Meet Karen Laos

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Karen Laos. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Karen below.

Karen, so great to have you on the platform and excited to have you share your wisdom with our community today. Communication skills often play a powerful role in our ability to be effective and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your communication skills.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve loved the spoken word. In a high school speech class, I thought I nailed my talk in front of my classmates. Afterward, the teacher told me I looked at the ceiling the whole time! I was red from embarrassment. That was my first big communication lesson in public speaking. The newfound self-awareness helped me step into confidence the next time I spoke. Over the years, I fell in love with public speaking and once I started working, I fell into HR and eventually became a corporate trainer at Gap Inc, where I was teaching communication skills, which was a natural evolution for me.

Later I became a corporate trainer and eventually head of program delivery at Decker Communications, where we taught corporate leaders to communicate to influence, in both their presence and in their content. There’s nothing like video of yourself to make you want to change a few things! Self-awareness and feedback is what made me effective, and still holds true today.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

In July of 2020 I quit my corporate leadership job to focus on my mission: to eradicate self-doubt in 10 million women in 10 years. Too many women are paralyzed with doubt, and my goal is to give them strategies to speak up and ask for what they want.

My dream is to speak on the Chase Center stage in San Francisco by May of 2030 – I can’t imagine anything more exhilarating then thousands of women coming together, empowered and free!

Whether you’re speaking in a boardroom, leading a meeting with your team, or negotiating with a roofer for your home, I want all women to be free of the things that hold us back: self-doubt, people pleasing, fear of rocking the boat, perfectionism or fear of judgment. I’m on a mission to replace doubt with confident communication skills, specifically what to say and how to say it.

What’s most exciting for me is to watch someone go from hesitant and unsure to speaking up with clarity and confidence.

For example, one of my executive clients wanted to overcome her fear of public speaking, and she was terrified before we started working together. Within six months, she nailed a presentation in front of 200 people in a huge hotel ballroom- she felt calm and confident, which was her goal.

Another example is a client who had been waiting for 10 years at her company to get promoted, thinking and hoping that she would notice her. We started working together, and within three months, she got promoted, because she made an offer to her company that they could not refuse – she saw a need that she could fill, we worked on her pitch, and she got it.

My mastermind community is called The Power House, and this is a combination of group and 1-1 coaching along with collective group wisdom. What’s powerful about it is the connection of the women and the shared experience of the group – the supportive nature is so helpful for women to feel more confident and connected.

Besides coaching, most of what I do is on a stage – as a speaker on executive presence and messaging/storytelling, along with negotiating and how to harness our power as women. Ask my clients – I love doing role plays as that gives people massive value, along with recording people speaking and then watching it back so they can celebrate their wins and also see what areas in their body language, voice, or facial expressions they need to work on. Many people come to me for public speaking help, but my heart is for the woman in a meeting who’s holding back from speaking up. I yearn for all women to be free to share their ideas and do it with certainty.

In 2022 I published my book: Trust Your Own Voice: Growing your influence through confident communication. I never expected to start a podcast, but opportunity struck and now my podcast, Ignite Your Confidence, has 30,000 downloads and is in the top 3% globally of popular podcasts.

What matters to me is making an impact, and I’m grateful I’m most known for my practical tips that people can immediately apply. My core values are care, excellence, celebration and flair. I live these out daily and am deeply vested in my client’s growth.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Expecting amazing things to happen to me. I have always had the attitude that life is going to work out for me, and that people love to help me. That confidence and expectation has served me well, because what you expect, you generally get.

2. Having the courage to ask. My ability to believe I can get things by asking is a powerful one, and has made the difference between opportunities coming to fruition or dying. I’m quick to ask and follow-through, too.

3.How to command any room. I have mastered how to speak up, own a stage and facilitate in an unflappable fashion. I’m 100% myself on stage – and am comfortable with my humanity. I’m vulnerable, take myself lightly, but also am serious about my craft, and people can tell.

Advice is get a coach or mentor to help keep you accountable to your dreams and goals!

To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?

Taught me that I could do anything I set my mind to. My dad taught me the power of asking for what you want. He used to say “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” and “you don’t have because you don’t ask” – that was a powerful learning because so many women don’t ask for what they want, and this is one of the reasons we are behind in pay equity.

We need to be asking for the raise, the promotion, the business – and that’s a big part of what I help women do.

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Image Credits

Karen Laos
Hormel Foods

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