Small But Mighty Episode 10: Alex Keenan on pushing through fear to make an impact

Getting up in front of an audience isn’t easy. Being able to do it well and tell a cohesive, compelling story is even harder. Alex Keenan, a public speaking coach and communications consultant—and owner of Stage Light Communications—helps people push through the fear so they can have the impact they were meant to have.

Being a speaker isn’t always the goal. Telling a story is a skill that has immense value in so many places in the business world. Building that confidence to get up on stage and speak can be a springboard to help you speak up when it’s needed most in other contexts. 

You can learn more and connect with Alex on her website, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and join her Facebook community as well.

Full episode transcript:

Karen Wilson: Hello, and welcome to the Small But Mighty Biz Stories Podcast. I'm Karen Wilson and today I'm joined by Alex Keenan of Stage Light Communications. Alex is a public speaking coach and communications expert who helps people get more comfortable with putting themselves out there and telling a compelling story. Thanks for coming on today, Alex. Why don't you introduce yourself and tell some more about your business and what you do?

Alex Keenan: Absolutely. Thank you, Karen. I take the "ick" out of public speaking. More broadly, what I do is, I help business owners, professionals, change makers have more impact by removing the barriers that get in the way of them sharing their message with the world. I work with people one-on-one, I run workshops, and I generally am trying to build a community of people who have diverse experiences and who want to make a difference in the world.

Karen: Awesome. What are some of those barriers that you speak of? Because as you said in your intro, you have on your website that you take the "ick" out of public speaking, which is so clever, I like it a lot. How universal is the "ick" or is it a little bit different for everyone?

Alex: I'd say it's different for everybody. I think there's always a little bit of ick. I've been doing this for a while and I used to practice law and I always get a few butterflies in my stomach, which is fine. It's one of those things that you can turn into a source of power, but a lot of people do hold themselves back and will avoid getting into situations where they can share their brilliance or avoid situations where they're going to be interacting with the people who can move them further on their journey because they are worried about making a mistake. They don't feel comfortable in that situation. 

What I try to do is make that experience fun, show people how it can be a way to express your creativity and to really connect with other people, rather than having it be this very scary, vulnerable feeling.

Karen: What are some of the ways that you try to overcome that vulnerability that people feel? Because even the vulnerability is good, but you don't necessarily want it to be a barrier.

Alex: Right. Absolutely. One of my big things, I teach and perform improv and so I use a lot of that. When I say that to people, they get nervous because everybody has seen Whose Line Is It Anyway and think you have to be very clever and really quick on your feet in order to do this, but in my experience, the kind of improv that I do is really about being real, being yourself, looking for what is fun and interesting in everyday experiences.

My improv practice has really helped me in my business because what it is is every "mistake" is just an opportunity to try something different and you start from wherever you are and you say, "What can I do next with this?" So I bring those principles into the workshops that I teach and the work that I do with clients. "Let's play around. Let's try something. I'm going to give you a little bit of parameters, and I'm going to get you just to use your creativity and just throw stuff out there. There are no wrong answers, let's just have some fun with us and see what we discover."

When I teach workshops, every time we come in, the first thing I do is we'll have a little short discussion and then I say, "Okay, let's do something silly." We do something silly just to get rid of any sense of self-consciousness, everyone in that group is in the same boat. It really opens people up and makes them feel like, "Okay, this is a place where I can play. This is a place that is safe to just be myself." Then so much more growth can take place in those workshops. 

Karen: I've personally taken your Fearless Public Speaking workshop and it was super fun. We did it online because it was post-COVID isolation in the spring. What was interesting to me is that those activities that make you—they're fun and they make you feel a little bit silly, but they do level the playing field for everybody. We had such a fantastic combination of personalities, of people with dry humor, or people who were just up for anything, and people who were a little bit more reserved and didn't put themselves out there, and then people who were like myself who were a little bit more, "Okay, I'm just going to go for it even though this is so out of my comfort zone."

It was great because it really helped me to feel more comfortable and get past that vulnerability because as you were saying, everybody was in the same boat and people have different reasons for taking your courses. What are some of the catalysts that you hear about?

Alex: Oh, it really runs the gamut. I do get a lot of people who are at a point in their career where they're saying, "I'm ready to have an impact. I'm ready to stop being a wallflower and hanging out in the background and just putting my nose down and working for the benefit of someone else." I get a lot of people who are in the early stages or mid-stages of their own business, who really want to be able to promote themselves and share their ideas and expand their audience. I also get some people who have spent most of their lives being in the background and want to leave a legacy, which is really interesting to work with people who have a ton of life experience and are just trying to share this incredible amount of wisdom and are struggling with, "How do I express this and how do I get people interested? How do I tell my stories in a way that's going to resonate with people rather than boring them or turning them off?"

Then there are just people who say, "This scares me, but I know I have to do it. I have to do it in order to advance my career. I just want to get over that." I've had a few clients who had just gotten promotions and were in a position where we had to get up and present to the big bosses at the company and things like that and just were in a position where they were going, "This terrifies me. I'm not sure I can handle it."

Then after a few months, you get them to a point where they feel really, really good about what they have to say and their ability. I remember I got one email from a client once who has this very extreme fear of public speaking and about six months later, did a very large presentation. He emailed me and said, "It was incredible. I can't believe how comfortable I was. You changed my life." I never thought before I got into this business, anyone would say, "Hey, your public speaking, coaching changed my life," but I get that, and it's been amazing.

Karen: That's awesome. It's funny because I have a 12-year-old, and I watch how his schooling has been and they really incorporate public speaking opportunities in the school experience now that didn't happen when I was in school. It happened a bit in high school but I was always so terrified. I used to tell people because I was also a singer and I would sing solos in front of audiences. I would tell people, "Give me 5,000 people to sing in front of, but give me 5 to speak in front of and I'll be terrified." It was bad. My brain would go completely blank.

I actually got forced to do a presentation for a class, a marketing-- that wasn't a marketing class. Anyway. I got forced to do a presentation for a class I was taking after I moved to Canada and it was this "aha" moment because I realized that it really just mattered how much I prepared because I worked really hard on that one and I enjoyed it and I was good at it.

Alex: Yes! Amazing. A lot of us, we go through life and especially people who are already out of school, once upon a time, it was just, you were expected to do this and no one ever bothered to teach you, it's just you get up and you do a presentation, and you're just supposed to know how. We're not born knowing how to do this. What it does is it introduces this incredible feeling of vulnerability, because you are set apart from the group, all eyes are on you and you're opening yourself up to being judged and potentially being rejected.

There's a ton of vulnerability that can come from being in a position where you are the one up there speaking and sharing your ideas and potentially being disagreed with. It's really important to get support in learning how to do that and so many of us didn't learn. So I think that's a big reason why it's so nerve-wracking for people now, it was the thing that you were just forced to do. One thing I feel very strongly about is, there are ways that you can help people get through that. Part of it is creating those safe spaces like I do in my workshops where it's a level playing field, everybody's having fun.

The other part is when you tell people, "Okay, here's something you need to work on." It's about giving them a strategy to do that and so I've been in some public speaking programs where they would say, for example, "I'm from Nova Scotia. I grew up speaking very, very quickly because that's what we do out east. For years, and years and years, people would say, "Oh, you need to slow down." It was just like, "Okay, well, that's great but this is just how I talk." I can't just get into a situation where I'm nervous and use that much mental energy to do something that feels unnatural."

When you're in that situation when there's something that you need to improve, you need a strategy. You need a way to figure out how to do that in practice and you get into that habit before you're on stage. That's one of the things that I work with people on is like, "Here are the challenges, and here are some strategies. Here are concrete ways that you're going to incorporate this into your life and build this habit." Other than just saying, "Do this differently. You talk wrong."

Karen: Yes. Well, that's one of the things that you brought up in the workshop that I did with you is that "ums" and "ahs" and these things that we've been told to eliminate are not actually a bad thing. I listen for that now, um, when [chuckles] I just did it.

I listen for that now in myself and in actually other podcasters or speakers that I'm hearing. I listen for those natural ways that we speak that make them sound authentic, as opposed to this perfect robotic way of going about speaking.

Alex: That's right. Yes. You actually just yesterday sent me a video from this corporate presentation and said, "What do you think of this? It's so highly scripted." They were very robotic and so it's hard as a human to watch something like that and to feel like it's authentic. If you add the little bits of disfluency, is what we call it, can actually add to what you bring to the table. It's only when something becomes very repetitive, that it becomes a problem.

I think we tend to hold ourselves to this very high standard that doesn't actually serve us. It's about being intentional about the way you present. Being aware of what you're putting out there and making choices about what is going to have the most impact on whatever audience you are in front of, or whatever audience you're trying to reach.

Karen: It makes a lot of sense because when you're listening to higher profile leaders who have to give interviews on the fly all the time, whether it's an elected official or someone with some sort of a responsibility. You look at the medical officers of health right across Canada, they're giving briefings all the time these days in a way they haven't been used to before, but when they do it they're very knowledgeable, capable. You have confidence in their expertise, but you're not necessarily getting a delivery that is filtered of all of the disfluency. I love that word now.

You're not getting that from it because they're not preparing these talking points in a fashion that actually puts out a perfect delivery. It wouldn't seem authentic if they did.

Alex: Absolutely not. The chief medical officers are in such a difficult position because they are trying to communicate very scientific ideas to a public that has very different levels of scientific literacy. They're trying to communicate these very complex ideas in a world where the primary rule of communication is keep it simple. Public health and the evolution of scientific knowledge is anything but simple. 

They're trying to walk this line. I work with quite a few people who have scientific or technical backgrounds, and it's really hard for them to sum it up because the stuff is complicated. A lot of the work I do with my clients who are in those fields is narrowing down what they know to what their audience needs to know and filtering out the rest but to have to do that on the fly, that's incredibly difficult.

Karen: Well, it's funny because that video that I shared with you yesterday, I was watching it last night and laughing because they're doing a product launch and they're coming up with words to describe features and I'm like, "It's such a cool feature, they had to come up with a new word for it."

It doesn't mean anything to anyone and I find that that's such a corporate thing to do, to introduce jargon that actually complicates the message when you're actually trying to simplify it.

It's this funny thing that corporations do all the time. I do the same thing with the written word is try to get people to understand that simpler is better. Obviously, with SEO, you have to have keywords in there and that complicates matters, but it's that whole idea of being able to use plain language, simplify the message, and communicate clearly. It's so important.

Alex: It really is. Yes. There's one exercise that I use in my workshops and in my coaching. When I first introduced this, in my very first Fearless Public Speaking course, I thought, "Okay, people are going to think this is so stupid and so childish." You pick a fairy tale, so The Three Bears and you tell that story in two minutes, and then you tell that story again in 30 seconds and then you tell it again in 10 seconds and you really have to filter it down to what is essential.

I thought people were going to go, "Okay, we're adults, why are we doing this?" People really enjoy it. Even more importantly I'll do this with a client and then three months later, I'll be trying to help them simplify and I'll say, "Remember the three bears." All of a sudden this light bulb will go off and this one just childish little exercise has so much power and has so much sticking power that it really helps to do that.

Karen: It's funny because using Twitter helped me to do that, but then I got away from Twitter and if you don't practice it, you lose it. Now you see people who are doing the long threads and so Twitter has become almost instead of a microblogging platform in some ways, it's a blogging platform.

Alex: I have such a love-hate relationship with Twitter because it does have that power to force you to be very concise, but one thing that it often does is it just makes people take out all of the nuance and then it becomes fluid.

Karen: Yes, that true.

Alex: Yes. Hopefully, you're trying to walk that line and one thing that I find so important in my business is I am teaching people techniques that are often abused and manipulated for power and gain. It's so important to me that the people that I work with use these tools of integrity because they can be used for incredible good, they can also be used for destructive purposes and they often are.

That's something that comes up again and again, and I've been very fortunate in that I've built this community of people who want to conduct themselves with integrity, who want to make a difference in the world and so they will actually ask me when I do some exercise that it could be used in a way that is not so ethical, they'll say, "But what if this happens?" Then we get to have those conversations, which is so important, how do we use these tools as a force for good?

Karen: Well, I'm glad you brought that up because one of your services that you have is verbal branding. I really appreciate when experts get outside of the visual because that tends to overshadow all that important deep thinking that you have to do before you can even get to a place where you're ready for visuals in a business. The idea that you've designed your workshops and business services around the ethical use of the tools is obviously a part of your brand. 

I find it's very common, people just think about their brand as a logo or colors, but when it comes to the thoughtful consideration of words, it doesn't necessarily make that connection that this is an aspect of your brand as well, how are you presenting yourself to the world in your words?

Alex: Yes, exactly. It really comes back to who are you trying to reach? What is the purpose of your business or your organization? What are you trying to accomplish? Then you start from there. A lot of people, they will start from, "Here's what I have to say." The starting point is, what are you trying to do and who will help you do that? Then how did you speak to them, what they need? What they are trying to accomplish in their lives and how can you work together?

The verbal branding part comes down to what is something that's going to resonate with your audience, and also be in alignment with your values as a service provider? There's always a difference between those two things. Some of the people who have money might be looking for something that's not so good for you to give. It's finding that middle ground, who are the people that you want to work with?

When I define my ideal client, it's someone who is curious and purpose-driven, has a sense of humor. Someone who is not purpose-driven is probably not my ideal client. I'm not going to use them for corporate speak, that would attract someone who's really like, "I'm looking for the highest returns." kind of thing. I'm looking for the people who have a vision and a mission. So it comes down to that, what is going to be in alignment with what you're looking for, who you're trying to work with?

Karen: Yes. That's the challenge that I have with some of my clients as well. Because often when you start a business, you're thinking about this great idea and you've got interest and enthusiasm behind it, and you're eager to go and help people, but you don't necessarily think about all of the foundation underneath that idea that drives you to do that work and how you want to channel it and focus to find that ideal client who fits into your values, the mission, the vision, all of those things. So interesting. It's a struggle for businesses to even understand why that matters. I think that's a big part, though, of maintaining the love you have for your business, the passion you have for your business. It can be demoralizing to get into this cycle of taking on clients that are just okay.

Alex: It takes time and it takes effort to do this work which can sometimes feel like it's pulling you away from the activities that are bringing an income. I find it's helpful because otherwise, you end up in a situation where you go, "I don't know who I'm serving, and the people I'm attracting are not the people I want to be working with." It's very worth investing that time and that energy in doing this process, to make sure that what you were saying as the face and also the voice of your business is in alignment with where you want your business to go.

Karen: Absolutely. I find I'm always learning from my clients and sometimes it's from the work we do together, or it might be from their lessons learned. Because I've had a few clients who've come to me and been a little disappointed in how a project or something has gone. What are some of the general takeaways that you've gleaned from the work you've done with clients?

Alex: I think one thing is that people respond to something that brings joy into what they're doing. Anytime you can bring more joy into it, the lessons will stick and it will help them feel better about what they're doing because sometimes on the day-to-day things are really hard. Sometimes people come into a session feeling demoralized. So then the task is to find out what's going to bring you to life about working on this? What's going to help you feel more connected?

Another thing is that everyone is coming into this from a different place. So it's really important as a service provider to be listening and to be paying very close attention to what is happening for your clients. Sometimes we come in and we have this particular service offering and it’s like when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Sometimes that's not what people need.

So it's very important to really be paying attention and to be asking questions and digging deep to find out what are you struggling with? What works for you and what doesn't? Then I can create something that is going to serve you. If what you need isn't what I have to offer, then why don't I help you find someone else? Because sometimes what they need is not what you have to offer. You'd be better served, sending this to someone else and finding someone that you can really bring your genius into helping out.

Karen: That is such an important point. I find that even though I create programs or offerings that, in general, are supposed to be delivered the same way, I never deliver them the same way because you can't make a one size fits all.

Alex: Absolutely not.

Karen: It's not easy to do. Clients have their different challenges. It reminds me of in past lives, where I've worked in places, and we had clients where you didn't get the whole story, sometimes for months or even years because there is an instinctive need to keep certain things private. Sometimes it's not until you start doing the work with a client that you realize, "Oh, there are some other things going on that I didn't know about." You would have to factor that into the service and sometimes pivot unexpectedly.

Alex: Yes, absolutely. Doing corporate workshops, I find this happens a lot. You'll talk to management, and they'll say, "Here's what the challenge is, here's what we need to work on." Then you get into a room with their employees and the story is very, very different.

Karen: That is not surprising.

Alex: Sometimes then you'll have to go back and say, "This is what we heard from your people. I think we need to dig into this and keep working on this thing." It can be a delicate line sometimes too. What you think your people are saying is not what they're saying. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this is really an issue.

Karen: Tell me about some of the work you do with corporations. What kind of offerings do you have for that area?

Alex: Well, I do offer something very similar to Fearless Public Speaking for corporate groups. Especially for companies that want to make sure that their employees are serving as good brand ambassadors, are going out into the world, and presenting this face that is competent, and friendly, and on-brand. I do workshops with them on building those public speaking, the communication, nonverbal communication, storytelling, speech writing, and interaction.

I find audience interaction is one thing that makes people really nervous. So I always make sure we work a little bit on that. What happens when someone asks you an unexpected question? Anyway, I do those. I've also been focusing more, especially since the pandemic started, on team connection, because sometimes those barriers that you find aren't just between you and your audience, but they are within a team.

Especially now that we're all working virtually or many of us are working virtually, it can be so much harder to make those connections, and people have this mental load where the normal ritual is you get dressed, you go to the office, you pour your coffee, you sit down at your desk and talk to the person next to you, and those rituals that bring us into that headspace of, "This is who I'm supposed to be at work. This is how I speak. This is how I behave." It's all blurred. Now we have this mental load where it's like, "I'm in my sweatpants and a nice shirt, and my cat is next to me, but also, I have to be my professional self on the screen. Who am I? What version of myself is showing up at this meeting, and how do I strike that balance while also carrying all the other stressors that my job usually brings?" I work with people on how do we make this easier for ourselves, how do we communicate more clearly how do we get to know each other on a deeper level, so that we can help each other through this very stressful time, and make sure that if someone is having trouble with that mental load, it doesn't cascade into these negative effects for the whole team.

Karen: That's a really interesting line we're having to walk these days with COVID and the number of people who are working remotely right now. It's challenging. I'm happy that my work life at home started long before COVID hit.

I felt quite acclimated to it and I was okay in transitioning, but it's been an interesting, interesting phenomenon to watch, for sure.

Alex: I think we've all had to come to terms with the fact that we're all very human. Sometimes we like to pretend that we're not, but this has forced us to admit that.

Karen: There's this aspect of inviting people into your home that you wouldn't normally do.

Alex: Yes, exactly.

Karen: That can be a very uncomfortable experience.

Alex: Yes. The whole concept of space has changed because public spaces now feel unsafe because of the risks that you expose yourself to by being in a public space, and then our private spaces have become the new public space, and so where do you retreat to?

Karen: Yes. It's true. It's true, we all need that safe place we can go. What are some of the most rewarding aspects to the work that you do? You mentioned earlier that you've had a few clients who've come back and said that it was life-changing to build that confidence. What are some other things that you've had come out of the work?

Alex: One thing I love is, almost invariably, not 100% of the time, but quite often, when you're working with a group, you see some kind of "aha" moment emerge from that group interaction. Someone starts to look at things in a way that they never have and there's a very distinct point where they start thinking about things differently. For example, I had one person in one of my courses who had a lot of nervous energy, and is a very brilliant thinker, but was pacing and fidgeting and had a lot of very distracting habits on stage that were very distracting from this incredible message that she had.

We had this one session where I got her to start to think intentional. You're in a standstill and then when you switch to this idea, you're going to move, you're going to walk to a different part of the stage. You're just going to be very, very intentional, and using that energy to catch your audience's attention just by moving very intentionally. What happened was, she discovered that she had this intuitive sense of where an idea existed in space. So, when she directed her thoughts to that she could just move to wherever she needed to be to connect with the audience over that idea, and that nervous energy just vanished immediately. It was just so purposeful.

Karen: That's amazing.

Alex: That was incredible. It was incredible. Just within five minutes, this thing that had been a liability for her became the strength that she could use to her advantage. It was an eight-week course, and I heard her speech several times over the course of those eight weeks. After that moment, every single time I heard her speak, even though I've heard it over and over and over again, I was on the edge of my seat every single time because she was so captivating once she had learned how to use her space.

Those kinds of moments—I've had people say, "You saved my relationship because I'm able to communicate with my partner so much better." I've had people decide that a relationship that they had in their life where they were feeling like their ideas didn't matter and that was translating into how they presented themselves publicly, they had this revelation with that relationship and decided to not let it control them anymore. Those breakthrough moments are what make it all worthwhile.

Karen: I can imagine. It's interesting how there's this complementary aspect to what you do that can go so much further beyond public speaking. Especially for women, I find that I talk to women especially in the corporate world too, who are nervous about just speaking up. They have good reasons for those nerves. They have good reasons, but it's something that they really want to do. They have good ideas. They have a voice that they want to be heard, but it's hard and so for something like a public speaking course to help that voice get raised, the volume to be raised, is so incredible.

Alex: Yes, it is pretty magical to watch the transformation of someone who would say-- Even now, I've had people say in the first session of a class, "I'm not sure if I'll stand up." I'm like, "Sit down and just speak." Then almost immediately, they're standing up because they feel comfortable in that space. Once you can feel comfortable in that space in front of, say, 10 people, then it's just another step, a little nudge outside your comfort zone to get up in front of 10 other people, and then you can go from there.

Karen: I find that pushing your comfort zone isn't that hard when you think of it as baby steps, you don't have to go from never standing in front of a crowd to standing in front of 5,000 people. You can start in a room of just your team at work, speaking up when you normally wouldn't.

Alex: Exactly. It's just about one intentional action after another and then they build up. I used to be very shy and I used to be very self-conscious and preoccupied with what people would think of me. It was a series of baby steps to get to where I am, where I can jump up on stage in front of a large crowd of people and act like a confused chicken and not care.

There's so much freedom in saying, "You know what, you can never look stupid when you are living your best life in public." Anyone who's going to judge you is just, they're judgy, and who cares? To let go of that preoccupation, it's incredibly freeing. It changes everything.

Karen: Absolutely.

Let's switch gears, and we'll talk about marketing. I always have to talk about marketing. It's especially fun when I get to talk with someone who's in the same arena in their business. What are some of the challenges or surprises you've encountered in promoting your business?

Alex: I came from the legal field. I never really had to do much marketing aside from in-person networking and things like that. Starting out, I didn't have money to hire a marketing person. I'm getting into that place now where I want to start offloading some of those tasks, but it's been a crash course over the past couple of years and learning how to market myself, how to talk about what I do. Sometimes I feel like I need my own Alex to bounce it with and to ask those questions through to your audience, "What are you trying to accomplish?"

Karen: It's true. If there's one piece of advice I could give any business owner, it'd be, hire someone to do what you do for you.

Alex: I'm going to be knocking on your door very soon, Karen.

Karen: I've hired marketing help for myself. I've hired you before. I still need help from you.

Alex: You know where to find me.

Karen: Yes, I do.

Alex: It's important to me to understand how all the pieces fit together. I don't think I would have traded learning that and going through that learning curve, however steep it might have been. It's a lot to balance that with doing the work that I really want to do. I think one of the other challenges for me is, I see myself not as just a public speaking person but as a communications person. But it's really hard to try to communicate those two very different things.

I'm working on your public speaking but also your internal communications and so often that's which one of these am I going to emphasize? Am I just going to drop this, but I really like doing it. How do I take those things that I love doing and that balance and that variety in my life that I really crave? How do I communicate that in a way that is simple.

Karen: I know. It's challenging.

Alex: It really is.

Karen: I have a similar issue because I work with corporations and small businesses, you end up with two tiers of messages that are going out in the world and are you confusing people, or is it clear? That can be challenging.

Alex: Exactly. Exactly, yes.

Karen: It's always, always fun chatting with you because we could talk for hours and go on and on. I wanted to give you an opportunity to share how people can find you and if you have any special offer you wanted to put out there.

Alex: Absolutely. Well, you can find me at stagelight.ca. I also have a Facebook group, Stage Light Communications Community which is yet another safe space where you can post your videos, share any events where you're going to be speaking, whether in-person (eventually) or virtual, and ask for tips, get advice. I post a lot of challenges in there, so if you have something that you want to try, if you want to be pushed outside of your comfort zone, that is a great place to come and be among friendly folks who are trying to accomplish the same thing. That's a great place to find me.

Karen: What's your latest challenge?

Alex: My latest challenge is what I call the "Oh snap, I should make a video about that challenge."

Karen: Which I love.

Alex: I was inspired when someone asked me a question that I've been asked many, many times and I was like, "Oh snap, I should make a video about that." Anyway, the challenge is something that you get asked all the time about your area of expertise, make a short video whether it's a Facebook Live or a pre-recorded video just to teach that little thing to people and put it out into the world.

Karen: I think that I need to. I think I actually am inspired by you because we were talking about this last week. I think I'm going to have to start my own video series and I have a title in mind, which you know, but I'm not going to reveal it today.

It's funny how we all have that thing that we can latch onto and use for content. I love that.

Alex: We all have these little things that seem so obvious to us but could really make a big difference to other people who don't know because it's not their specialized knowledge. The more you can share that, the more people will know what you have to offer. I think it's so important especially right now where we can't meet in-person, being visible online is so important and it's so much more difficult because everyone is online and there's a lot more noise.

So, if you can actually be putting your face and your voice out there, you'd have so much more impact. I'm trying to get people to get over that because putting out a video is a big fear. That's out for the world to see. I talked about vulnerability, but we attach so much more stress onto it than we need to. You are not in as intense a spotlight as you think you are. Just show up. Just show up and keep showing up and that's how you'll get noticed.

Anyway, so an offer, I actually have two. I have a free speech-writing cheat sheet that people can sign up for by going to my website, stagelight.ca. I am also going to be accepting a limited number of people to start in January for one-on-one coaching. For people who sign up before December 1st, I'm offering 20% off of those packages. You can also connect stagelight.ca and send me a note.

Karen: Incredible. We will make sure that all the links get in the show notes and on the podcast blog, and everyone can find you. The main place to go is stagelight.ca.

Alex: That's right.

Karen: Thank you, Alex, for coming and joining me today.

Alex: Always such a pleasure, Karen. Thanks for having me.

Karen: Absolutely.