How Perception Shapes Our Confidence

In this episode of The Impostor Syndrome Files, we take a closer look at a topic that quietly shapes every professional interaction we have: perception. My guest this week is Shira Abel, keynote speaker, marketing expert and creator of the Perception Formula. Shira brings more than 25 years of experience in marketing, sales and teaching to show us why understanding how others see us is essential to building stronger relationships, communicating with clarity and showing up with confidence.

Shira breaks down her perception formula, which includes heuristics, hormones, history and heritage. We explore cultural and socioeconomic differences, the role of social conditioning and how much of our daily communication happens on autopilot. Shira also shares practical strategies for preparing for conversations, reading the room and navigating the nuances of communicating online.

Here we talk about the growing influence of AI on communication and personal brand, including how to use AI tools responsibly without losing your own voice. Shira also opens up about confidence, what it really means and why it has less to do with fearlessness and more to do with self-trust and the willingness to get back up after failure.

About My Guest

Shira Abel is the go-to-market expert trusted by category-leading enterprises including Siemens, Samsung, AXA, and Allianz. As the founder of Hunter & Bard and creator of The Perception Formula, she helps companies reshape how they’re seen, so they can close bigger deals, earn trust faster, and grow with intention. Her perception work has doubled sales for tech companies and enabled clients to land enterprise deals they previously thought were out of reach.

Shira holds an MBA from Kellogg, has taught at UC Berkeley, and is recognized globally as a keynote speaker and business mentor. She’s driven over a billion dollars in economic impact and scaled her own agency to seven-figure revenue, an accomplishment fewer than 2% of female founders achieve.

~

Connect with Shira:

Website: https://shiraabel.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shiraabel/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/shiraabel

~

Connect with Kim and The Impostor Syndrome Files:

Join the free Impostor Syndrome Challenge.

Learn more about the Leading Humans discussion group

Join the Slack channel to learn from, connect with and support other professionals.

Join the Facebook group.

Schedule time to speak with Kim Meninger directly about your questions/challenges.

Connect on LinkedIn

Websites: https://kimmeninger.com

Transcript

Kim Meninger

Welcome, Shira. I'm so excited to be talking to you and the in this capacity, usually we talk to each other outside of this setting, but I'd love to start by inviting you to tell us a little bit about yourself.

Shira Abel

So my name is Shira Abel. I'm a professional speaker, and I talk about perception and how perception drives decisions. I'm also working on a book and doing all the things that go along with that. So quite busy. My background is 25 years in marketing and sales. I've also taught marketing for startups at Berkeley as a lecturer and also previously as a fellow. So I moved from fellow to lecture, moved up, and I have an agency that I grew to seven figures marketing agency. We worked primarily with enterprises or selling to enterprises. We worked also with scale ups and startups and early stage but pretty much everyone we worked with was selling to enterprise. So that's my background, marketing and sales.

Kim Meninger

So tell me a little bit about the topic of perception. When you talk about perception driving decisions, what do you mean by that?

Shira Abel

Well, you know, think about it. Everybody makes a decision based on how much they like you, how they feel about you, how much they trust you. So if you understand how somebody on the other side thinks, you can make sure you're giving the impression that you want to, instead of the impression that you may be giving that you don't intend to write, different cultures have different backgrounds, and not everybody thinks the same. And the whole idea that just follow the golden rule is enough, it's not.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, so that's really interesting to think about the golden rule in the context of cultural differences. Because, yeah, I mean, what we how we communicate here in the US is very different from how people communicate in other parts of the world.

Shira Abel

Well, also just how we communicate in different parts of the US, right? Or how we communicate with our socioeconomic status. I grew up lower middle class. I've been working since I was 14, and we now live in an area that is upper middle, maybe even considered wealthy. And I had stopped cursing, dang, that's Apple, you know, I mean. And it was hard, really, I honestly, I still do when I feel really comfortable with someone, but I always keep it in mind that it's really considered improper here and very and people are judging.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, well, and I think that judgment piece is really important to what you're saying, because I think most of us like to think that we're not judgmental people, but that's how our brain works, right? Our there is a part of our brain that is always judging and assessing. Is this a person that I, you know, I can feel safe with? Is this a person I want to work with? Right? And so, like you're saying, a lot of it is situational. There's, there's a cultural element to it. What? What do you generally advise people to think about in terms of their own preparation for how they're going to be perceived.

Shira Abel

So I have a whole framework about this, right? And the framework is perception is equal to heuristics, which are mental shortcuts, hormones, emotions, chemicals in our body, history, the history have either with the person or with the company or with the industry, and then heritage. Where does the person come from? Their socioeconomic status, what tribes they self-subscribe to? Like, I come from marketing and sales. My husband's an engineer. We do not think the same way at all. So you have to consider all of these things when you're figuring out how to approach someone, how to speak to someone, how to get them to give buy in.

Kim Meninger

Yes, and so one of the things that I want to ask you about, too, is because everyone feels like they don't have enough time to do even the basics right now. And so when you see that, I can imagine people thinking, gosh, that's a lot of work I've got to basically do, like a research project on people before, right? And, and maybe that information's not always easily accessible, right? So, like, how do you think about doing your homework in a really chaotic, busy world?

Shira Abel

It's doing your it's just basically doing your research on the person where they're from? How do they think what they do for a living? Because you'll find, I, at least have found in my years of marketing and sales, because a lot of this, all this goes into marketing and sales, right? So when you're figuring out your ICP, which is your ideal customer profile. You have to figure out how this person thinks, and you will find that marketers tend to think the same way. Sales people are very similar, engineers, very similar, coders, very similar. So if you focus on that bit, you'll be more likely to be able to break through things. Then if you go like I think that is that and socioeconomic status are the more important than necessarily other bits right, like, okay, somebody may code switch, but how they think will be closer to what like their socioeconomic status that is around them, because we try to get people to be around us that are like us and, and the tribe they self-subscribe to. So if they're a geek, they're going to think in a geeky way.

Kim Meninger

Well, and I think that that does create more efficiency, because even though there are always exceptions, yeah, you know, generally understanding what type of background a person has going to give you some really powerful clues. We do have, even though we are probably busier than ever before and we've got a lot of noise coming at us, we do have more resources available than ever before too, like LinkedIn is such a great place for doing some of this homework and just being able to go and look at people's online presence to get some of these insights.

Shira Abel

Right. And if you don't have time to, you know, learn everything about the different hormones and the heuristics and all of this, you could also just throw it into an LLM and get something back. It won't be, you know, LLM solutions. So I cannot promise you perfection each time, but it will get you closer than you know. If you don't have any background in any of this, it'll at least give you some type of insight.

Kim Meninger

And that's one of the things that I always associate with you, is like you're, in my mind, you are the expert in AI and all you know, this whole new world that we're entering into. And so I'm glad you brought that up, because I think that there are probably a lot of people out there listening who are more on my end of the spectrum, who are still kind of dabbling and trying to figure it out. And so is there a particular platform you would recommend or…

Shira Abel

Okay, okay, I have to preface this. I am a geek. I am a massive geek. I pay for two forms of Gemini. I pay for Gemini inside of my Google, you know, work environment, and then I pay for Gemini separately, because the Gemini that's separate is actually an earlier version of the one that they give you for the work. Oh yeah, because I'm a part of Gemini labs or, or Google Labs. So I get an early I get a more advanced version in my personal so I pay for both. I pay for grok, I pay for Claude, perplexity and chat GBT, and then I will pay for other platforms, like lovable and several others, as needed, when needed, right like, right now, I'm playing around. I'm not playing around. I have a friend who's a graphic artist and a website maker, and she is playing around on my lovable right now. Lovable is a dev platform, and she's playing around with it because I had extra points and I wasn't going to use it. And we got to chatting, and I said, take my $200 and go use all of my thing and go do whatever you want. She's like, well, if I'm doing that, I might as well learn how to work on websites inside of lovable. So she's making a new site for me. I don't know whether it'll end up being usable or not, but she's testing it. A geeky person has geeky friends, and so, you know, saying which one is the best is kind of impossible to do. I can tell you which ones I find generally helpful for what things I have put my own writing. So I record my talks, and I take the transcript from that, and I put it into Claude so Claude understands my voice and tone, and I have projects in Claude. Claude is most of the time the best one for writing. I consider Gemini the best one in terms of, of marketing and strategy. So if you think about it, Google, who knows? Yeah, really. Who knows it better than Google Chat. GPT is the best overall, and gives the best advice. I'm not particularly good at writing sentiment, Chachi. PT is so if I have to write. Thank you note or something like that. I will ask chat GPT to do it for me, because even though I may feel the feelings, I'm not very good at explaining the feelings that I may have. So I'll put it messy inside of chat GPT, and it'll come back with something beautiful. So also I have in chat GPT, I have my board of directors, so I have, through Gemini research, created PDFs of different people that I admire in the industry. Gemini research did the full research. Then I take the research, I put the research into perplexity, and say, confirm all of this is true, right? That's how I check for hallucinations. And then after perplexity confirms it, I take the PDF, I put it into German or chat GPT, and then I have this whole prompt saying, here's how I want you to use this as my personal board. And when I was figuring out if I was going to do a podcast or a newsletter. My personal board said, do the newsletter first before you start the podcast, because I'm working on my book, right? So I need to build up my numbers, and I also need an email list. So if I'm working on the book and I need the email list, it makes sense. They all basically said, except for one, which is funny, because it's, it's very how it, it really does read it back to you as because I pick people who are very vocal online, so it understands how that person thinks. It has all of their data. It has the books that they've written, even though it's probably not supposed to, or at least it did so chat, GPT has all of this information, so it really comes back sounding at least quite accurate. Who knows?

Kim Meninger

That's so fascinating because I think that's, you know, another part of the work experience that may feel a little bit tricky. I know the whole concept of a board of directors isn't new, but there's still a way in which people are reluctant to ask for help directly, or they feel like they're wasting people's time.

Shira Abel

Which is why I did it this way.

Kim Meninger

Which is it's just fascinating to me to think about having a technology based board of directors. And then, to your point, you get to use figures that you would never have access to, right? Like, I can't remember who's on your board of directors, but it's just really funny to think about. Like you could have Brene Brown as like, one of your board members.

Shira Abel

I have Mel Robbins, [okay, yes, exactly, yes. And so] when am I going to get access to Mel Robbins, maybe after the book.

Kim Meninger

But that's such a such an interesting and creative way to be able to access, you know, advice from them, given what AI knows about all of their background and how they would likely respond to you on a particular issue. [Yeah.] Yeah. I want to go back to perception for a minute too, because there's perception as it relates to the you know, you and I are having a conversation. I can read your body language, you know, we're or we're not in the same room together, but it sort of feels like we are. But then there's the, the online piece, and especially in the context of AI, where a lot of people are putting the messy message, like you're saying into AI, and then having it cleaned up and then, like, what do you think we should be thinking about when it comes to perception, electronically or in writing?

Shira Abel

Okay, first of all, we all need to realize that anything written has an automatic negative connotation assigned to it. So if you're going to be positive, you have to be a little extra interesting if you're just doing neutral, like when you're sending an email, if you're just doing neutral, it's very easy for it to be read as negative, even if you mean nothing by it. So with that in mind, there's a couple things to consider that's one, that's the first one I learned that one long before AI even became a thing that was back in my customer service days when I first started my career. So one, and then the other things to keep in mind is that people think less of you if you're not writing your own stuff, if they see it and they see you're not writing your own stuff. And I know this for multiple reasons, but one being my son, who is in college right now he's at Lehigh, has given me an endless amount of grief. Or you for he's like Mom, I could tell that you wrote this with an LLM, and I hate it. Why are you doing that? It's and he will go off on me. And quite frankly, he's saying what other people are thinking that they will not say out loud. It's. So you could think of it as well. I'm using it in order to get more attention, but then, if people are giving you the attention, what are they thinking of you when they see it? So I was part of of an automated commenting group, and I took myself out because at the end of the day, if somebody it was getting results, people were looking at the comments. But I hated all the comments that were being written automatically, like they weren't my voice at all. I would never write something like this. And you could tell, you could tell, you could tell, by the way, it was written, if anybody actually, and even if you didn't know me, you could tell it was written by an LLM So, and I've seen enough comments through friends, on LinkedIn and on Facebook that it gets a worse impression, rather than even, you know, a typo personal, at least you know it's personal these days, right? So I, so I left it, even though it was bringing results in terms of attention, right? Because awareness is a big deal. As a speaker, you need to build up your awareness, and so attention is crucial. But while people may not remember the details, what they're going to remember is how they feel about what you produce. So my concern there was, how are they going to feel about what I produce? Because I'm not out enough, right? I'm not meeting people enough to get beyond that. Too much of my personality online is from what I post and my videos, and you know this, right? I get out maybe once a week into San Francisco, maybe, maybe. So I'm not out meeting people the way some people are. I know people who are out literally all the time, and they're flying to different countries, and they're doing all of these really incredible things, and that is fantastic. And I think in that case, especially when you're known in in a situation like that, for being kind of a pioneer in things AI and technology and testing things you can get away with it more because they're expecting it from you, whereas somebody like me, I come from marketing and sales. I'm very direct, and I think that I'm taken more because I am so direct, and hence I think I'm considered trustworthy. So if I'm doing something like this, it's incongruent to my brand? Yeah.

Kim Meninger

Well, you know what's so interesting hearing you say that is, if we go sort of back to the beginning and connect the dots, there's a way in which, when you talk about perception and perception management, right? Of like you're, you're sort of deciding, how am I going to show up in this environment based on who I'm interacting with, that might be misconstrued as lack of authenticity, right? Whereas what you're talking about right now is a real value around making sure that people are seeing the real you and that you're not hiding behind technology. And you know, so. So how do the two fit together for you? How do you reconcile those?

Shira Abel

So what I will do is I'll write something myself, and I may put it into Claude or something else and say, Edit this for grammar and spelling, and that's it. Don't do anything else to it. I might do that. I don't always, sometimes I leave it in with the mistakes, but that, that would be how I end up using it most the time, or and for research, like with my book, I'm working on my book now, right? I need to have research. I get I get the research done, the highlights and all of the references from using, you know, from using an LLM, I, you know, I it's going to be a while before the book is done. I have a whole whopping 1300 words out of 90,000 that are needed. So, so it's going to be a while. But, you know, with that done, like what I found today was I needed a story about I'm doing the emotions chapter, and I wanted a story about hubris and and I got a great example, so I was able to start it with a real life with all of the. References and the whole story put together, and the explanation of how it all works. So it was great that that is how you use it. You use it to supplement and make things faster, because it would take me a lot longer to do all of this research just with Google search.

Kim Meninger

Yes, yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, the balance between efficiency and, I don't know accuracy is the right word, but like you said, just wanting to put your own stamp on it, right is going to be, I think, the, the project for all of us as we move forward into this new age. What's your book about?

Shira Abel

My book is about the perception formula, perception framework. It's all about it explains the different components of perception, how you put them together, how you can look. I'm thinking about it from multiple points of view, right? You've got the executive who needs to manage a team. You've got the sales person who needs to, you know, sell high, high value goods. You've got the marketer who needs to understand their ICP, there's so many different points of view when it comes to perception. You've got, you've got diverse teams that are around the world. How do they work with each other? So first I start with the framework, and then I go into the examples of how they work together. And perception recipes. I have the outline done, but nothing else.

Kim Meninger

Well, I love the issue of perception recipes, that's a great way to I have a question. I've been dying to ask you this, and sorry to spring it on you in a podcast format, but speaking of perception, you are somebody who I have always perceived as very confident, and since we're talking about imposter syndrome, I would love to know if that's true.

Shira Abel

Oh, it honestly my confidence. Okay, I'm not gonna lie. I am ridiculously confident, like stupidly confident. We, we moved back when we moved back to the US, we moved to Los Altos, which is one of the most expensive areas the entire United States. To live with no safety net, no company moving us over, just my ego, thinking I'll be able to get work. That's it. My husband didn't even work the first year. So am I ridiculously confident? Yeah, but it really has to do more with how much I sleep, how much I'm working out, how I'm eating, like, as long as I keep those things in line, I'm good. I, you know, I've thought about why I because I there's people who hate me for my amount of confidence, huh? Like they really want to see me fail. And I have failed more times than I can count. Confidence has nothing to do with failure, like it still happens on the regular daily, okay, it's confidence. Isn't how it not failing. Confidence is just having the nerve to get back up again. It's all it is. So if you get up after being knocked down, you are confident you're going to fail. I have moved country several times, so I think that it's a mixture of that. It's me losing my dad at 19. It's being put into the gate program when I was How old was I 11/6, grade. So gate is gifted and talented education. They give you an IQ test in California in fifth grade, and at least they did where I was growing up, and then they move you into gate in sixth grade, right? And, you know, I so I've always known that my choices are my own, so if I make the right choices, I at least have the brains to back it up. Yeah, but that can lead to hubris, and that's and that is takes us back to the original conversation, and that hubris can either you know that can end up being a wildly bad idea, or you can get lucky. I do think it's luck when it comes to hubris. I don't think that that anybody is beyond the ability to fail, so I can't tell you how to recreate confidence in yourself, because I would also never wish confidence comes from being knocked down so many times that you don't hesitate to get up again. I have lost so many people in my life through. So my father passing away at 19, when I was 19, to more friends than I can count, committing suicide to like other there's just been a lot and I got up again.

Kim Meninger

Wow. And I really appreciate that perspective on confidence, because I often try to shift the narrative around it too, because I think that there's this misinterpretation of confidence as this state of constant fearlessness, or this constant feeling of, I'm amazing, right? As opposed to as you're describing it, it's self-trust. Yeah, confidence is trusting through experience, especially if you failed, that you can handle it, because you've survived failure before, right?

Shira Abel

Yes, and that's exactly it. It's just going all right, if, if everything just goes horribly wrong, what's the worst thing that can happen and have I fixed things before, like, we moved to we moved to California, we were on the brink of destruction four times before we bought our house. I mean, like we lived on the edge, not just paycheck to paycheck, like, really on the edge. And now we have savings. Thank God, but, but it is you build the savings because you know that these things happen, and I don't like living on that edge. Um, so, I mean, that's it, that's how you get confident. I I'm not going to curse, but I would you make mistakes, and that's how confidence gets built.

Kim Meninger

Is there an element of optimism to like, a belief that you, you can do it all, right?

Shira Abel

So Melanie would say, I'm bringing in somebody else that we both know. Sorry about that listeners and watchers.

Kim Meninger

Melanie has been on this show, so I'll put a link to her episode.

Shira Abel

Okay, Melanie would say I'm a pessimist. I am convinced anything can go wrong at any time.

Kim Meninger

That's really funny.

Shira Abel

And you know, if somebody calls me and I'm not expecting a call, the first words out of my mouth are, what? What's wrong? Who died? Yeah. So I I consider myself, I guess I consider myself a realist and maybe even an optimist, but not by her point of view. And quite frankly, she is an optimist to a degree that I don't even understand. So, so it all depends, you know, perception is depends on where you sit.

Kim Meninger

That’s very true. And I think maybe the way that I'm interpreting it, now that you're saying it is going back to that self-trust piece is, I don't I'm not optimistic, per se, but I'm also not gonna let the possibility of something going wrong keep me from moving in the direction that I want to go in exactly.

Shira Abel

Yes, that's it. Yeah, willpower, and it's not even willpower. You also have to create the systems. But you know, if you create the systems and you make the plan and you put the things in place and you trust yourself, then eventually things start to happen. You get momentum, and you find things built well.

Kim Meninger

And I think at the at the heart of what you're saying, which is something that I've been sort of on this kick lately, of reinforcing is you have to take the action, right? You can't just wait until the moment you feel ready, because that's gonna happen.

Shira Abel

You feel ready because you took the action.

Kim Meninger

Yes, yes. And I think that is something that a lot of people still don't understand. They're still waiting for the moment when they feel like, okay, I'm confident now I'm going to do it. And it's that's never going to happen, right?

Shira Abel

No, never. That's not how it works, folks, you got to actually get up and do the thing exactly.

Kim Meninger

Oh my gosh, this has been such a fun conversation. Shira, I really appreciate your perspective. I feel like we've covered some really hot topics and fun ways. And I want to ask you too, so everyone listening can continue to stay connected with you. Where can people find you if they want more of you?

Shira Abel

So you can find me on sub stack. My sub stack is the perception playbook under Shira able, speaks and you can find me on LinkedIn. Under Shira able, you can go to my website. It's Shira able, I know there's a theme here. You can also find me on Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram. Take a wild guess. Shira able speaks on Instagram and Tiktok and just Shira able on YouTube. So look for the name. You will find me everywhere. I think I'm the only one of me out there. A-B-E-L, just to be clear, S-H-I-R-A.

Kim Meninger

I'll make sure those links are in the show notes too, for anybody who's interested in thank you again. Shira, this has been so much fun. I'm so grateful to have you.

Shira Abel

It was wonderful to be on an honor. Thank you so much.