Your Truth Is Showing: How to Speak with Real Authority with Emma Wainer

If you’ve ever felt your voice wobble when your truth is trying to walk tall, this episode will steady your stride. We dive into the quiet power that rises when your words, your body, and your mindset finally stop arguing with each other and start telling the same story. Truth isn’t just noble; it’s profitable. And, as you’ll hear, it’s the cornerstone of communication that actually moves people.

In this conversation, Fran sits down with communications expert and speaker coach Emma Wainer to unpick what makes a message believable, the kind that earns trust instead of begging for it. Emma shares her winding path from speech and language therapy to operations leadership, and the heartbreak of five miscarriages that silenced her voice before a master’s in voice coaching helped her reclaim it. Her story is raw, real, and a testament to the resilience behind authentic communication.

Together, they explore:

• The Power of Congruence: Why your audience trusts your body long before it trusts your words. 
• Big T Truth: How to deliver even scripted messages with honesty instead of hollow performance. 
• Childhood & Gendered Conditioning: The subtle forces that teach us to shrink, soften, or over-explain and how to break those patterns. 
• Warmth + Credibility: The timeless duo that builds trust faster than any shiny technique. 
• The Bridge of Trust Framework: How to meet your audience at their pain points before you dare offer a solution. 
• Storytelling with Spine: Helping logical thinkers add emotional weight and human stakes without feeling cheesy. 
• Body-Mind Recalibration: Practical ways to regulate nerves, breath, and inner narrative so your truth can actually make it out of your mouth. 
• Pricing, Presence & Self-Worth: Why owning your message and owning your value are the same skill wearing different outfits. 
• Rebuilding a Voice After Loss: Emma’s poignant journey back to self-expression and how practice, not perfection, makes a magnetic speaker. 

This episode is for you if:
You want to speak with more confidence, sell with more integrity, and show up in your business as the truest version of yourself, not the polished mask you think people expect.

Come for the techniques; stay for the truth.

About Emma

Emma Wainer is a speaker coach, communication strategist, and voice expert who helps business owners speak with more clarity, credibility, and impact. With a background in speech and language therapy, startup leadership, and voice coaching, she brings a rare mix of commercial insight, vocal expertise, and practical tools to help people communicate in a way that builds trust and moves people to action.

She works with founders, leaders, and experts who want to come across more naturally and powerfully, whether they’re speaking on stage, in meetings, on podcasts, or on camera.

Links
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmawainer/

Free talk diagnostic
https://whyyourtalk5.tiiny.site

If you have a story that you think would be good for the podcast, please do get in touch by emailing thepowerofthetruth@mojo-motivator.com. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hello and welcome to the Power of the Truth podcast with me, Fran Willoughby. Today's guest is a communications expert and works with people every day to teach them how to be a better communicator, mainly in business. But I think it goes without saying, once you've listened to this, you'll realize that the way we communicate affects everything, our relationships, our friendships, our business. Everything. And I found it fascinating that truth obviously is a thread that runs through this subject hugely. And as long as you can find something that you believe in to do with that subject or a way to justify it in your own mind, you can find a way to be truthful in the way you speak and therefore be believable. Now, whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen. It depends on what you're talking about. But it's a really interesting conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it. If you enjoy this conversation, please do follow me on social media at the Power of the Truth Podcast. And if you have any thoughts or suggestions, you can always email me at podcast at mojo-motivator.com. So without further ado, I'm very excited to introduce to you the very lovely Emma Wayner. Welcome to the Power of the Truth, Emma Wayner. Thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Thank you for having me, Fran. I'm really looking forward to this.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Yeah, me too. So uh just for the benefit of my listeners, would you please tell us a little bit about who you are and how you ended up to be here with me today?

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Yes, of course. So my name is Emma Wayna. I am a speaker coach. So I help business owners position themselves on authority by creating their authority talk so that they can help their audiences really understand what they do and generate commercial impact with that talk. Um, and I in how did I get here? Pretty squiggly. So trained as a speech and language therapist, very scientific, did a master's degree in voice coaching and training, really theatrical, all about engaging your audience, and I spent 10 years as an operations director, so really sort of strong commercial understanding of how businesses work and commercial drive. And now I put all those three things together to help business owners position themselves as an authority in their workspace, but also to get those wonderful inquiries and leads every time they speak.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Amazing. So what did your early life look like? Tell us how we got to this point. What led you to being in communication specifically and speech and language therapy? How did you get there?

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Yeah, well, I grew up in a medical family, so we had doctors and nurses and all that kind of stuff, and I knew I didn't really want to be a doctor, plus my maths was never good enough. Um, and I didn't really want to be a nurse, and I looked at physiotherapy and I looked at all these other things, but I also loved language and I loved reading. Pretty ironic because I discovered I was dyslexic at 43. But anyway, I loved reading, loved books, and so I thought, well, how can I combine those two things? And so that's how I ended up in speech and language therapy because it was clinical and medical, but it was also about language and communication, and I found I just really loved that. And then when I was working as ops director, it was in an event management company, which is kind of a meta way of communicating, it's really like a zoomed-out version of that. Um, so I just found that all I was I worked in pharmaceutical sales for a while, all of those things are all drivers for the whole thing behind it is communication, doing it really well. So I think I've always just been really interested in how humans communicate and connect with each other. Um, so I think that has been the sort of driver all the way through.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

I find it fascinating. As you know, my background is musical theatre, so I've basically been performing my entire life. And I know you work predominantly with women, don't you? Although you can work with anyone, obviously, but I think I think women particularly are very good at masking. And we spend a lot of time throughout our lives transforming into a different version of ourselves, dependent on which part of our lives we're in, whether that's as children trying to fit in, and girl code and girl friendships are so difficult, and then going through who am I, what do I want to be, all of that. And every step of the way we change our perspective often on who we are, and so the way we communicate changes. And I know you don't mind me mentioning that you had some pretty traumatic experiences when you were starting a family, and that kind of really affected your ability to communicate, didn't it?

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Definitely. So when I was operations director in my event management company, I'd been doing it for 10 years. I really knew my staff, I trained our staff on presentation skills. I went out and I headed up all the big pictures, you know, like I was really sort of front and center, and I was somebody who could really use my voice. Um, and then I had my son, which was a little bit of a problematic pregnancy, but it was all right. We got there in the end, but then I discovered as a new parent, this little bundle didn't come with a manual, it didn't come with instructions, and every time I thought I'd figured it out, it changed. And I found it very disconcerting. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know how to handle this. And then we tried for a second baby, and then I had a series of five miscarriages, and that process really stripped away my voice because my body couldn't do what women in my mind, right? The narrative was this is what women are designed to do, and you can't even get that right, Emma. And so my inner critic had an absolutely massive party, really stripped away my voice. I just became flatter, quieter. I wouldn't put myself forward for things, I wouldn't do things. I started stopping talking when we went out for dinner with other groups, you know, groups of people. All that kind of stuff really impacted. I just didn't feel enough. I wasn't enough, I wasn't smart enough, I couldn't produce a baby, I couldn't keep a baby, all those things. It was just, yeah, that narrative of not enoughness impacted my ability to speak massively. And I see this in women. They might not have that story, but they'll have I'm not smart enough, I'm not old enough, I'm not young enough, I'm not slim enough, I'm not tall enough, I'm not pretty enough, I'm not working whatever. Pick your poison and just insert it before enough. But I see it so often and I see it really take away the power of their ability to communicate authentically. And it's really sad and amazing when we rediscover it.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Yeah, absolutely. And it's just it shows, doesn't it, how important our mindset is on our ability to communicate effectively in any situation. Um, whether that's in a relationship or whether it's in business or whether it's just in friendships, all of those different scenarios require different levels of communication. And so I guess I'm interested to know how much of our childhood experiences do you think impact our ability to communicate as adults and then therefore in the workplace. How does that track?

SPEAKER_00 7:34

I think it's really common to see patterns that are much. So if you if you stood outside a uh a children's playground, a school playground, and you turn away, you'll just hear voices. So you'll hear kids' voices, they all sound pretty much the same up to about the age of seven. They'll all be, you wouldn't really be able to tell the difference. At the age of seven, girls' start communication patterns start to change significantly, and boys' communication patterns start to change significantly. So boys compete for status. So it's like I threw the ball this far, well, I threw it further, well, I can throw it over the wall, and they'll compete. And so whoever ends up at the top is then the leader of the pack for however long, right? So you'll see that happen. You start to see girls communicate for community. So they'll say things like, Oh, I hurt my knee, oh, I hurt my knee too. Right now, if you track that into university and then track that into the first years of business, what you'll see is men going, Well, I did this project really well, well, I did this and I achieved that and I've done the other. And you'll see women go, Oh, I find this really difficult, oh, I find it really difficult too. And so you've suddenly got this really quite big differentiation in ability to speak up and an ability to put yourself forward and what I call positively promote yourself in those scenarios. Now, if you own your own business, that means men are out there going, I charge £10,000. And you know, the women will often be going, Well, £2,000 is £2000 okay? And so you've got this massive differentiation. And obviously, there's uh an acceleration that happens. So how we're brought up to speak and communicate and the impacts that that has in a childhood, you will often see going through into adult life, unless you are very, very intentional and very conscientious and very, very self-aware, or do something like I did, like the master's degree, where it's like literally navel gazing about all of this stuff and figuring it out, and then kind of realizing, oh, I've been doing this all of my life. So, yeah, it definitely definitely tracks.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

So interesting, isn't it? I wonder at what point it can change and go the other way for either gender. Yes, yeah, there must be instances where there are men who struggle with that, and then adversely what we would probably call a ball breaker, a woman who has the ability to speak like a man. Yeah. And it and we talk about women who are put into that category with different words to how we would describe a man in the same category, don't we?

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, like Miranda Priestley, because I've just went to watch Devil Wears Prada 2. I mean, she would be this sort of classic ball breaker. So there are definitely people who sort of swap swap roles. Uh, actually, someone I trained with grew up with five women and definitely communicated in a much more female, collaborative way. Um, in fact, was so empathetic. It was like, whoa, this is amazing. And I kept saying, God, if I had a sister, I would want her to date you because you're amazing. He was so in tune with what was going on around him. But I guess the question we always want to ask in those situations is, is it performative? Is that authentic? If you happen to be super straight talking, super confident, no messing about, very kind of self-aware of your own abilities and very comfortable to portray that to everybody else in the room. Amazing. That's your authentic, that's your truth in terms of communication. That's absolutely fine. If it's performative because you feel you've got to do that, and that's the only way you can succeed, then that's quite damaged. That's masking, and that is over time pretty unhealthy. It's unhealthy vocally, it's certainly unhealthy psychologically. So my question would always be, is that your genuine character? Great, crack on. If it's not, then you're playing a game.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

And that's interesting, isn't it? Because I know one of the things that you uh do is you train people to TED Talks or TEDx. And I find it really fascinating that somebody could be a super duper expert in their field, but not good at talking or not have that charisma. They could be scientific, they could be mega intelligent, but they haven't got the communication skills to be able to express their enthusiasm or their excitement. So, how do you teach somebody to be like that? Because I mean, I obviously, like I said, my background's theatre. So I've spent my life acting and I know how to turn on a story and sell it to an audience. But for somebody that's purely academic, they've just got a brilliant idea and they don't know how to tell the story, where do you start?

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Well, there's a few different places. So, but I think that the number one thing is so if they're if they're very, very logical, and if you've been in academia for a long time or you're in a very sort of highly scientific area, you're gonna be a very logical human being, right? So the first thing I say is logic is amazing, right? We definitely need that, we need structure, and we need a way to you know take our uh listeners or our watchers from point A to point B. And we need to do that in a nice logical fashion because they're gonna get upset if we don't do that. So, first of all, reassure them that we're not chucking logic out of the window. But logic is not the thing that moves your audience to take action. Emotion is. So we have to add heart in. You cannot bludgeon your audience through a logical argument to take action. Doesn't happen, right? If you think about it, what was the last charity you you donated to? You didn't donate it because it was the logical thing to do, you donated it because it made you feel something, you know, whether it was an animal charity or a children's charity or whatever it was, it made you felt something and therefore you took action. So I generally tend to start there and say, listen, we have to find the emotional piece for your audience to connect to this because they don't understand it as well as you do, because you're super smart, so we have to help them feel something so that they will do the thing that you need them to do at the end. So that's one way, and then the other way is finding the human in the story. So why is this their story? Why are they so invested in this thing? Because I have had a situation where somebody came to me with their TED talk already scripted and written, and it was pretty good, but when I read through it, it's like, well, I could give this to any other professional in your area and they could read this. This has got nothing to do with you. You know, we need to get you into that story. So you'll find with all the really powerful TED stories, the person telling the story is like front and center. Why are they telling this particular story? So bringing that bit of the human bit in, then we can build that story into the logic, and then it makes much more sense to the audience. So it's a kind of slowly, slowly catchy monkey. If they're very, very logical, but we do get there in the end.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

And do you have you ever been in a situation where you've gone through that whole process with someone and then they've still not really come across as being believable? I mean, obviously you can only work with what you're given in terms of a person and their ability to communicate. Because I think an audience knows if somebody's not being honest. I think in terms of truth, which obviously is the premise of the podcast, I think you can smell it if someone's lying. And it's your gut feeling, it's that instinctive you go, I'm not sure about them. They just didn't really hit it for me. I, you know, I just I I I like what they were talking about, and I agreed with what they were saying, but there was just something about them that I just didn't connect with. So, how do you get over that? How do you get over that part of someone just not being likable if that is, you know, or coming across as not being likable? A bit like before we started the recording, we were talking about swearing, weren't we? And about how people who are sweary sometimes are really sweary, other people don't swear at all. I people don't think I will swear because for some reason people think I'm posh because I like bone china cups. And so when I swear, it has quite an impact. It shocks people. Um, so how do you get past that preconception that people might have of you in terms of communication?

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Yeah. So what we're always looking for is congruency, right? There has to be congruency. So there's got to be congruentity through what you're saying, so the story that you're telling or the idea that you're promoting. There has to be congruency in your body language and your voice and your tone of voice and your gesture. It's all got to make sense, your facial expression. We had one, we had one very senior person who was delivering a very serious message that was quite bleak in some ways, and he was smiling. We're like, oh no, stop, stop smiling. This isn't. Um, so yeah, we have to have congruency there as well. So, what I say to people is when you're presenting, when you're talking in front of an audience, we need two things. We need warmth and we need credibility. So the warmth is going to come through things like the tone, tone of your voice, how sparkly your eyes are. I don't know if you've ever seen a presenter whose eyes are completely dead, so they're smiling and they're doing all this, and their eyes, I'm trying to do the dead eyes thing. It's quite hard, right? But that it is like you're like, ooh, what's going on there? So we have to have that warmth coming through, the smile if it's appropriate, open gestures when they're appropriate. So we have to have that warmth, that openness, you and me in this conversation, even if the presenter's the only one talking. And then we have to have the competence piece. So that is the taking up of space, that's the logical argument, that is projecting your voice in that space, that's gesturing for the size of the room that you're in. It's all those kind of things, the way that you walk, the way that you pause. Now, we need both of those things. If we've got too much warmth, we're like, oh, she was lovely, really liked her, forgotten everything she said. If you get right high competence, you're like, whoa, they're really impressive, nothing like me. I could never be like that, I could never do that because I'm not like that. Don't didn't really warm to them either. So we have to have a kind of 50-50 warmth competence, and the warmth has to come first. If I don't like you or feel like I'd like you in the first few seconds of you speaking, you've probably lost me, or you've got a really big uphill battle to get me back on side. So warmth is critical and has to come first, and the competence has to support it all the way through. Interesting. It's making people just a bit shinier, I say. So if you've got someone who's very introverted, it's like we're just going to make you just a tiny bit shinier than you would normally be.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

It's just turning up that dial, isn't it? And it takes practice to be like that, doesn't it? Yeah. Uh you can't just expect to go and stand on stage and be like that. It takes time. I talk to my dancers about that when I'm teaching, you know, you have to practice your face as much as you have to practice the moves. Um, otherwise, you'll just go on stage and look deadpan, and then everyone will be bored.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Um I said my speakers, you've got to rehearse if when you're rehearsing, you've got to rehearse at performance level. If you rehearse by going, da ba da da ba da da ba da da ba da da ba-da-da-ba-da-da-da-da-da-ba-da-ba-da-h- you know, that's what's going to come out when you get on stage or a version of that. So you've got to practice. If you've got a hundred people or two hundred or five thousand people, you've got to practice at that level so that your brain and your body know what to do in that moment of sort of slight anxiety, slight pressure when you when you walk on stage or when that camera gets switched on, or whatever it might be. You've got to be able to perform at the level that you need to.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

Yeah, it's very interesting. And I and I I like that you talk about body language and how important that is. Because we when we think about communication, we really only think about what's coming out of our mouths or making eye contact or smiling, but actually it's your whole body, isn't it, that has that impact, especially if you're doing a talk on a stage like Ted, for example.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

Yeah. But your body is telling a narrative, you know, whether you like it or not, it is telling a story. So we need it to tell the story that we want to tell this particular audience. And because we we still function a lot using our reptilian brain, that sort of old bit of the brain, we look at a whole human silhouette and we go friend or foe, good or bad, competent, not competent, and we do it instantaneously and we do it subconsciously. So we decide immediately whether you're worth listening to or not, before you've even drawn breath, before you say your first words. So what you're doing with your body is really, really important. So if you're fidgeting or you're making yourself smaller, or you're taking up too much space, too close to your audience, whatever it might be, we're gonna be like, we're gonna either go, worry about you because you look a bit nervous, or we're gonna be like, whoa, step back. I had had that last year. I went to a conference and one of the speakers came into the middle of the audience and then just projected at us for 40 minutes. It was like, I feel like I'm being attacked. It's completely unpleasant. He completely read the room wrong. Um, so yeah, so we've got to get that body narrative right. That's what I mean by congruence. Body, breath, voice, content, it's all got to match up. Otherwise, we're like, eh, no, not quite. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

And then in terms of the words that are actually coming out of people's mouth, because again, I think if the person who is making the speech doesn't truly believe what they're saying, that will come across. So I'm sure there's what always work to do on the actual words as well, right? And and you'll be able to tell when people don't necessarily believe what they're saying. Yeah, how how do you approach that with people, especially if they've written something and they're very kind of set about what they've written?

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Yeah, we call it finding the big T truth. We've got to find some kind of truth in it. So I think this mostly happens when somebody Has been given a script, so in corporate setting, maybe a little bit more, or there's some kind of legal thing that you have to say, or something like that. Um so we've got to find the truth somewhere in that. So even if you don't 100% believe in the thing that you have to say, it's like, what do you believe? Well, actually, I believe this thing will be helpful for the people who have to do it. I don't 100% believe in the way that it's been written, or I don't 100% believe in why, but I do think it's going to make a difference. So I can get behind that bit of the truth. So you find some element of truth that people can connect to, even if it's not wholly 100% the thing that they're saying out loud. But if you're a business owner and if you're doing a podcast or you're, you know, doing some kind of panel discussion, I would hope that you're not saying things that you don't 100% believe in, because my question would be, why are you saying them? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

Yeah. 100%. But I was thinking in terms of people like barristers or um solicitors where they might have a client that they know is I mean, I know in this country there are laws, you're not allowed to represent someone who's admitted as there's admission of guilt, it's not like America. But at the same time, you could, for example, you had a man and a woman going through a really bad divorce, and you know that that man is Conin, the woman out of all the woman's uh being ridiculous and trying to take the man for everything, and and it's not fair, yeah. But in court, then as a barrister, you have to then stand up and defend that person or fight for what you know that must be really difficult because it's your job to represent the person. I mean, have you ever worked with any barristers?

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Because that's quite performative, isn't it? It is barristers are it's definitely more performative because you are managing the judge, the person you're defending, or or in the prosecution, and the jury. So it is it's it is a little bit more performative. And I have some friends who are barristers, so I know that often the truth is not necessarily what they're arguing about, they're arguing about the law, so they can get behind the point of law, which is not necessarily the truth of the scenario, which is quite interesting, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 24:16

I mean, obviously that's not always the case, and no, no, but it's certainly not so no, but I find it fascinating that that and and actually interestingly, I came across recently. Have you ever watched How to Catch a Super Killer? On um, I think it was on Netflix, it might be on Disney Plus now, but anyway, it's this story about a case that was in Wiltshire in the 90s where there was a girl that went missing, and the detective basically caught the killer, and because there was a threat to life, they didn't have to read him his rights in the same way that they normally would. And at the point that they took he told them where the body was, before they'd found it, he said, I'll tell you about another one if you like, another person that he'd murdered. And what happened then was what the the police officer should have done, according to the law, was he should have taken that serial killer back to the station, read him his rights, give him a right to a lawyer, right? At that point, that's the law. They're called papesa laws. The laws have since been changed because of this case. And what happened was the detective in charge didn't do that because he knew that if they took him back to the the station, he wouldn't tell them where this other body was because the solicitor would advise him to stop speaking. So instead he said, Okay, take us to the body. So they they found this second body of this girl that had been missing for a number of years, reunited her family with the body, but when it went to court, they couldn't prosecute the serial killer for the second murder because the rules hadn't been followed. And the barrister who uh cross-examined the detective in that scenario said this isn't about truth and justice, and it isn't about something else, it's about inadmissibility uh admissibility of evidence. And that's exactly what you just said. Sorry, that was a really long way to get there. Yeah, but it's so interesting because in that moment, even though that barrister was representing the serial killer who they knew was a serial killer, and he did get convicted for that second murder eventually. It took him about another two years to convict him. They found other evidence, because they knew he'd done it, but they just couldn't it couldn't convict him of it because the the law hadn't been followed in the terms of the way he'd been arrested. Um but essentially that's exactly what happened is that the the barrister in that scenario was representing the law, even though he knew that that the guy was a serial killer, and by the way, he also alluded that serial killer that there were other there were others, but because of then the scenario, then he basically so they'll never find out uh who they were. So I find that fascinating, you know. If if you're in a job where you your job is to communicate truthfully or defend a situation that you don't believe in, like you just said, you have to find a truth you can get behind, and in that instance, it's the law. So I it it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, because the law is the truth in that in that scenario.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

Yeah, fascinating. It it is difficult, but if you can find something you can connect with, some way to connect with what you're saying, then that's really really helpful.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Very powerful, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

Yeah, because when it's communicated from from your sort of heart or your gut and you really believe it, your the vocal um tone, the resonance changes. We we have this sort of, you know, I will often talk to my clients about your head voice, your heart voice, and your gut voice. And your head voice is amazing for talking about clinical things, for data, for facts, for figures, you know, it's all it's really clean and clear. Your heart voice is really warm. It's saying, I care about this, I care about you, I care what happens, like it's got real feeling to it. Whereas your gut voice is like, we get this stuff done now, yeah. And if we say a sentence using the wrong thing, the wrong tone of voice, the wrong resonance, then it's really confusing. It's a mixed message to our listener, our audience. But I said to my my son, who's doing his A levels, Jakey, revision now. That's soft. That's like, I really want you to do revision, I care about your revision, but whereas I'm saying, like, Jakey, revision now, right? It's a different thing. Which one is you more likely to do? The second one, hopefully. When you tell me to go away, but um, you know, we when we change our tone of voice and it matches the thing that we're saying again, back to that idea of congruency and truth, when it matches up, then it's much more easily absorbed and much more easily actioned by your audience.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

So I know from our conversation before, you said everybody has the potential to be magnetic. So, what's that really mean? How do you help people discover their magnetic personality? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00 29:31

Which one, I think, a lot of it, because I help people do these authority talks where they're they're really positioning themselves as an expert. So, number one, it's like a little bit of an exploration of how amazing they are and the transformation they get for their clients, all that impact that they create. We do a little bit of a deep dive on that and we start to look at their identity, there's something that gets released by that. They sort of go, Oh god, yeah, I do a good thing. I do have an impact. And so there's a little bit of that, and I I call that getting at ease with your expertness, so expert ease. When people start to realise, oh, I do a good job, then when we start to figure out what it is that they could talk to their audiences about, all those ideas that they could share, all those pitfalls they can help them avoid, suddenly we get that 10% shinier, and in some cases 20 and 30 and 50% shinier. It just depends on their personality. So often I feel like I'm a bit of an archaeologist. It's like I'm I'm just clearing away the mud and the crud and the sand that's got compacted on top of that, that wonderful kind of glow that we all have. And I'm just helping clear that away so it can come out and shine.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

It's confidence, isn't it? And it's having that resilience. And again, you have to believe in yourself in order for people to believe in you. Uh, and I think when, especially for founders running their own businesses, it's easy to forget that people aren't just buying the thing that you offer, they're also buying you as a person. And uh that can be really terrifying, can't it, for some people?

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Definitely. I was talking about this the other done. I I really feel like whenever we're speaking to people that you've got your your audience, whoever they might be, your people on this side of the bridge, right? There's a bridge, there's a big river or a ravine, and there's a bridge going over to the other side. And they're listening to you because they've got some kind of problem. Because if they didn't have some kind of problem, they wouldn't be listening to you. So they've got something and they've got somewhere they would rather be. There's a kind of like nirvana somewhere over the other side of the bridge. And so our job when we're speaking is to, it's like we're building a bridge of trust. And the first section of that bridge is trust in you. They aren't going to step on that bridge, they aren't going to spend time, energy, or money with you unless they trust you, first of all. So that's our first job. It's like build trust in you. Then we need to build trust in the process and the product, and we switch those around depending. It's like this is how this works, this is how you can get from here to here. So they have to trust the process, they've got to trust the product. And so, what people do when they talk about products is they tell them all the things it does. Don't care. What's it gonna give me? What's what is it gonna transform? I was working with somebody this morning on this and they were telling me all the features of this thing. It's like, don't care, don't care, don't care. What's it gonna do for me? And he's like, Well, it'll save you time, it'll be more secure, it'll stop this from happening and that from happening. Okay, now I care, now I want that thing. It's increased my desire. So we've got to have those two bits, and then the final bit is trust in themselves. So do they trust themselves or their organization or their structure to get the results that you've been talking about? Because if they don't, they can't take that final step. So if any one of those bits is missing when you're talking, they can't take the next step because it is literally like a big gap in the bridge. They're too scared to take the next step. So you've got to have all of those trust in you, process, uh, product, and then trust in themselves to achieve it.

SPEAKER_01 32:55

So, what's the best way to build trust with an audience in that respect, then? I know you've uh you said we're in a low trust economy. So, what's the best way to build that trust if you're running your own business, for example?

SPEAKER_00 33:09

Okay, I can tell you what not to do, and what I see people do all the time. Go on, is prove that you are the expert in the area by going, well, I've been doing this for 20 years, I've got a master's degree in this, and I've got a this and that, and I work for Microsoft and Google and blah blah blah and all those other big companies, and I've gone this, and I've won this contract and that contract. Don't care. Don't care. And I the reason I don't care is because it's about you. So you've made the first few minutes of your presentation, your talk, all about you. So one of the biggest ways you can build trust with your audience immediately is see them where they are. So, you know, it might be saying something along the lines, hands up, uh, how many of you woke up this morning and thought, oh god, I've got to do this and I don't want to do it? Or who woke up at 3 a.m. last night worrying about X? You've got a room full of business owners, who's concerned about pipeline? Like a thousand hands are gonna shoot up, right? You ask them questions uh to show that you understand where they are, or you paint a picture to show that you understand where they are, and it could be to do with you at that stage, it could be five years ago in my business, yada yada yada yada yada. So it could it could be to do with you, but it's much better if it's about the audience. Let me tell you about Sarah. Sarah had to talk to a bunch of da-da-da-da-da. Paint a picture that shows your audience you understand where they are, their pain point, I guess. And then you paint a picture of what it could be like, where they could be. Like, here's the mistakes, here's why people end up in the position that you guys have just we've just been talking about. Here's the three mistakes that they make, here's the three things they get wrong, or here's what incredible businesses do that loads of other businesses aren't doing and aren't as successful because of it. And you you paint the picture where they are, and then you paint a picture of what's possible, and then and only then do you start talking about how your solution is the thing. And I see people do that all the time. They try and fit their solution in right at the beginning, and it is literally like you're trying to, I sort of gave the analogy the other day, it's like you're trying to stuff a whole loaf in someone's mouth at once. Don't do that. Give them a little breadcrumb, another little breadcrumb, and then another little breadcrumb, and then they're gonna want the loaf, but don't try and force feed it to them right at the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

And that really requires being good at storytelling, doesn't it? So, how do you teach somebody? Because I think I speak in stories, I'm terrible for it, actually. I have to stop myself, I tell myself off for it. And people say to me, Oh god, here she goes again, another story. But it's just that's how I communicate. I'm like, oh well, there was a time. Um so how do you how do you teach somebody to be a storyteller uh if it doesn't come naturally to them?

SPEAKER_00 35:53

Frameworks. It's usually if someone's not a natural storyteller, it's frameworks. So when we do the TEDx stuff, we actually spend a big chunk of time at the beginning just getting when we have a storyboard, not in the traditional as in this is what happens storyboard, but just right, tell me about childhood, tell me about this, tell me about your siblings, tell me about when you went to school, tell me about your first job, tell me about university, tell me about what time when things went really horribly wrong. And we just literally get a hundred mini stories out on a on a digital whiteboard or a physical whiteboard, and then we pick and choose when we start to figure it out. What are the themes here? What's interesting about all this? What so if you put them into buckets, what comes out? And so we do all that first of all. Again, that positions the person in the middle of the story. Um, but also they suddenly realize they've got thousands of stories, way too many to put into the talk. So that's one way, but but if we don't have time to do that, and a really quick way of doing it is a framework. So something really simple, like before, during, after. Tell me what was happening before you did this. Oh, okay. And what how did you get to where you are now? Right. And so what's it like now? Easy, someone's told a story. So we've got lots of lovely little frameworks that you can use for what I call strategic storytelling, so that you know you're going to tell that story. And then as you get better, you can get into agile storytelling, which is like an audience member might ask a question, you're like, Oh, let me tell you about Kenya, da-da-da-da. And then you kind of you kind of dive in. Uh, because you've sort of got the frameworks in your in your head, but that's possibly the the easiest way for people to remember.

SPEAKER_01 37:29

What's your favorite part of the work that you do?

SPEAKER_00 37:33

Ah, I love it all, but I what I love, I had this happen the other day. Here you go, story. Here we go. My phone pinged at 3 a.m. in the morning, and I normally have it on silent, and for some reason I didn't have it on silent, so it did actually wake me up. But I was delighted it woke me up because it was a uh a client of mine, she was speaking out in Canada and it was like, I've just come off stage, and it was amazing. And it's like emojis, and I did this, and they said that, and I came away with all these leads. It was the most wonderful way to be woken up at 3 a.m. So I have to say those moments are they just they make me smile from head to toe. It's amazing when I see people who are like, Oh, I'm not, I'm not sure. And then they send me these things going, I just did this. Just had a client uh email me to say she's got $25,000 in investment because she just did a pitch two years ago, that would not have been possible. So yeah, it's those moments of like, yes, she did it, or he did it.

SPEAKER_01 38:29

Amazing. And I guess once people find that inner confidence to be able to speak passionately about the thing that they believe in so much, you must just then see them blossom once they've done it once, and then they just fly because all of a sudden they go, Oh, this works. I can do this. So I can imagine it must be incredibly rewarding, actually.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

It is. I mean, it's always a journey, right? Because we're always doing stretchy things, or I'm always encouraging my clients to do stretchy things. It's like, okay, you've done that. That was 30 people, great, right? What's the next biggest one? Right, what's the next stage you're gonna be? And there's a new devil at every level, right? Because it's like, oh, these are really senior people, oh, this is a much bigger audience, oh, it's gonna be films as well. So there's always a little bit of a stretch, and sometimes the speeches don't go so well. I had a client the other day came back and went, she went, it was all right, but I really wasn't firing on all cylinders. Um, it's like it's okay. And but she said to me, But it's a blip, that's not who I am now. It was a blip. I'm like, great, that's brilliant. So right, back on the horse when we out there next. So I always see it like as a journey. It's like we're always taking steps to be stretched and grow.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

And actually, I know when I'm coaching, I say that imposter syndrome piece that we all suffer from at some point. You've got to reframe it as growth, haven't you? It's expansion, it's when we're just putting ourselves outside of our comfort zone, and it's gonna feel icky and a bit stressful and scary, but you've got to reframe that as growth and expansion, and that's how you will push forward, right?

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Yeah, yeah. We we we tend to use the word stretchy, it's a bit stretchy, stretchy, yeah. It's definitely that's the point of growth, and then what you were doing before suddenly seems easy. Yeah, so it is important that we keep progressing and pushing ourselves because otherwise we get comfortable and then we get complacent. Yeah, what we were good at stops being quite so good.

SPEAKER_01 40:29

But nerves can be so debilitating, can't they? And how do you how do you coach people through that element? Because some people they could be brilliant with you when they're just stood, but actually, if nerves take over for some people, it can be really detrimental.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

Yeah. So we have a body uh-mind approach because you can kind of get at this in both ways. So if you position your body in a confident way, as a performer, you'll understand this, but if you're breathing deeply, um, so you've got a nice soft belly and you're breathing deeply. So we call it diaphragmatic breathing, but your belly is moving in and out. That signals to your system that you're calm and everything is fine and there's no danger. So you're unlikely to start pumping out those stress hormones of adrenaline and cortisol. So it's signalling to the to the body, we're good. There's no dinosaurs about to eat you because that's really what the body is worried about. It still thinks there's dinosaurs and still thinks you're going to get eaten. So we can do the body things like get your body in a really calm state. Then we can also use the brain, and that calm body feeds up into the brain and says to the brain, all good, don't worry. Or we can use the brain and we can say, right, this is great. This is an opportunity for me to grow, this is a chance for me to share my ideas with these people. I will often say to people, if I help one person in this audience today, I have done my job. That's all you have to do. Help one single individual, not the hundreds, not the thousands, one person. And that can kind of bring the stress down. And then if we are thinking good thoughts, then that feeds into the body. So if we can do both, then we're we're good to go. And then we have a whole load of techniques to help people ground and breathe properly, all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 42:14

Yeah, I had a really interesting conversation with one of the guys who because as you know, I did a show uh last week and I choreographed the opening number, and I'd asked, we only have two boys in uh two men in our troupe, and I'd asked one of them to sing the opening line of this number. And he was so nervous. He'd said to me so many times, oh, I can't sing, I can't sing, I don't know why I agreed to this, I can't sing. And I was like, right, we're not gonna, we're not going down this road. You have to change that language, you have to say, I can sing, I'm just nervous, I can sing, because every time you say, I can't sing, your brain goes, Oh, oh, I can't sing. So there's not just the way we think about something, but actually it's so important, isn't it? The way we talk to ourselves and actually the words that we use, I think. And because I talk a lot about our mind being the architects of our reality and how the choices we make uh really affect our actual ability to function. And I think uh I'm sure you agree that that that has a big impact, that that voice and the way we speak to ourselves and what we say out loud.

SPEAKER_00 43:34

Absolutely. Everything you think, everything you think about yourself will leak out of your body somehow or another, whether that's through your literally your body language, through your voice, through your tone of voice, through the quality of your singing, all of it will leak out. Most people would say, Well, I can probably sing in the shower, but if you suddenly put them in front of a hundred people, they'd feel possibly less confident unless they were a trained singer or just naturally very good. Um, so everything we think will Will leak out of your body and breath. So the words that you say to yourself, the stories that you tell yourself are absolutely critical to how you show up. For instance, I mean, I we mentioned this when I when we spoke before, but this idea when somebody says, Oh, it's 5,000 pounds. So say your child, your consultancy is 5,000 pounds. So it's 5,000 pounds as a statement of fact. But if I if I'm like, who am I to charge 5,000 pounds? Oh my God, they're never going to pay me 5,000 pounds. They're going to think I'm greedy. Lots of narrative about me and greed. And I go, it's £5,000. That's now suddenly open to negotiation because they're like, well, is it or isn't it? We don't want to pay £5,000, we want to pay three or two or one. So what we think, in terms of how much space we can take up, our right to do things will affect how we speak. So that internal narrative is critical to the impact of your performance. Agreed.

SPEAKER_01 44:55

And that inflection, that question asking at the end of that sentence changes it completely, doesn't it? If you say it's £5,000 and that is that's how much it is, take it or leave it, you know, and it's that confidence, isn't it, that comes with saying that as opposed to £5,000? Is that you know, you know, yeah, is that okay? Um, and actually we know through the science of pricing, uh, that actually quite often if you price yourself a little bit higher, the brain goes, Oh, they must be better. Yeah. It's the psychology of pricing, isn't it? Is that actually often when you increase your prices, you get more people because there's a preconception that it must be higher quality. And it's so interesting that, and people undersell themselves consistently, don't they? Because they lower their prices or they don't charge enough. And then people think, oh, well, that they're probably not very good.

SPEAKER_00 45:53

They're charging less. It's so interesting. And I was speaking to a uh a peer today, and she's amazing, right? What she does is really she's really, really good at her job, and she was having a bit of a price wobble, and she's like, Well, it's just this, and they're just getting that, and then I'm just doing this for them. I'm like, no, no, no, no, right, bin justs, right? There's no just about this. You only think about the transformation that you're giving them. What is it worth to them in terms of clients that they might win once they've done this program? It's probably worth an absolute fortune, way more than you're charging. And they're paying for your expertise and your experience, not the number of hours that you're actually going to have to work. So one of the things I said was like, what's the next level of price rise? And I want you to walk around the house for the next two days going, it's this much money. So it's 12,000 pounds. It's 12,000 pounds. Hello, Kettle, it's 12,000 pounds. Hello, lampshade, it's 12,000 pounds. Just walk around saying 12,000 pounds. And then when you come back to your actual price rise that you're about to do, it's gonna feel really cheap. You can't go, oh my god, it's only 8,000 pounds. What am I thinking? Well, this is this is ridiculous. But that means when you say it to a client, it's gonna come out in a way that feels incredibly natural and of good value because you've thought about the transformation that you're actually offering, not the amount of hours you're working. And you have to believe that.

SPEAKER_01 47:13

Yeah, you have to believe it, don't you? You have to believe that what you're offering is so there's a there's a there's a a trust in yourself in that moment, the truth that you believe that what you're offering is worth the amount that you're charging.

SPEAKER_00 47:30

Yeah. And just look at your client results. That's all if you're in the least bit wobbly about that, look at the transformation that you get you for your clients or the results that they get. I was talking to another colleague the other day and she was we were just chatting, and she went, I've just realized that 100% of my clients, win clients, within 10 to 15 days of starting to work with me. Whoa, that's a massive, that should be your headline. And then suddenly talking about prices starts to become much easier to do because you're like, gosh, I I genuinely make a difference to people's but to people's lives. And it doesn't have to be commercial, it can be, you know, an emotional impact or a variety of things.

SPEAKER_01 48:14

So just to take you back a little bit, when obviously you'd gone through this terrible situation where you'd lost your babies and you really lost your voice. What did you do? How did you regain your voice in that moment?

SPEAKER_00 48:29

Well, I know this is going to sound really odd. And when I think about it, I'm like, what on earth was I think? That was the point where I signed up or I auditioned to do the master's degree in voice coaching and training because I I knew I'd lost my voice. I'd always been interested in voice and communication, and I I'd always known that was what I wanted to do. And yet I chose to do it at the possibly my lowest point. I really felt quite rubbish. And I got there and I was surrounded by honestly, I walked into my they called them an audition as well. And I'm not an actor, so I called it an audition. And I had a woman on one side of me who sang at the French National Opera, this unbelievably elegant French woman who's like, oh God. And then on the other side of me had I had a jazz singer who sang at Ronnie Scott's. So if you're not in the UK, amazing jazz institution, like unbelievable. And then the fourth woman in my room was an actor in East Enders. And then there's me, mum. I'm like, oh, science person. I felt really, really out of place. So my inner critic could have gone, I mean, I was ready to hightail it out there, to be honest. But I got in, and then in the first few weeks, I was like, oh, I can't do this. They're all really smart, they're all really clever. I don't fit in here. Um, and I tried to leave a few times, but never did. And so I stayed, and it was literally transformational. I rediscovered who I was, I rediscovered my voice. There was an amazing moment actually when I was one of our tutors was that she's a voice therapist, so she uses voice as a form of therapy. And we were doing a class with her, and I don't know why she did this, but she did this room. Emma, come come over here. And all the classes sat round, and she basically got me to put my forehead into the palm of her hand, and I had to rest the full weight of my head on her palm. And I was sitting on a chair, and she was just allowing my head to drop towards my lap, and she was just gently pressing my spine, and she's just saying, just release, just release, just release, like all the way down my spine, and my head now is really heavy in her hand, and I'm almost like lying in my own lap. And then she just gradually brought me back up, brought me back up, and I realized as she sat me back up, I realized that I had been braced for impact. I had been holding my whole torso, my whole chest up for I don't know how long, years. And I think it was all to do with the miscarriages. I was waiting for something to go wrong. I was waiting for someone to tell me there was no heartbeat. I was waiting for this the entire time, and I was just holding myself ready for whatever crappy thing was about to have happen. And that whole process of her taking the weight of my head and just getting me to release, I suddenly felt this incredible, like a concrete block had been lifted off my torso, and then it was like my voice just erupted out of me. It was like, whoa, where did that come from? But it because everything had been so tight, my voice had gotten lost. So yeah, I rediscovered it through that process. I mean, it was hard. I wouldn't recommend this to everybody, but it it I mean, voice work is not therapy, but my god, it can be therapeutic. That sounds incredible for something like that to be so transformative.

SPEAKER_01 51:53

It just shows that you you never really know what is going to be a turning point for you in whatever scenario you're in, and actually, whatever it takes, right? It's fine, but I find that incredible that that that moment specifically was so pivotal in your ability to then open up because you've been so braced for so long, yeah amazing. Oh, well, thank you so much for sharing your story. I have I I know we could talk for hours and hours, I'm sure, but if there was just one thing that you could leave people with in terms of having the confidence to open up, what would you say to someone who's struggling to communicate well?

SPEAKER_00 52:44

I think I would say that great speakers uh and when I say great, I don't mean necessarily on TEDx stages, but powerful communicators, people who've got a message that needs to be communicated with the world. They're not born, they're made. And you know, that that confidence you talked about, that resilience you talked about, it comes from just putting yourself out there. And whether that means talking to three people, whether that means speaking up in a meeting, whether that means saying no to something, whether that means jumping on a stage in front of a thousand people, it's the trial and error, the getting it wrong and getting back up again and doing it again. That's the bit that's going to give you the confidence. So it's not about perfecting it. Don't get it, don't try and be right the first time. Just try and connect with the people that you want to connect with. Because that's what will make you into a great speaker. Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 53:32

So if anybody wants to work with you or they've been really inspired by this conversation, where can they contact you? Where can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 53:39

Come find me on LinkedIn. So I'm there pretty much every day at the moment. Um, but yeah, I'm Emma Wayne out on LinkedIn. Come and find me. Thank you so much for this conversation. It's been brilliant. Pleasure, it's been so much fun. Thank you for having me. Welcome.