Do you invest in yourself & others?

This week, we chat to one of our recent participants, Andre Obradovic who attended our Corporate Performance course in Melbourne. Andre is an accredited ICF Leadership/Personal Coach, CEO of rapidly growing technology company m-View and ambassador speaker for Beyond Blue. After 18 years in the Australian Army, graduating from the Royal Military College Duntroon and completing the SAS Selection Course, Andre undertook corporate leadership roles at Cisco and Samsung. Today, Andre applies this life experience to inspire people to take different paths.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your career that has lead you to become CEO of live-video streaming company, m-View.

Essentially I’d had enough of big corporate roles and wanted to work with nice people and a smaller team where I could coach and support them, and do myself out of a job within three years. I wanted the time and ability to spend a lot of time learning and coaching, and this role allows that in a flexible manner.

As CEO of a rapidly growing company, I’m acutely aware of the risks and rewards of visionary thinking. Coaching combines my passion for storytelling and commitment to help people understand true power of the mind and one of the most important muscles: their brain.

Running marathons and inspiring people to change is nothing short of an obsession. I am making the switch into Triathlon in 2016 and will soon be a certified Iron Man Coach. I share my own life experiences and my ongoing battle to smash through the wall at every marathon, to help everyday people prime their own brain for success. Far more than anecdotal, this is deeply grounded in the latest knowledge.

As personal coach, why do you think it is important for professionals at all levels to keep investing in their own development and training?

I believe it is critical to your own success and capabilities to always learn, read and think about what you can improve on and in what areas you can bring more value to the people you work with, live with and spend time with. Regardless of whether you are the CEO, a junior leader or the storeman, everyone needs to understand their own capability shortfalls and develop goals around enhancing those areas both in professional and personal life.

With more companies investing in having dedicated spokesperson roles, do leaders still need to know how to talk to the media or address a room full of people? Do today’s leaders need to focus on building other communication skills instead?

I feel that the way we communicate within our teams, with our friends and to our customers is critical to who we are and how we influence people. I am continually amazed at the gaps I see in the way many senior people do presentations or talks. There is nothing worse than a slide-reader or someone who does not inspire people.

Please understand I need more work myself and no one is perfect, but my advice is start your story by asking yourself the following questions before you open your computer, “if you were to bump into someone in the group of people you spoke to in three months, three weeks, three years or three days, what would you want them to remember about your talk? What would you like them to have done as a result?”

In the end what you say does not really matter, it is how you inspire people.

Is presentation training something you have recently ventured into, or is this a skill you have invested in throughout your career?

I have invested in this for many years, when I worked at Cisco – a great company – they invested a great deal in our training and I always loved presentation or storytelling courses. I look forward to my one-on-one session I have also booked with NIDA.

What do you think makes NIDA’s training different to other presentation and communications coaching out there?

First of all it is nothing about slides and charts, secondly it is all about that emotional connection with the people and the audience and what I call storytelling. So different to nearly every other public speaking or presentation course I have done.

What is one technique or tip from your NIDA training that you still use today?

I often would speak in chunks with gaps hoping that this would emphasise specific points, but on my most recent course I learnt that bringing things together – flowing the structure together a bit faster – made the story flow much better.

All views expressed are authors own.