Episode 283: How to Find Your Signature Talk With Speaking Coach Jen Oliver
Are you someone who wants to do a TED Talk? The entire idea of that platform is ideas worth spreading. Maybe, you want to be better on stage, or understand what makes a speaker so compelling. There's something that has people connect to us when we're on a screen or on a stage.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. How does their authentic, awesome, gooey goodness self get up and deliver something that hits us in a way that is so compelling we can't look away?
Jen Oliver has devoted her life to becoming a speaking coach. She's deeply connected to the entire TEDxCommunity as she is an executive producer for them. Jen coaches women to speak with impact and is highly effective at helping her clients show up REAL while leveraging their story, mission, and embodiment to exert powerful influence.
Whether you want to deliver a strong TEDx Talk or keynote -- or present and network with greater confidence for your organization -- a high quality communicator advances their relationships and ideas. She is also a force behind WomanSpeak™ - an internationally recognized body of work teaching the art and soul of public speaking.
Becoming a speaking coach
Jen is an extrovert. For her, getting on stage and picking up a microphone was never a problem. But what she was terrible at, according to her, was saying the truest thing in her relationships, in her marriages.
“I really would dance around subjects or I'd sugar coat or I'd people please, or I'd say what I thought was palatable, what they wanted to hear,” says Jen. “I was never really dropping into my body and getting super clear on what my truest voice even was.”
One of the biggest things she had to overcome was “feeling wrong” for feeling her emotions. But emotions inform us – they aren’t a shortcoming. Jen sees it most in her clients when they shift and she sees their confidence change.
“You know, all those different voices in your head, that’s one’s ego … that one’s personality … that’s social media,” says Jen. “Suddenly they have this understanding that all these voices in their head aren't necessarily them ... then they're better equipped to go out.”
There’s a liberation when they realize the voice wasn’t theirs – the more people who show up their real selves and speak their truth begets more.
Jen’s personal journey to TEDx coach
To understand how Jen pulls people onto the stage to share her story, she begins with her own.
She recalls her second marriage – she rushed into it. The thought was she’d restored the legacy for her children after her first marriage ended, and she had restored herself as an upstanding woman. She was with a wonderful man, but she didn’t belong in the marriage.
She wrestled with the truth of it. It was making her feel sick and ill at ease in her body.
"I thought it was nerves about speaking and that's just an indicator of how inadequate I am and ill-equipped to speak on a stage or to be on a podcast or to honor something with my own clients,” says Jen.
She remembered what a relationship mediator told her, "It is so profoundly unkind to not tell the truth. You're torturing another person because you're they're dealing in the absence of communication. They are dealing with a fiction That's so far worse than the reality. Give them the dignity of the truth, speak your truth."
Jen had to admit she didn’t belong in the marriage.
“It's those little moments where we look at what is the dis-ease? Where am I not showing up true? Where am I not saying what is honest? Like, where's that voice?” says Jen.
Jen says she’s unconventional in the work she does as a speaking coach because she focuses on that authenticity and sharing that truth as a means of connection beyond the typical tips of how to be persuasive, make eye contact, etc.
Unleashing energy for presenting
Helping people tell their truth puts energy behind their words, their idea or their coaching. Whether you’re on stage in front of 4,000 people or in the boardroom, you have energy watching you, and if you don’t meet that energy, it will bowl you over.
“Here's what happens and is the mistake: We don't partner with and see that energy there in service to us,” says Jen. “We instead take it as an indictment and an indicator that we're somehow inadequate for that task.”
Those feelings of fight or flight are normal because it’s a higher stakes situation than your average moment in your day.
“Let's teach you to drop into your body, which is what I do with women is drop into your body, connect with that. Let's partner with it,” says Jen. “I'm real showing up like a real human as opposed to this perfectly polished, managed little automaton.”
Jen says we need to pay attention to what we’ve grown numb to. For Jen, before her business took off, she needed to own the parts of herself she was ignoring so that she could help others.
When you do that personal work, it really is the precursor to other things. You can in fact shake the nervousness off – it resets your nervous system. You have the ability to hold your truth and have your nervous system contain it.
“What can we do to get your nervous system accustomed to this new way of being, operating, living in the world and in your skin?”
Jen reminds us that the law of the universe says with expansion comes contraction. She calls it a vulnerability hangover. As you expand for a big presentation, wedding day – you name it – you need to prepared for the next day. What are you going to do to nourish yourself?
It’s not a bad thing; remember to be kind to yourself.
“It doesn't mean that when the contraction happens in that same week, because it's this ebb and flow, that something's wrong, or you're not making the progress. You are,” says Jen.
Find your signature talk
When Jen coaches others to find their signature talk, she asks them to slow down and drop into their body.
“I believe that the body, if you can slow down long enough and regulate and listen to it, is the voice of spirit and soul. It holds memories, it holds emotions, it holds so much wisdom and data points,” says Jen.
She asks her clients to tap into their body instead of their mind – the mind can be a bully. If you want to build a TEDxTalk start by connecting yourself to your deepest, truest wisdom in your body.
“Some of those people, their talk shifts a little bit and the premise behind their talk and their main tenets and talking points and the thing they ache to give their audience morphs and changes,” says Jen. “It's their truer work.”
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