What would you say is your why and what you do?
My why is probably the thousands of women that we work with on the Innovation Women platform.
We actually do something we call Speaker Friend Fridays and we have a Zoom call every Friday
morning, quarter of nine Eastern, and anybody can come. And when people come, often I think they
expect a hard sell. They expect people to be kind of jumping on them and like, oh, you have to be
paying us lots of money to unveil the secrets of public speaking. And I think they have been
conditioned a little bit to expect that because there is a lot of predatory stuff out there about
public speaking. People are like, pay us lots of money and you're going to learn the secrets of
public speaking. Make a seven figure income from public speaking. And the reality is like,
nobody is just going to jump up on stage and people are going to pay you lots of money to be
a speaker. You have to build a career. You have to build a business around public speaking.
This stuff takes time. And whenever I get pitched on the people who are selling this stuff around
public speaking, I always think to myself, if the people you're selling to had a couple of friends
who were also interested in public speaking and who were on the public speaking journey,
you could travel together and you can learn together and you can help support each other.
So that's one of the reasons we call that session speaker friends is, you know, we know that
the most successful speakers are often ones who have speaker friends and they can help each other.
So we're really trying to help people get comfortable with the idea about public speaking
public speaking, say yes, if they're invited, and also learn and grow as speakers and business people.
A lot of people use public speaking to support a business or to help build a business.
And I don't think they think about it this way, but they're actually building another business
on top of that business. So all of a sudden, you know, if you're doing public speaking to support
your day job, you are building two businesses at the same time. And that's a lot.
So you need to give yourself a break.