283. How to Find Your Signature Talk With Speaking Coach Jen Oliver

Are you someone who wants to give 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 makes people connect to us when we're on a screen or on a stage.

Sometimes, it works, and sometimes, it doesn't. How does the person's 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. As an executive producer, she's deeply connected to the entire TEDxCommunity. 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 a powerful influence.

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. She thought she'd restored the legacy for her children after her first marriage ended and herself as an upstanding woman. She was with a wonderful man but 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.

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 her work as a speaking coach because she focuses on authenticity and sharing that truth as a means of connection beyond the typical tips of how to be persuasive, make eye contact, etc.

Helping people tell their truth puts energy behind their words, ideas, or 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 this is a higher-stakes situation than your average moment in the 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. Before her business took off, Jen needed to own the parts of herself she was ignoring so that she could help others.