“I know I need to speak from the heart, but it’s hard to do that and do all the things so you sound professional”
That’s what someone when I ran my first session of The Speaker Space, and I knew exactly what they meant.
The dilemma
Whether we’re speaking to a room or creating a reel for social media we have a pressure to get things in order. Not to mess up our words. Not to waffle. Not to use words that don’t sound professional. And that’s hard for most of us to do.
At the same time we want that feeling of the one-to-one conversation to come through. We want to be real, personable, and natural. We want to be ourselves! We want to be the one who can close the client when we’re on a zoom call or sitting down together – because we know that’s us, engaging, aligning, being present.
The problem is that our natural self doesn’t turn up and speak in the way we believe we should. For many of us, our natural self doesn’t do speaking to camera or an audience either. We’re already at a disadvantage. Then the person we believe we need to be is nothing like our best selves either. It’s a bit like finding the right winter coat; just because your partner has one that keeps them warm it might be an entirely wrong fit for you.
Broken fixes
What happens when we try to do all the ‘shoulds’, is that it doesn’t fit. We try to fix it by using a script which sounds wooden, or by self censoring our language which feels false. I’m not saying drop the f-bomb in every room, but finding your own phrase is much more powerful than the one that ‘sounds professional’ and everyone has heard before.
Real solutions
As a speaker coach, I’m never going to tell you to stop working on your speaking skills, but you also need to find your own voice.
What works better is finding ways to guide your waffle into meaningful flow, but without false constraint. Identify what drives you and be aware of how you speak when you are in-flow. Once you’ve done this valuable ground work then you can work on adding power to your stage or Facebook time. Remember, your voice isn’t supposed to sound like someone else’s.
Remember
There are ways we can learn to be a version of ourselves that your future clients will recognise when they speak with you. There is a version of yourself that can show up comfortably, the more natural, the more your business will grow.
Perfect your Pitch workshop
Perfect your Pitch is an interactive workshop to find YOUR perfect pitch. Running from 10am to 12pm on 24th March
- We’ll be doing that inner work, to make sure that what you say really aligns with you and your business.
- We’ll be identifying the words and phrases that really feels like you
- And there’ll be time to practise and refine, so that saying it out loud FEELS good
This isn’t a PERFECT as performance, but perfect because you’ll know it’s EXACTLY what you were trying to say all along
Who is it for? The workshop is for women running their own business who are looking to create the real answer to ‘what do you do’.
Find out more: https://softlyinspired.co.uk/perfect-your-pitch/