Welcome to Uncommon/Confidence!

Welcome to the world of Uncommon/Confidence - the place where women find sanctuary, a kind but tough drill instructor, and a path to presentation mastery

Presentation Training, Personalized

What you'll find here are the observations of a professional public speaker coach - and a few different recipes/thoughts that go into making a great speaker.

Be honest: When you get an email that says "Hey, we need you to do this presentation," you aren't thinking about the silver linings or the lemonade you can make from that particular lemon. I mean, maybe you're the unicorn who says "Oh goody! I get to put my words and body and face and personality and everything else about me on display. It's sure great that I have no questions at all about my expertise or right to be up there."

But if you're like well over 90% of the population, you approach that assignment with some mix of dread or at the very least great reluctance.

Believe it or not, there's a way to actually have fun doing those presentations.

The view from the trainer's seat

Listen, I've been doing this presentation training thing for a long time. And whether it's working with a TEDTalker or knee-knocking-nervous CEO, I've gotten both a bird's-eye and up-close view into what it is that makes speaking difficult for people, and the ways that speakers clear those barriers. Nerves? I've seen (and experienced myself!) the worst of them. Rambling with no real point? More execs than you may expect suffer from this. No logical narrative or compelling content? Few have it naturally and even fewer are aware that it's important. The main thing I've noticed about those who get better at this skill is they are able to distance themselves from the idea that their expertise has ANY relation to their ability to be powerfully articulate about that expertise. Once people can see these as the entirely different skill sets they are, they can set themselves to building their speaking muscles.

There's a path. honest.

The path to getting good at this - to end up with the kind of Uncommon/Confidence that has you owning any damn stage - begins with one key idea: "I want to get better at this." And the more that sentiment can wander into the lane of curiosity - the lane where you say "I'm going to get GREAT at this, dammit!", the more likely you are to succeed.

We all have different strengths, weaknesses and barriers keeping us from being SuperSpeakers... If you can think of these as muscles, tell me: What's your strongest speaking muscle (it's usually the thing that comes most naturally to you - without even trying.) And, conversely, what's the one muscle you want to make stronger?

What's your metric of success when giving a presentation?

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• Not embarrassing myself/coming across as confident
• Engaging and captivating the audience
• Just not effing it up
• Getting through all the content

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