetime, that's 7% of our working lifetime doing emails. Terrifying. And that 86% in a 2020 report by HubSpot said that 86% of professionals still prefer email for business communications. I did a little bit more digging and kind of along the same lines, the average office worker sends around 33 emails every day. They spend about 4 hours a day reading, writing, and managing emails. Half your workday just doing email. And probably the most scary one for me, actually, nearly 20% of email users check emails as soon as they receive them. So that ding, that little dump of dopamine that we get when somebody needs us or wants us, that's making us go away from the work that we should be doing. It's breaking our concentration. It's stopping us getting into that flow that we all really want to try and get into to do really good quality work. So we're getting our voice, our thought pattern broken all the time. With that much email, we want to make sure that they're good emails. And at the moment, having seen lots of emails and received and probably sent a few not great emails, we know they're not all brilliant. So I'm really pleased to have today's guest here, Kim Arnold, who is a consultant, founder of Email Engagement, and an author who's written a book on the subject. So hopefully, we're gonna get to the bottom of why emails are so bad, and perhaps even hopefully over the next 35 minutes or so, how we can make them a little bit better. Kim, you're very welcome.

Thank you, it's great to be here.

Let's kick off really quickly with just the usual, I like listeners to get to know you. So maybe just a quick 90 seconds about you, where you've come from, and what you do today.

So my name's Kim Arnold, and I'm a self-proclaimed email geek. It's an absolute weird passion of mine, but my, my background is in marketing and communications. I've worked in communications for around 25 years and what I saw when I worked in-house, I was global marketing director, comms director. I saw all this care and attention that people put into marketing emails. They would go through 8 levels of sign-off and there would be all these track changes, loads of people. Making their comments and making sure that it was absolutely finessed. And yet all the while that this was going on, thousands and thousands and thousands of emails were being sent from all the other inboxes by all the employees in the company, and no one was looking at these things. So emailing senior stakeholders, clients, colleagues, senior management, and, and no one was looking at any of this stuff. So I really wanted to bring some of the, the rigor and attention that, that we learn in, in marketing to our everyday business emails, because these are as, as important, uh, as those marketing emails. They're, they're as important to our brand, to our reputation, all of those things. So I founded Email Engagement, which is one of the world's leading email writing training programs, really to tackle this issue of how do we improve productivity, relationships, retention, employee morale, all through these emails. As you said, we're spending so long on them every day, it's time that we did them better.

Yeah, brilliant stuff. Thank you. And I've read your book and it's very good. It's very entertaining. It's a very easy read with some very practical insights and advice. So we'll make sure that we stick a link to that in the show notes. Talk to me about some of the problems that poor email etiquette is creating in business today. Where do you see those problems lying?

Well, it's, it's a much, much bigger problem really than, than we realize. Grammarly recently published their State of Business Communications report. They did it in conjunction with Harris Poll, and there were some really interesting and slightly shocking figures. So they found The written communications are up by 18%, so we're using writing far more than we did asynchronous communications, but its effectiveness is down by 12%. So two-thirds of business leaders are experiencing miscommunications at least once a week. That doesn't surprise me. I had a recent conversation with a client and she said everything can get so misconstrued over email. I, I sent something out, my boss replied, sent something back to me. I said thank you and he replied, no thank you. And she panicked. She was, she was, you know, stressing out. She was worrying what it was. She, you can guess what happened. She, and she gave him a call and yes, it was, it was a question. It was no, it was sorry, it was, it was a comma missing. No thank you. So it was just a very simple example of how easily we can misconstrue people on email. And particularly with asynchronous communications with, and global workplaces, email can spiral so quickly. So we've all woken up, haven't we? We've shut our laptop down at night thinking everything's hunky-dory. We've woken up in the morning to 20 emails that have got completely outta control overnight. So there's a lot of time being spent being wasted on sorting out these miscommunications that really are due to people not understanding how to, um, make sure that they come across in the way that they intended. And Grammarly said it really well. They said high-value time is being spent on low-value activity. 70% of business leaders say they've lost deals because of poor communication. 1 in 5 say they've had brand erosion due to poor communication. It's a really, really big problem out there. Yeah.

And I think probably what I think one of the quotes that I quote most often, and now the person that said it has slipped from my mind, French philosopher, um, I'm sorry I had to write such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write a short one. I think we wait, we, we just, we just get to a keyboard and we go blah, and we just, and we just throw down all the words that are in our head with little thought to the structure or the content or the recipient or being empathetic of the position that they're in. We just want to get our job done da da da da da, get the words typed in and hit send and then tick that thing off our list that we've done that. Now I can delete the email 'cause I'm gonna wait for one back from them. So it's probably not the best position to be in. And I think that problem has been massively exacerbated. And you mentioned there about asynchronous communications. The issue has been massively exacerbated by hybrid working, by the pandemic, by the fact that we're not actually in the office with each other as much anymore. And as you said, the amount of email has increased. So all that's gonna happen is this problem that exists today and existed probably for years is gonna be compounded as we move on and hybrid working becomes much more of a thing. Is that the case?

Absolutely. We seem to have treated hybrid working, most organizations have treated hybrid working as a logistical issue. So when are we gonna get people back in the office? How many days a week? Do we have enough desks for everyone? Does everyone have Teams? But actually there is an enormous communication issue there that hasn't been addressed by, by most organizations. We haven't really acknowledged the fact that the way that we are communicating with each other is very, very different from how it used to be. We don't have the water cooler chats. We don't have those opportunities to clarify, to understand people's intentions, to look them in the eye and go, "Actually, I don't think you're so bad after all. You're just a bit misunderstood," or, "Ah, you know, yes, I can see how you might rub people up the wrong way, but you don't, you know, you don't really mean it like that." Or, "I didn't really understand your email that was 50 paragraphs long. Can we have a quick chat about it?" So all of these things are really contributing to, the problem, and we haven't really, to a large extent, thought about the new skills that people need to deal with the hybrid working environment. We started off doing it, we were like, oh, we need to make sure everyone knows how to use Zoom or Teams and make sure they know how to be on camera, make sure they haven't got their dirty washing in the background. And we, we broadly, organizations have tackled that, they've done some kind of training there. And of course, we are on camera for large portions of the day, but as your stats said, half of our working days are spent on email. It's a vast amount of time, and yet most of us have never, around 90% of us have never been taught how to write a good one.

Yeah, so I'm gonna come onto that in a wee second, because I think actually that problem, I think the problem that we're kind of discussing here is about you and I as employees sending emails to each other and to other people in the organization and to our customers and other stakeholders. But actually the problem exists as much, and I see it all the time with clients that we work with where we go in and we may do an internal comms audit for them, or we may ask to know about, you know, as part of a program of work around creating an internal comms strategy, we may ask them for a bit more information on their channels. How do you get information to your people today? And what's the most given answer? Of course, it's email. Regardless of the fact that we have Slack, we have Facebook at Work, we have SharePoint, we have whatever we have, Email is still king and people just aren't reading them. And if they do, they're getting confused. And back to the point that you made there a few seconds ago, we don't teach effective email writing as a skill because I think even when, even as I'm saying those words, it sounds a bit noddy, you know, writing, writing, oh no, I learned to do that when I was 7 and I've never really gone back to it since. But it is a skill that we need to hone, that we need to build. Build, it's a muscle that we need to continue to exercise, and we get better as we go. So why are organizations not teaching that skill if it's that important, if there's that big a gap?

I think that the first reason you've just so rightly said, we talk about writing as if it's a finite skill. I learned how to write at school, I learned how to read at school, one and done, that's it.

Tick.

I can put a sentence together. I know how to use the semicolon. I can use spellcheck. Therefore, I am able to write. What we aren't teaching people is how to communicate. And those two things are very, very different. The writing that we have been trained for is not the writing we're doing every single day. So I always say to clients, and particularly when I talk to a lot of graduates, no one is being paid to read what you write anymore. Um, you know, this isn't school or university where people were, were, you know, really paid to sit down and read what you write, and that you were rewarded for the length of what you wrote. So we've taught people to write to a point, but as you say, this is an evolution, and we are now in a war for attention. People are overloaded. There's a most recent stats on attention span. Dr. Gloria Marks has just brought out a fantastic book. She reckons we switch screens every 47 seconds. So that's not devices, that's just screens. So we're flicking from email to Slack to PowerPoint to, you know, a Word document every 47 seconds. And then you can imagine within each of those, the attention span on one email versus another. You know, you start writing an email and then, and then something else pings up. So we aren't being taught how to write. I think there is an assumption that we should know how to do it. The other point here is that organizations aren't measuring the cost of poor communication either. So, um, they are not putting financial figures around the cost to productivity, um, around the cost of attrition. There was a statistic that said, um, a quarter of employees have considered finding new jobs due to poor comms. So this is something that's really just going under the, under the radar at the moment, and it's something that, that when we work with organizations, work organizations from the Arctic Circle to Australia, is really thinking about how do you quantify the cost of poor communication versus how do you quantify the gain here. So how are you measuring response times? How are you measuring, um, uh, project effectiveness? How, how quickly things are moving? How do you measure relationships, team collaboration? All of these things that are so affected by email. And I think once we really understand the size and the weight of the problem, but also the size and the weight of the upside to focusing on this, then it all starts to make sense. But as you say, otherwise, you know, email writing, well, it feels like something that we really should know how to do. The other point here as well is that business leaders tend to think they're better communicators than they actually are. So it might be seen as something for the more junior people, but not for the more senior people. And there is a really strong disconnect. Again, the Grammarly survey brought this up. 83% of business leaders think they're strong communicators, but only 50% of knowledge workers think communication from senior leaders is effective. So that is, that is a big problem as well. Well, it might be, might be those people over there might need help with their email, but I'm good, I'm good. And of course, it's, it's often the, the senior leaders who are writing those, you know, 2,000-word missives that, um, people really struggle to, to get their arms around.

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Yeah, and they struggle to give those senior leaders feedback on those comms. You know, I'm not sure, Mrs. CEO, Mr. CEO, that the, the com that you've just written there, the 2,000-word, 5-page missive is kind of gonna hit the mark. Perhaps that needs to be a video, perhaps it needs to be a dozen bullet points, perhaps it needs to be something else, or perhaps it needs to be 3 separate emails broken up and sent out a week after each other. But I don't think organizations are great at giving feedback. I don't think actually, it's interesting, I was watching a film yesterday from Anth Burrows, who was my former boss from AIB, who now runs Intelligent in Motion. And he's running a series of workshops on not how to help help people to give feedback, organizations and leaders to give feedback, but how to help people receive that feedback in a way that's open and honest and we're taking it on board. And I think maybe leaders have to think a little bit more about that. How do they leave themselves open to that feedback for somebody to say, I'm not sure, Sarah, Jim, Bob, Billy, that that's quite hitting the mark. And I love the point you made earlier on and that no thank you example. That was missing a comma. Because that, I mean, that sounds, I mean, if writing sounds noddy, the use of a comma sounds noddier. But the difference that it makes, no comma, thank you, or no comma, thank you, you in caps, that makes all the difference. And that would've made that message completely different. I think probably one of the things that we're gonna struggle with, and I love the fact that you said, you know, it's not about writing, it's about communicating, which it absolutely is because I think I have 3 kids, they're 17, 15, and 13. I ask them occasionally to show me their work and mostly they say no and sometimes they do. And I'm just shocked by the quality of punctuation, of capitalization, of, I remember once my middle daughter showed me a project she'd done and on the front she'd written, "Scott McInnes." 'all lowercase.' And I said, 'No, it's capital M, lowercase c, capital I, N-N-E-S, and it's my name, and I'm proud of that, and you should be proud of that. Proud enough to spell it correctly.' Didn't really even register with her that she'd done something wrong. So I think maybe coming through that, um, that, that group of people, that generation of people coming up now, the basics of really good writing aren't there anymore. It's all text writing. You know, "Wait, W8." Like, what?

I think that's right. And also, there is a widening gap in tone, in the kind of words that we use, use of emojis. And when we're dealing with sort of increasingly multi-generational workforces, they— the opportunity for miscommunication really increases. If you have a sort of very formal email from someone who's perhaps, you know, from an older generation or more senior communicating with, with a Gen Z who receives warmth through emojis or through exclamation marks, you have a real, real problem there. Again, you know, with, with global organizations I work with organizations all over the world, what might seem, uh, very— was sort of, um, polite to an English person, to a French person might just be a whole load of waffle. Remember, wonderful French senior director in one of our sessions said, um, she said, oh, I'm just so fed up with this. I hope you're well. How was your weekend? What did you do? Just get to the point. And then the Brits, and then she said, but I've been told off for being too direct. So we— there are so many nuances that we have to deal with. But, but good grammar and good spelling really isn't enough. And that's what we've been— our generation has, has, has been taught that. And that might not be coming through so much. However, I suspect, and what I'm starting to see, is that Gen Z perhaps are more empathetic communicators than we are, that they are much more open to expressing their feelings, being more direct, being kinder. So I think there are lots and lots of nuances, lots of upsides to the whole situation, but it's certainly fascinating to see unfold as these different generations have very different approaches to their communication.

Yeah, and I sometimes wonder, am I just a dinosaur on a dinosaur soapbox with things like grammar, punctuation, you know, the dreaded apostrophe? I wonder, does it really, does it matter as much today as it did 20 years ago? What do you think?

It's a great question, and I've definitely changed my views on this. So I, I'm a linguist, my background, I studied German and Russian at university. I adore language, linguistics, all of that. And, and part of that is syntax and grammar and all that stuff. I love to get my, my hands into. And, and I think I've, I've been to my shame, a bit of a grammar snob, a bit of a spelling snob in, in the past, thinking that this was incredibly important. And And it is to a point. And I mean, there was a— in my book I mentioned there's a survey by Match.com, and they found that on dating, on the dating websites, we judge people more harshly because of bad grammar than we do bad teeth. So we can have terrible dental hygiene if we know how to use our apostrophes. However, these days I am taking much more of a Gen Z approach. I think we have a lot to learn here and really thinking about people who are neurodivergent, um, people who might not have had higher education, the benefit of that, that privilege. Um, and actually we aren't all grammar, and with the speed that we shoot out emails these days, I am much, much more forgiving of this stuff, and I really encourage people to do the same. It obviously depends on your industry. So I work with a lot of lawyers, and for them, this is really important. If there's a missing decimal, there's, I mean, some terrible tales about missing decimals in contracts that have, you know, decimal points that have led to, you know, millions and millions and millions being lost. So, you know, if your profession is around the accuracy of your written work, then okay. However, I think in general, we can all be a bit kinder. We can all be a little bit more forgiving, given the speed and the sort of nature of email overwhelm. So I'm a reformed snob, let's say that.

Okay, note to self, I'm going to be more forgiving and less of a grammarian nightmare. So thank you. Thank you for that. I feel like lying down on a couch for a few minutes and contemplating that. One thing you touched on there a second ago, Kim, which I also think is quite, is maybe as divisive as grammar and apostrophes and all that stuff, is the use of emojis in emails. What's your take on that in the workplace today? Is there a home for emojis in business emails?

If you'd asked me 3 or 4 years ago, I would've said no. And these days, absolutely. I think, um, they are increasingly useful to clarify our tone and intent. Again, we have to be very careful of our audience. They will turn some people off. If you work in a very traditional industry, not necessarily appropriate. However, they can fill some of those gaps that, that we need. On the flip side, they can be problematic to those who might use screen readers. So we need to be careful about the inclusive nature of them. If we pepper our emails with lots and lots of emojis, a screen reader will read them out very literally. So you might have, "Hi, how was your weekend?" Grinning sun emoji. And it just disrupts the flow of what you're saying. But there is— there has been an enormous shift, and I think COVID has, um, really contributed to a more informal way of communicating over email. We were plunged into that time when we were literally seeing into each other's bedrooms, you know, with, with cameras on. We were seeing bedhead, literal beds. We were seeing pets, all of those things. And And for email, what that's done is take away some of that formality, which I think is a very positive thing. So emojis in moderation, check your audience, but overall we're moving to a more informal tone of voice.

I agree. And I think that again, back to that example of no thank you, if that had been no thank you smiley face emoji.

There you go.

Then maybe that would have helped clarify the intent and the emotion behind that, that response. Um, right, we've spent 25 minutes talking about all the problems and all the holes and everything that's going wrong with the email, and listeners are going, will you just tell us how to fix it? So how do we fix business emails? What are some— obviously you have a book, you have a training course— what are some of the big headlines? What are some of are the big buckets that you're teaching people about when you're doing that course, or, or even in the book? What should people be looking out for?

Number one thing we get asked about all the time is tone of voice. So how do we strike that balance between being professional and being friendly? And that's the area that people struggle with the most, because typically we've been right, we've been sort of We've learned how to write emails that start with, "I hope this email finds you well," or, "Please find attached the aforementioned report." We tend to move into formal, posh, you know, I've got my top button done up, I've got my jacket on, and I'm not gonna crack a smile here. People are starting to realize that that doesn't always create relationships. It doesn't create connections. It doesn't build bridges with people because we sound like a robot. We sound like someone who— we sound ironically less human than ChatGPT. ChatGPT does a much better job at sounding like a real human than most of us. So tone of voice, really thinking about the words that you are choosing. Are these words that you would say in real life to someone? I wouldn't say to my children, please utilize your cutlery. I would say use your fork. And that is the kind of simple language that we should be using on email for So many reasons. One, it sounds friendlier. Two, the words are shorter. The sentences will be shorter. Your overall email will be shorter. It's easier to read. It's more inclusive. Clear is kind. So shaking off some of that formality will really, really help you. When I talked about writing versus communicating, this is where we can make that difference. Emails that sound human have empathy. They create connections. We're trying to create relationships from scratch a lot of the time over email these days, something we've never done before. And you can't do that unless someone gets to know a bit of you. So thinking about how you can be more informal is a really important part of that. Second point, love this quote from the, the— I think it's the US Navy SEALs, but it's been banded around, but it's the slow is smooth Smooth is fast. So slowing down just a little bit and thinking about your audience, the 3 Ws I talk about. So who am I writing to? What do I want to happen next? And why the hell they should care? If we answer those things, if we just spend 30 seconds thinking about that, it's going to hone our email. It's going to make it much clearer. We're gonna give people an incentive to respond and it will save us so much time. Time. So those are the two biggies, I think, is thinking about your audience, slowing down, and, and tone of voice.

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. Yeah, I think for me, a few things jumped to mind there and you kind of covered it off. Don't use a long word when a short one will do. That's a really important one. Again, my wife has never said to me, can you commence putting the shopping in the car? You know, that's never been said in our house. Yet we say all the time in emails. Yeah, brilliant. And I think, you know, for me, and we could spin off on a tangent and talk about tone of voice for about 40 hours, I suspect. But, you know, people have battery lives on their phones and that kind of thing. So we may run out before we got to the end of that. Maybe that's for another episode. We will just talk, we'll just talk tone of voice specifically. But how does How does a business go about creating a tone of voice? Is it something that has to be written down? Kind of a bit like when you came from your background of marketing and branding. Of course, many organizations have brand guidelines. You know, this is how we talk to our customers, this is how we sound, this is what our logo looks like, this is how much white space we need to have around our logo, all of those types of things. Yet we don't have that internally very often. And of course, John Simmons, Scott McInnes, back about probably 60 episodes ago, is worth a listen, the kind of the godfather of tone of voice. He coined the phrase and he said, well, why are we not doing that internally? So is it something that organizations should have? Should they have tone of voice guidelines, or does that kind of ironically make everybody sound the same, the same sort of informal? So we've gone from sounding the same of the sound, the same formalness, and now we're sounding the same informalness. So Is there an irony in there as well? I don't know. Is that, was that even a question? I don't know.

No, no, I love this point because of course it's a balance and it's a tension often between the individual and the organization. How much of my own personality am I allowed to show? Can I sound like me? Do I need to sound in a certain way. And I think what really great tone of voice guidelines do, and, and this is something I work with clients on, um, is give people the, the sort of handrail, um, but allow them to walk freely. So it's, it's giving people sometimes the permission. So one of my clients, um, the Charitable Foundation, and they have a really superb writing guide but nobody had read it. And it was only when I started working with the team on email and I said, you know, have you got anything? And eventually this, this thing gets dredged up, and it's superb, really, really great. They wrote a lot of reports, um, very academic, um, reports, very, um, they're all analysts. And they were absolutely thrilled with it because what this writing guy told them was they didn't have to be academic and stuffy And yet they thought to appear professional and to be taken seriously that they had to write in a certain way. What this writing guide showed them was actually, no, this is how you can write in a way that connects with people. So it's almost a really great tone of voice guidelines gives people permission to be themselves, but to understand what the expectations of the organization are. And if you couple that with an email playbook, So which might go into more detail about how you use email versus how you use Slack, for example. It might be around response time expectations. I had a client recently who said, I feel like I need to respond to senior management within 15 minutes, day or night. And I said, where does that come from? And she said, well, no one's told that to me, but that's what I feel I need to do. Now, I don't know if that was the expectation at all, but wouldn't it be good to know one way or the other? Because if that's not the expectation, if it's, you know, an hour, 2 hours, 24 hours, then you're gonna have a much happier workforce. You know more about this than me, but giving people more guidance around email and around writing style is so important. Too often we'll tell people, you know, our brand values are excellence, curiosity, integrity, and that's who we are. But what on earth does that mean when I'm sitting there writing an email to a client? I have no clue whatsoever. So making that bridge between the brand guidelines and your everyday employee writing stuff is, is critical in my eyes. Yeah.

And I love the fact that you've, you've continued to use the word Guidelines, because they're not generally rules, they are guidelines, or they are handrails, or they are a framework. You know, we talk often about freedom within a framework. So you're giving somebody the outlines of the pitch and then you're saying, well, here's the outlines of the pitch, but actually when you're in the pitch with your team, you play however you want to play, however suits your team and suits your customers and suits the other people who are on the pitch, the other stakeholders. So that whole idea of, I think, freedom in a framework is really powerful, but just to give people a bit of, a bit of freedom to be able to express themselves. I once read a thing that said, if you know the person that sent you the email, when you're reading the email, you're reading it in your head in their voice. So if they are using words that they wouldn't use when they're speaking to you, like commence or initiate or whatever it might be, if they wouldn't use those words face to face, then it creates this inauthenticity and this lack of integrity in the comments, which of course then goes on to breed a bit of distrust, 'cause you're reading it and going, "Well, why on earth is Kim using words like that? She'd never say words like that to my face. Maybe she's trying to, you know, cover up for something that she's done, or, you know, there's some big bad news coming or something else," which of course then gets us into this spiral of, "I wonder what," or "What if?" So, there's definitely something in that, and I think that whole idea of guidelines is a very, very powerful one. We are nearly out of time, Kim, but as I say, we will definitely be coming back to talk more about this stuff. I can guarantee that. That almost sounded vaguely threatening. It wasn't meant to be. Let me finish on this. People are all listening and going, that's great. Kim gave us a couple of things we need to think about. But if I wanted to do one thing right now to improve my emails, to get what I need to get from the emails that I'm writing, what's the one thing that listeners could do better right now? What's the one thing they could change?

Make them shorter. It's very simple advice, but it's hard to do. And we teach a lot about how to be concise, 'cause that is an art form in itself. But these days, to get people's attention and to sustain it, you have to be concise. So 80 words or fewer in an email, 5 or 6 sentences. It is so much less than we tend to write, but that is And that is the one thing that I would pick out of many.

Brilliant. That's been great. Listen, Kim, I've really enjoyed the chat. As I said, I could talk about this stuff for literally weeks and weeks. We will come back. For now, if people want to get in touch with you or want to hear more about the work that you do, what's the best place to get hold of you?

They can connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line via my website. It's Kim at, email is kim@kimarnold.co.uk or my website, kimarnold.co.uk.

Brilliant stuff. Listen, thanks a million for taking the time today. I've loved this chat, something that I'm really, really passionate about and you are too. And hopefully we'll get to chat about it again. But in the meantime, thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much. It's been wonderful.

Thanks for listening. To hear from other leaders in our podcasts, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do at Inspiring Change, please visit inspiringchange.ie.