August 13, 2025 • 41 mins
Hire a theater kid, they say. They can do anything. Today we will talk about how true that is, as well as the power of saying 'yes'
Carol Lempert started her career as a professional actress. She now helps leaders increase their executive presence by teaching them the skills actors use to have great stage and screen presence.
A sought-after leadership expert, Carol’s insights have been featured in Forbes, The Financial Post, The National Post, and Reader’s Digest. She also serves as a teaching fellow at Florida International University’s Center for Leadership.
Scotty Watson has been working in Improv for over 30 years starting with The Second City Canadian National Touring Company Off-Broadway Scotty was seen as a disembodied head in the Off-Broadway musical Walmartopia! and served as an alternate for, “Bebe,” (BEE-bee) in Cirque du Soleil's Mystere (MIS-tair). Scotty has done feature films with Ed Asner, Eric Stoltz, and Gerard Depardieu. On television Scotty appeared in a series of commercials for the NYC TV market and has dressed up as David Crosby, a human heart, and Carmen Miranda.
You can find them at
carollempert.com
LinkedIn
and
scottywatsonimprov.com
Scotty Watson's Improv Tips
Follow Marci Talks Money (and Life) wherever you get your podcasts to get the episodes as they post.
Visit MoneyMarci.com for other financial literacy resources.
Carol Lempert started her career as a professional actress. She now helps leaders increase their executive presence by teaching them the skills actors use to have great stage and screen presence.
A sought-after leadership expert, Carol’s insights have been featured in Forbes, The Financial Post, The National Post, and Reader’s Digest. She also serves as a teaching fellow at Florida International University’s Center for Leadership.
Scotty Watson has been working in Improv for over 30 years starting with The Second City Canadian National Touring Company Off-Broadway Scotty was seen as a disembodied head in the Off-Broadway musical Walmartopia! and served as an alternate for, “Bebe,” (BEE-bee) in Cirque du Soleil's Mystere (MIS-tair). Scotty has done feature films with Ed Asner, Eric Stoltz, and Gerard Depardieu. On television Scotty appeared in a series of commercials for the NYC TV market and has dressed up as David Crosby, a human heart, and Carmen Miranda.
You can find them at
carollempert.com
and
scottywatsonimprov.com
Scotty Watson's Improv Tips
Follow Marci Talks Money (and Life) wherever you get your podcasts to get the episodes as they post.
Visit MoneyMarci.com for other financial literacy resources.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Powered by Riverside f M. Welcome to Marcy talks money
in life. I Am Money Marcy, and today is a
doubly special episode because I am welcoming two guests. The
episode was inspired by Josh Grobin and the meme about
hiring a theater kid because they can do anything. Carol
(00:22):
Lumpert started her career as a professional actress. She now
helps leaders increase their executive presence by teaching them the
skills actors used to have great stage and screen presence.
A sought after leadership expert, Carol's insights have been featured
in Forbes, The Financial Post, The National Posts, and Reader's Digest.
She also serves as a teaching fellow at Florida International
(00:45):
University's Center for Leadership. Scotti Watson has been working in
improv for over thirty years, starting with the Second City,
Canadian National Touring Company. Scotty was seen as a disembodied
head in the off Broadway musical Walmartopia and served as
an alternate for Bbi in circ Desalais Misstaire. Scotti has
(01:06):
done feature films with Ed Asner, Eric Stoltz, and Gerard Departo.
On television, Scotti appeared in a series of commercials for
the NYC TV market, and has dressed up as David
Crosby a Human Heart and Carmen Miranda. Okay, I want
to start by establishing that you are both very much
(01:29):
theater kids and adults, and that you have and I
don't want to say transitioned as much as expanded into
other professional roles as well. And that's really the main
part of the focus today because I want listeners to
understand the breadth of skills you learn from participating in theater.
This is expensive, not limiting, So welcome Carol and Scotti. Yay.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I like the way you said that too, because you
don't have to step out of the theater to also
work in another area. You step up, you hop out,
you hop back.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
I love that, and sometimes you have your feet in
both worlds exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Okay, I'm going to start with Carol. You have a
bachelor and master's degree. These are in communication with minors
in theater, is that right?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
And education?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
And education? So how did that evolve into your current position.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
In terms of running my own company and teaching executives
about leadership presence.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
In terms of all the various things I guess I
should have put an S on the end of that.
How did that evolve into your current positions?
Speaker 3 (02:32):
So what I thought I would start with to answer
that question because you conjured up Josh Grobin. For those
of your listeners that aren't familiar with the quote, I
looked it up, so I thought that I would share it.
So he says, hire a former theater kid. I don't
care what your business is, it'll go better if you
hire a former theater kid. You need somebody who can
work on a deadline. Hire a theater kid. You need
(02:52):
somebody to take a job and a pinch and act
like they know what they're doing the whole time and
do it on zero budget. Hire a theater kid, lump,
but you need checked out, Hire a doctor for that.
When you need someone to cheer you up when you're
waiting for the results, hire a former theater kid. So
that's Josh Grobin, which is a little bit of an
answer to your question. So as somebody that started doing
(03:14):
theater in my senior year in high school and then
like I love this and I loved singing, I was
always inquire. I actually started. I went to Wayne State
University for my bachelor's degree. I started in the music department,
and then I met someone who was doing musicals in
the theater department, and I started doing a lot of
theater work as well. But after I graduated and then
I was looking for work as an actor. You have
(03:36):
to still pay your rent, and I wasn't necessarily right
away getting work as an actors, so I became a temp,
and I realized that basically what Josh Grobin says, when
you're working as a temp in other people's offices, the
fact that you have been rigorously trained to learn quickly,
to show up and do well, to take direction, to
be able to get along with strangers, because on the
(03:57):
first day of rehearsal with your castmates, you don't know anybody,
but you have to pretend like you're a team because
on opening night you're all going to have to do
this thing together. All of those skills really came from
being trained as an actor. And then I discovered later on.
There was this moment where my brother Sheldon, had a
friend who was having to give a presentation at work,
and the guy was freaking out, and Sheldon's like, I
(04:18):
can crack open a beer for you and calm me down,
but I can't help you with the presentation. But my
sister's an actress. She can help. And so I went
over there and I worked with this guy over the
weekend to get him ready to do his presentation at work,
and basically I rehearsed him the way you would rehearse
a monologue for an audition, and off he went to
do his presentation and he said it went really well.
And you know, I did a favor for my brother,
Sheldon and his friend. And then a couple months later,
(04:39):
I got a phone call from a friend that guy,
who said, you know that this guy now is considered
high potential at the company because now he can give
better presentations. Can you help me too? So that's when
I realized that there's a pain point for people that
work in corporations where they have to be able to
give presentations, and they have to be able to think
on their feet when they're being asked questions in the
(05:00):
middle of the presentation, and they have to be able
to manage their anxiety when they have a one on
one meeting with their boss. And these are all skills
that I cultivated through the world of theater. And I thought, oh,
this is much more fun than answering some guy's telephone
on attempt job. So I took two years off my
acting career and I went back to school to be
certified as a coach as a learning designer, and that's
(05:21):
how I'll start. So thanks for resking.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Okay, it was pretty comprehensive.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
No more questions, class dismiss.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yeah really, no, no, no, I know there's way more
stories in here than that. And weren't even gotten to you, Scotty.
So while your bio doesn't mention it, you ended up
as the head of advertising and marketing for a pretty
good organization in New York. So can you tell us
about how you ended up there?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Everything is saying yes to it and then figuring it
out afterwards. Everything that I've done has been yeah, I'm
pretty sure I can figure that out, although as they
get older, I'm more clear about the fact that I
am going to have to figure it out, and people
seem confident in that. So I was running the improv
(06:11):
part of a theater company in New York City and
I helped them increase their board. They had a very
small board of all artists. If you're not for profit
in the arts, please don't just have a board filled
with your friends. Have a real board that will give money,
get money or get off. The board doesn't necessarily have
(06:33):
to be money, can be materials. Boards need to be functional.
So I did a campaign to increase their board, and
I brought a banker on. This guy who was a
vice president in one of the banks in New York
City and a great guy, and he said, like, if
I'm going to go on the board, I want to
take your improv class. Takes the improv class and he's
good right away, He's just like, right away, phenomenal. And
(06:55):
I said, you studied improv before he goes no, and
he goes, wait a minute, I think maybe I have.
I think maybe being a banker is doing improv. And
we connected just like that over the fact that everything
is improv and improv is everything, and we became fast friends.
And he liked the way I promoted the theater company.
He liked the way that I built the board for
(07:16):
the theater company, and he asked me to just as
a consultant, will you come in give your thoughts and
insights into what they were doing in terms of marketing.
So I went and I did, and that the board.
Their board, which was a very functional board, said we
like it. And I said, okay, so there's the plan.
Just do the plan. And they said, you want to
do the plan because we don't want to do the plan.
You do the plan. And so I ended up working
(07:40):
for not for profit financial institution for a number of years.
So it's just saying yeah, it's just yes and making
connections and enjoying meeting new people and clicking with people
and sharing your thoughts and ideas.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
It's improv well, life is improv I mean, I don't
know about you, but I don't get a script every morning.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Right, there's my script right now? Hello, Massie. I agree,
you don't get a script of any morning.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
He said, okay, we checked that off the list. Okay, good.
So Carol goes into businesses they hire you to talk
to their executives and talk about their presence and Scotty,
you've gone into businesses and organizations to train I don't
know if it's the same execs or different levels of
employees whatever else on improv and you guys sometimes work
(08:27):
together on that. And you also had a comedy troupe
a number of years ago where you did both sketch
and improv. It must be kind of nice work when
you get to work together again doing these things and
bringing other people into it.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
It is may I answer that because Carol often will
do the presentation side, and then I'll do the Q
and I Q and A. Did I say that right?
Did I say something off color? No? Q and A.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Check your notes, Check your notes?
Speaker 2 (08:54):
What was in the script? I'll do the Q and
A side so that we can work together. So time,
can I say the name of the city that we
went to because I want to talk about the food.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Sure, I don't see why not.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
We went together to Memphis, Tennessee, and my god, I
love catfish so much, and we had a very rewarding
and interesting experience in the workshop. And then immediately afterwards,
I ate three different kinds of catfish over three nights.
It's a fun time. So it was one of those
rare treats where we got to work together. And I
would like to do more of that, he said over
(09:28):
on a podcast in public. See what she says.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
So I guess I should. I should make sure that
I use that snip and broadcast it fully so people
know that they really want to hire you. Guys as
a duo.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Well, I want to see if Carol wants to do more.
That's the thing we'll see live on the air.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
We have to rustle up some clients. Anybody who's listening
that thinks that you could have Scott and I come
and help your participants practice difficult conversations. Scott shows up
as being kind of a mean looking client or a
mean looking bomb and they can practice with no risk
to their actual career because he's just an actor. Or
if you want to do an improv workshop and practice
(10:07):
thinking on your feed and then I'll help you debrief.
That's a lot of the stuff that we do together.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
And all you have to do if you're interested in
this is tell me what the big dish or food
your city is known for us.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Well, you know, we'll go to food. Now we're going
to come back to other things, but let's go to
food because Scotti is a food guy, and that's the
special and wonderful foods, and that's the basic food. Scotti
is the guy who taught my family the importance of
having sandwiches and carrying a sandwich with you so you're prepared.
We have been stuck a couple of times where having
(10:42):
a sandwich made all the difference. So you know, tell us,
tell us about your love of food and cooking and
all of those things.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah. So, Howie Mandel is from Toronto, which is where
I'm from, Toronto Native and when he was first breaking
I'm talking about all the way back when he had
hair and then before it became I think as germophobic
as he is now. He was being interviewed on a
local talk show and what advice would you give a
(11:15):
young comedian and he said, get a bus passed. He says,
you can't have a car, which I took to heart.
I take public transit as much as I can. I
love public transit and I love figuring out public transit
when I'm in a new city, by the way, so
that's the other thing you can tell me about your
city is how to get around. And he said, and
pack a sandwich because at the time sandwiches were a
(11:36):
couple of bucks. But then again, a couple of bucks
was a couple of bucks. And now if I'm in
an airport and I'm traveling, sandwich is fifteen bucks. Am
I crazy? I can make a sandwich for cheaper than
fifteen bucks, and it becomes a habit. It's the same sandwich,
but it's a fifteen dollars sandwich in the airport, and
it's a free sandwich if I pack it. So it
(11:57):
just becomes economy that I use that money in my career.
I don't use that money for a sandwich.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
And that's basically what you often. You're talking to us
about the arts right now, but your podcast is Marcie
Talks Money. So when you choose a career like the
careers that we've chosen, there's no predictable income path. You're
not getting a paycheck every week for the whole year.
You might be getting a paycheck every week that you're
in an eight month run of a show, but then
at the ninth month the show is over you have
to go get another show. So we both learned to
(12:26):
assess what we were buying through the lens of is
this a want or is this a need? I need groceries,
I need lunch, I need a sandwich. I want to
replace my milk crates with a proper bookcase. So you know,
I live with milk crates as a bookcase until I
was almost forty years old because I needed groceries. So
always pack a sandwich, because not only are you always
(12:48):
fed when you're hungry, and you don't have to worry
like where am I going to find a place? You're
saving money.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Well, remember it's Marci's talks Money and life, and it's
also about the life things. So for us, it wasn't
a matter of how much a sandwich cost. At the
times we were trapped. We had picked up a picnic
lunch when we were driving through I think it was
Yellowstone when the buffalo decided to walk on the road,
not across the road, on the road, so we were
(13:14):
stuck for about two hours. There wasn't a place to
buy a sandwich. I am sure the people in that
line around us would have paid us hundreds of dollars
for the sandwiches we had, which we were not giving up.
We wanted the sandwich. But it's just that that being
prepared for life happens. Another time we were trapped on
a plane and sometimes they just can't board or onboard
(13:37):
or take off or whatever, and you're trapped and the
stewardess aren't offering service at that point in time. So
you have a sandwich or you don't have a sandwich.
It's not a matter of you know, whether you're willing
to buy a sandwich. Not that I want to spend
fifteen dollars for a two dollars sandwich, but even so,
it's being prepared in life for whatever is going to happen.
(13:57):
I have a sandwich in my pocket right now.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
It's it's not like your batman or anything like you're
prepared for every eventuality. You know you're going to get
hungry somewhere down.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
The line, right And I don't carry a sandwich everywhere
I go, But there are certain circumstances in life where
you know has a better chance of being out of
your control, right, and you kind of prepare for those
better because you can only improve yourself so far that
improv imaginary sandwich. You can make it look delicious to
the audience, but you know it's not going to feed
(14:32):
you or them. But I liked it. We talked about
managing wants and needs, because I think that's important, and
certainly as as gig workers, because whether it's being hired
as an actor or being hired to coach people or
whatever else, those are gig jobs. You might have fifteen
people want you for one day now, and you might
(14:52):
have a period of time where nobody wants you for
whatever you offer, and that's that's a challenge that a
lot of people don't understand.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, Scott and I often talk about the fact that
when you go to theater school, which we both did,
they teach you how to be a very skilled actor.
You have a lot of technique. When you get a script,
how are youre going to bring that character to life?
They teach you to memorize a bunch of monologue so
that you always have something that you can audition with.
They get you ready for the work of being an actor.
But nowhere in theater school did they say to us
(15:23):
once you graduate, you have become a solo creative entrepreneur.
You have to go out and get work for yourself,
and you have to manage your own taxes, and you
often have to negotiate your own contracts, and so all
of those skills we were prepared to learn, because being
a theater kid means that you're prepared to learn all
the time. But they didn't actually give us a playbook
(15:43):
on what solo career entrepreneurialism was going to be like.
So that was a learned skill over experience.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
I remember the first time it is a television commercial.
I told my dad what I made just for the
day at the time, I think it was seven hundred bucks,
which was a long, long, long time ago, for the shoot.
And then you get Rezi jewels that pay every three
months for it's very, very complicated formula. But there's things
that I did twenty years ago that I still see
a check for two or three dollars at a time
(16:11):
coming in.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
By way, I gotta check last week for six dollars
and twenty seven cents for an episode of doc show
in Canada that I filmed in nineteen ninety nine. So
if you get a big part and you have a
good agent and you negotiated well, your residuals might come
later on. But sometimes it's twenty seven cents.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
So I tell my dad. He says, what'd you make?
I said it was seven hundred and fifty dollars seven
hundred somewhere in there for the shoot. And then I'll
get residuals as time goes by, And my dad says, wow,
you do one of those a week, you'll be okay.
And I had to tell them, you know, you do
one of those maybe every three four months. This big
chunk of money shows up, and you can't think of
(16:51):
that as a paycheck. You got to think of it
as an inheritance.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
That's a great way to put that. People don't understand
that there are careers and their even paycheck careers. I've
dealt with salespeople over my accounting career that this year
they make fifty thousand dollars, next year they make one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the year after they
make fifty thousand again. So if they've got, you know,
(17:15):
lifestyle creep, they're going to have a problem that third year. Yeah,
this brings me back to another of my favorite conversations
topics that Scott's going to want in on Google sheets. Spreadsheets.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
I do love a good spreadsheet. I have this calcula.
I am actually mortally afraid of mathematics. Doing any kind
of math makes me uncomfortable and I sweat a little bit.
And spreadsheets save you from that because you drop a
formula in there, you copy paste it down the road,
and math does itself. God, I love a spreadsheet. The
(17:49):
other thing I like about a spreadsheet for a person
in the arts is that's how the normal people think
we think creative, spark. A spark is spark, and I
think like that, I absolutely do. But if you want
to think like a business, spreadsheets are set up the
way businesses think, so it can make you take your
(18:11):
creative thoughts and put them into the little boxes that
your accountant, that the businesses, that the government needs to
see to understand your financial life. So just take a
few minutes, it's free, googles Google sheets and just figure
out a little bit about it, and I sort of
it'll make your life better. Brought to you by Google.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Well, and whether you have Microsoft and you have Excel,
or you use the Google sheets that are available the
Google docs and all of those, or Libre Office is
also another freeware out there. These all work similarly. You
can even if you save it in the right format
or open it the right way, they transport from one
(18:54):
program to the other. I love spreadsheets. I mean, I'm
an accountant. Spreadsheets are on a using tool at every
level of managing your finances. But I've got guess I.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Add something about spreadsheets please Carol, because because I know
Carol just sees spreadsheets as a necessary evil, I will
use them for an improv set because I can take
my actors and pair one two, three, four, five six
one three two. You see what I'm like, So that
(19:27):
everybody gets to work with everybody in different scenes. And
can I have automated that on a spreadsheet. So I
whip up my phone and I open up I open
up Google Sheets, and I put everybody's names in and
the set list pops up, so that I play with Carol,
and then you play with Carol, and then you and
I play. It just happens for us. Doesn't matter that
(19:49):
I can put sixteen people up on that stage and
you'll never see the same pairing twice because I've set
up set it all up ahead of time. So use
it my creativity too well.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
But I mean that's that's a great point, is that
tools can be used for many different things. Once you
learn how to use a spreadsheet. There are things you
know that other people would think to use it for
that I'd never think to use it for. And and
it offers a lot of power.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah it does.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
We have to tell Google high a former theater.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Kid or libre or you know. Yeah, spreadsheets are us. Yes,
have you used it to manage the dessert hierarchy?
Speaker 3 (20:29):
No, back to the food theme.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Oh, I gotta go back to the food theme. You know,
it's part of the and life.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
So tell them you're dessert hierarchy.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Well, we have a basic logic disconnect in that I
think the top of the dessert hierarchy is fruit pies,
and Carol says that they are brownies.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Cake and brownies are way above pie on the dessert hierarchy.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
So there's a basic disagreement there. Even a spreadsheet can't solve.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Well, I guess you have to have your own spreadsheet
on that. I have much more open minded I like
all desserts. You know, I am terrible about having favorites.
There are so many different things to appreciate and so
many different ways to appreciate them. There are times I
might be in the mood for a fruit pie, and
(21:17):
there are times I need a brownie, and that's all
there is to it. So I don't have overall favorites.
I have preferences at certain points in time.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
But over time I've seen you're also good at having
like taste offs, like let's taste all the flavors of peeps,
and let's taste.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
All You can't taste all the flavors of peeps, because
I don't even know how many flavors of peeps.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, for a.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
While it seemed they were putting out a lot of flavors,
and so we would taste them, and some were good
and some were what were you thinking? And there have
been times where around Easter they have all the different
companies now make their own little jelly eggs, so we'll
taste them. Can you guess which Easter eggs these are?
And they might be Starbars, they might be Skittles, they
(21:59):
might be whatever. But all these different companies, Jolly Rancher,
they all make their own eggs, and they're all about
the same size, and they're all whatever. There is nothing
healthy about them. And you gotta go really gentle because
that's a lot of sugar. All it wants your teeth
are dissolving if you go too crazy. You don't want
to do that. But it's interesting to see the take
(22:20):
all these companies have on flavors because they're all coming
from the perspective what we want it to taste like,
what our candy tastes like, because that's what the people
who like our candies are going to want. What's scary
right now is the big flavor. It seems to be pickle.
And I love pickles, and I love deep fried pickles.
But I don't want a pickle milkshake. I don't want
(22:41):
pickle potato chips. I don't want ice cream flavor. I
can't even think of all the things that I've seen
pickle flavored popcorn, the things I'm seeing out there. But
if you're not seeing it yet, you're pretty soon going
to be seeing the pumpkin flavored everything.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
I heard they're even making a pickle flavored pickle.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Oh no, that would be going too far crazy. So
now we've narrowed in on pickles, I want to broaden
back out about the importance, especially in a gig type work,
of having a diverse client list, a diverse whether it's
offerings that you have or services that you can offer
to keep a client coming back to you. What kind
(23:22):
of things can you tell me about how you work
within those I.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Guess I can start in terms of how I built
my business. So I started with this offering on helping
leaders increase their leadership sometimes called executive presence, and if
you're an individual contributor at a company, your personal presence
by sharing skills, techniques, that actors use to have great
stage presence, and now that we're in this kind of
(23:46):
Zoom world or Microsoft Teams world, you know screen presence,
and there's like very specific learnable skills to help you
increase your presence at work. So presence when people businesses
think about presence, what they think about is people giving presentations.
So after people have learned their presence, sometimes their presentations
still don't go very well, not because their presence isn't
(24:07):
good anymore, but because the presentation sucks. So then now
they need help with how do I put together an
interesting PowerPoint? What's the narrative? What's the story of the
actual slide deck that I'm showing, Because both the message
and the messenger have to work hand in hand. So
that became my second offering, which I now call No
More Death by PowerPoint, And that's applying the five part
(24:27):
narrative structure narrative arc that screenwriters use when they're writing
sitcoms or Hollywood screenplays. And you can lay that five
back narrative on top of a PowerPoint presentation and bring
your audience through the story of your data in the
same way that you can bring your audience through the
story of some murder mystery or horror show. So that
became the second one, and then a lot of companies.
(24:47):
Then Okay, now I've got these people that know how
to give really good presentations. They know how to write them,
and how they're presenting them is really good. And so
now I want to help my people get promoted. You know,
we really need to fill our leadership pipeline. Who's going
to be the next managing director after George retires? So
that became an offering around somebody's brand? What is your
personal brand at work? And Jeff Bezos has this really
(25:08):
powerful quote that says that your he meant company brands,
but I think it works for people too, that your
brand are the words that people use to describe you
when you're not in the room. So then how do
you find out what those words are? Well, those words
are dictated by how you show up when you're in
the room. So your presence is how you show up
when you're in the room. How you give your presentation
(25:28):
is how you show up when you're in the room.
So now there's an ongoing conversation then about personal branding.
You're shaping your brand by improving your presence you're shaping
your brand by how you put your messages together, and
now you're shaping your brand by what your virtual hit
is like. So your LinkedIn profile, how do you write
your text messages? How do you write your email messages?
So that's now all about language and languaging, and then
(25:50):
that goes into how do you be a better influencer.
So then there was a program about influence. So my
clients basically taught me what the next pain point was
and then I would develop curriculum to be able to
fill that. That's how it worked for me. So Scotty
might have a different story.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Well, Carol has just covered the diversity of your offerings.
I want to talk about your diversity of your clients,
because as a gig worker, you can't have one main
client because you are too reliant on that client. You're
a commodity when you're a gig worker that they can
use when they need you, and they don't have to
(26:25):
use you when they don't need you. So, same as
you want to have a diversified portfolio of investments, you
want to have a diversified client list. You want to
have a number of clients from a number of different areas.
In the economy so that at any given time you're
going to have work. So I have been on both
sides of that you talked about. When I was working
(26:47):
at the financial institution, I had somebody who was a
gig worker and they wanted to make me feel better
by saying you're my only client. And I told them
that doesn't make me feel better. That makes me feel
distinctly worse at your business because you're going to call
me and bug me for work, as opposed to I'm
going to call you and ask you to do jobs.
(27:07):
I worked with that person to diversify their client list
to get other clients, because you need to have that.
On the other side of that is having a job.
Once upon a time, having a job was I have
a job, I have my client list. Except jobs are
not as secure as they were in our parents and
our grandparents' days. People don't have a job forever anymore.
(27:29):
And you can diversify your client list through networking. If
you have a job, you are a gig worker that
only has one client and they're giving you a bunch
of tax documents, but you only have one client. But
if you're networking and you have a wide net of
people that you're just networking is just making friends. You
(27:51):
have that network, you have other potential clients that you
can fall back on. So for me, it's diversification in everything.
Diversify what you offer, Diversify who you're offering it too,
whether you are a gig worker or you're a full
time job worker. Have a network.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
And to Scott's point, this whole idea of have a network,
companies realize now that their employees need to learn how
to do networking. And quite literally, last week, I was
delivering a program that's called take the guest Working out
of Networking for a corporate client so that their employees
could learn how to do networking better. So it kind
of all feeds into itself.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
It's true. I have done role play as an improviser
around networking, around having a simple conversations. It's fascinating to
me how many of the younger executives that I work
with that only think of networking as networking. It's with
somebody higher on the hierarchy. You can just use the
(28:51):
same word twice than themselves, whereas networking should be mostly
lateral network with the other people on the same floor
as you. Let's say you work on the twelfth floor,
you should also be networking with people on the eleventh
floor and the tenth floor, all the way down to
the street. And then maybe you get if you're on
(29:12):
the twelfth floor, you get to network with the people
on the thirteenth and fourteenth. But that's rarefied air. If
you network with your cohorts and the people that you
can help, people don't rise at the same speed. Many
of the people that I started out with as an
actor and a comedian are now running theaters in Ontario,
and because I've kept my network active, I can call
those people. So network, Network, Network.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
So do you think that your younger selves, when you
were in school, in college, studying, acting and whatever else,
do you think they would be surprised where you are now?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
He swallowed his coffee very hard.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
A Surprised is an interesting word. I mean, certainly I
had a goal when I graduated that I didn't personally
have a goal to be famous. I wanted to be
a working actor. I wanted to be able to make
my living as an actor. So I had a goal,
and I knew that I likely would have to have
what Scott and I would call a joe job or
a civilian job in between acting jobs, so I knew
that that was gonna be the case. I don't believe
(30:09):
in you need to have something to quote unquote fall
back on. But we went through the financial meltdown in
two thousand and eight, and then we went through COVID
quite recently, and before that, in the nineties, there was
an economic downturn. So having skills that you can use
in transferable places, because I was already temping in offices,
I guess I already knew that that's true. So I
(30:29):
don't know if I'm surprised, but I'm I can honestly
say I'm a tiny bit disappointed, and I haven't been
on Broadway, but I'm also grateful that I have enough
skills to do work that I do find rewarding and interesting.
So that's how would answer that.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
What would you say, Scott, I think I would be
completely gobsmacked at how the entertainment world has changed.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
There were three networks. If I did a television commercial,
there was there was only regional and national. There was
not it's going to play on YouTube. Technology has completely
shattered the world that the young Scottie thought was always
going to be there. For example, auditions are the first
round of auditions are always self tapes now, which when
(31:12):
we were starting out, getting yourself on videotape was hard
to do because your definition videotape was was a rarefied
technology and now it is right here on my phone.
So all of that would have been shocking, the shattering
of the markets. That seven hundred and fifty dollars television
(31:32):
spot that I did that played all over Canada plus
residuals is now a seven hundred and fifty dollars television
spot that plays in different websites here and there with
no way for me to track residuals. It's harder for
a young actor now, I think than it ever has been.
So I would have been shocked by the change in
(31:53):
the landscape and the technology.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Were there financial lessons that you learned, work ethic, things
that helps you to get where you are, that you
learn growing up, that you saw modeled in your family,
that you talked about that helped you to get where
you are.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Oh, I would say for sure. When I was a kid,
my dad was a contractor. He rest in peace and
he fell through a scaffold and he screwed up his
leg and his knee. So he was out of work
for a year, maybe a year and a half. I
was little, I don't remember how long, and I don't
even know if we were living on disability payments or
maybe he was getting disability payments from his work. So
(32:27):
my mom really was very skilled at budgeting, speaking of spreadsheets,
collecting coupons, looking for the sales, looking for the deals.
She really worked hard to make sure that we got
advantages to be able to go things like to go
to summer camp. But when I went to summer camp,
I was the scholarship kid because she got up in
five in the morning to stand in line at the
(32:48):
community center to get the three spots that were available
for the scholarship kids. So I saw my mom working
really hard in that way to be the person who's
minding the money. And I saw my dad working really
hard to go Like he would work all day on
a job, he'd come home for dinner, and then after
dinner he would leave again to go quote on a
job for the next week, which is a little bit
(33:09):
of the early lessons of entrepreneurship actually, which I kind
of didn't realize till after the fact. And then when
I was seventeen. My first job as a high school
senior was being a bank teller. And I got that
job because it paid five dollars and twenty five cents
an hour, and the other job that I had paid
minimum wage of like three dollars and twenty seven cents
an hour or something, so like, Okay, that's great, I'll
(33:29):
learn to be a bank teller. And why they hired me,
I have no idea, but may because I was an actor,
I knew that I could look the part, even at seventeen,
So that really taught me the importance of tracking every
dollar every day because you have to balance your till
at the end of the day, otherwise the next day
they don't let you come back to be a bank
teller to be able to earn that money. And then,
as I shared, you know, once I graduated theater school
(33:49):
and I realized, like, where's the next paycheck going to
come from? Oh, now I have to be a temp.
That's really where you know, we circling back to the
comment that you made earlier about balancing your wants versus
balancing your knee. So for me, that's how that happened.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
How about for you I'm a very different background that
I come from a blue collar union household. Yeah, teamster
and Canadian. I want to say CFL was this Canadian
football league.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
He was a firefighter, not quack.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
He was a firefighter out a quarterback. So money comes
from in our family, money comes from you have a job,
go do that job. We didn't have an allowance. For example,
if you needed money, you had to make a case
to my parents to get that money or go out
and get a job. So I quickly realized I didn't
enjoy making a case that I wanted money for malted
(34:40):
milk balls, which I love. By the way, don't tell
anybody right I love malted milk balls. What are you
going to do? Anybody doesn't know what they are? Look
him up, go get some. You're gonna thank me. I
love multed milk balls. And so I got a paper
route so that I could buy my own damn multed
milk balls. And I didn't have to tell anybody what
I was spending my money on. But different than my family,
that paper it was a gig. So I got on
(35:02):
to the gig work thing right away. That's my very
first job was a gig and a pretty much gig.
Even when I was working in the financial institution, I
thought of it as a gig.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
But even your dad, like in the early early days
of being a firefighter, when the union wasn't really strong,
he would work three days a week or three shifts
a week, four shifts a week, and he had another
part time job. Like I remember your mom telling us
that one of his jobs was filling up vending machines
all over southern Ontario, and that he'd come home with
bags full of coins, and then your mother would sit
(35:32):
at the kitchen table rolling coins and that was like
another way to get money in the families.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Yeah, they were very good with that. And then the
Canadian firefighters joined the Teamsters and Canadian Affiliation of Associated Labor.
I can't remember very strong union households. I will often
say when people people give a hard time to unions,
I say, I have Teamster teeth.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Well, we're also members of Canadian Actors Equity, Acters Equity.
I'm a member of SAG, So those are union. When
you're a gig worker, you need support of your brother
and sisterhood.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah, our Association Equity has been extraordinarily helpful, not just
in setting work standards, but by gully you can just
call them and say how does how does health insurance work?
Literally you call them and say how health insurance does
that work? I bet my voice is too high for
the for the broadcast, but yeah, and they will help
(36:29):
you out. That's that I think is that one of
the best parts about unions and safety standards and getting
rid of child labor is being able to call and
say help with this, help me with my banking, help
me with my investments, and they'll give you advice.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
A lot of people and a lot of different businesses, raids, gigs, whatever,
have resources out there that they're not necessarily willing to ask.
So I think it's it's great that you brought that up, that, hey,
there are a lot of positions you may not think
about the union beyond well, maybe I get my health
insurance there, maybe I get my what there, but that
they have so many more resources that if you ask
(37:04):
the questions, they're there for you.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
My goodness, you're absolutely right, and you know, let's take
it outside of unions. There's associations. I'm also a member
of the Apply to improv Network. It's just a loose
association of people that use improvisation in a business capacity
and they just have seminars. Somebody's going to come in
and talk to us about our taxes, and you sign
onto a zoom meeting and it's absolutely free and you
(37:27):
learn stuff. So wow, you're absolutely right in Arcie. Could
not agree with you more. Well.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
I love when people agree with me, So thank you.
Before we wrap up, have you guys got final thoughts
you'd like to share? Topics you wanted to hit that
maybe we didn't quite get to.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
I'll tell an anecdote by way of final thoughts. Scott
and I were in Memphis at this gig not that
long ago, and one of the things that we were
doing there was helping a particular executive practice getting more
comfortable giving presentations and getting over her stage right. And
so Scott took her through a particular improvisation warm up.
And so we just got an email from her last
(38:03):
Friday that she was on a family vacation after she
had worked with us, and she was just telling the
story of what had happened when she did this unique
experience with these two actors that were flown in from
New York, and you know what she learned from it,
and she has a five year old daughter. She didn't
even realize that the daughter was paying attention as she
was telling this story to her friends about what she
did with the improv. And then she sent us a
(38:24):
picture of her five year old daughter in her bedroom
that night, who had set up all of her stuffed
animals in a circle and was doing the little improv
game which happens to be called clap focus and was
doing this clap focus game with all of the little
stuffed animals in a circle because her mommy had been
standing in a circle learning this thing. And so I
emailed back to her, you know, you've got a budding
(38:44):
little actress. Maybe you should sign her up for classes,
And she emailed back, you bet, I am so there.
We are, like, sign those kids up early. Let them
become a former theater kid, so that the rest of
their lives they'll be able to use those skills to
transfer to whatever it is their heart desire that they
want to do for their life's work.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
I want to make a pitch for taking an improv class.
So many of the people that I have met that
take an improv class said it was the scariest thing.
I was so scared to do it and universally, the
experience that they had was improv is a collaborative community experience.
So people say they universally it was way more fun
than I thought it was going to be. It was
(39:24):
way easier than I thought it was going to be.
It was way more welcoming and warm and a sense
of community than I thought it was going to be.
So and every city just contact me and I will
hook you up with the improv workshop in your city.
This is not a pitch to take an improv workshop
with me. This is a pitch for people for your
listeners to contact me directly and I will find improv
(39:47):
for you in your city and go and take a class.
And many times the first class is free, just like
just like drugs.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
And again, as I said, we use improv in everyday life.
In my house, we have all taken improv classes, different places,
different situations, but we've all done it and it's an
amazing opportunity. And we are all a former theater kids
in this house as well, Riley doing the most as
he continued to do it on the side in college
(40:16):
and then I've done community theater and odds and ends
whatever else. It's an amazing opportunity. It's a way to
get yourself out of the stage fright, because in most careers,
at some point in time, you're going to be in
front of the group, and it's nice to know that
you're capable of doing it. It's nice to have that
little bit of comfortable in your pocket. I've done this
(40:38):
before for a bigger audience than this, So what are
twenty executives? When I had fifty people in the audience
and I was singing, So you know this is easy now.
So I'm going to include links for how people would
find you find your services in the show notes, so
those will be provided and available. This is been a
(41:00):
lot of fun. I hope you guys enjoyed it as well.
Carol and Scottie, any any last words of goodbye or
what have you.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Yeah, I'll do it, Scott, Scott all, I think we'll
appreciate this one. So when you're in rehearsal or you're
practicing in prov before the audience comes at the very
very end, just to be a little tongue in cheek
with each other, everybody says and scene meaning the scene
is complete. So for the podcast, we can I'll say and.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Scene thank you everybody. Thank you, especially to my two guests,
Carol Lempert and Scottie Watson. I really appreciate you coming
and stopping in at my studio, and of course I
appreciate the audience listening. This has been money Marcie, thank
you for coming by to Marcy talks Money in Life
and y
Powered by Riverside f M. Welcome to Marcy talks money
in life. I Am Money Marcy, and today is a
doubly special episode because I am welcoming two guests. The
episode was inspired by Josh Grobin and the meme about
hiring a theater kid because they can do anything. Carol
(00:22):
Lumpert started her career as a professional actress. She now
helps leaders increase their executive presence by teaching them the
skills actors used to have great stage and screen presence.
A sought after leadership expert, Carol's insights have been featured
in Forbes, The Financial Post, The National Posts, and Reader's Digest.
She also serves as a teaching fellow at Florida International
(00:45):
University's Center for Leadership. Scotti Watson has been working in
improv for over thirty years, starting with the Second City,
Canadian National Touring Company. Scotty was seen as a disembodied
head in the off Broadway musical Walmartopia and served as
an alternate for Bbi in circ Desalais Misstaire. Scotti has
(01:06):
done feature films with Ed Asner, Eric Stoltz, and Gerard Departo.
On television, Scotti appeared in a series of commercials for
the NYC TV market, and has dressed up as David
Crosby a Human Heart and Carmen Miranda. Okay, I want
to start by establishing that you are both very much
(01:29):
theater kids and adults, and that you have and I
don't want to say transitioned as much as expanded into
other professional roles as well. And that's really the main
part of the focus today because I want listeners to
understand the breadth of skills you learn from participating in theater.
This is expensive, not limiting, So welcome Carol and Scotti. Yay.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I like the way you said that too, because you
don't have to step out of the theater to also
work in another area. You step up, you hop out,
you hop back.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
I love that, and sometimes you have your feet in
both worlds exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Okay, I'm going to start with Carol. You have a
bachelor and master's degree. These are in communication with minors
in theater, is that right?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
And education?
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
And education? So how did that evolve into your current position.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
In terms of running my own company and teaching executives
about leadership presence.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
In terms of all the various things I guess I
should have put an S on the end of that.
How did that evolve into your current positions?
Speaker 3 (02:32):
So what I thought I would start with to answer
that question because you conjured up Josh Grobin. For those
of your listeners that aren't familiar with the quote, I
looked it up, so I thought that I would share it.
So he says, hire a former theater kid. I don't
care what your business is, it'll go better if you
hire a former theater kid. You need somebody who can
work on a deadline. Hire a theater kid. You need
(02:52):
somebody to take a job and a pinch and act
like they know what they're doing the whole time and
do it on zero budget. Hire a theater kid, lump,
but you need checked out, Hire a doctor for that.
When you need someone to cheer you up when you're
waiting for the results, hire a former theater kid. So
that's Josh Grobin, which is a little bit of an
answer to your question. So as somebody that started doing
(03:14):
theater in my senior year in high school and then
like I love this and I loved singing, I was
always inquire. I actually started. I went to Wayne State
University for my bachelor's degree. I started in the music department,
and then I met someone who was doing musicals in
the theater department, and I started doing a lot of
theater work as well. But after I graduated and then
I was looking for work as an actor. You have
(03:36):
to still pay your rent, and I wasn't necessarily right
away getting work as an actors, so I became a temp,
and I realized that basically what Josh Grobin says, when
you're working as a temp in other people's offices, the
fact that you have been rigorously trained to learn quickly,
to show up and do well, to take direction, to
be able to get along with strangers, because on the
(03:57):
first day of rehearsal with your castmates, you don't know anybody,
but you have to pretend like you're a team because
on opening night you're all going to have to do
this thing together. All of those skills really came from
being trained as an actor. And then I discovered later on.
There was this moment where my brother Sheldon, had a
friend who was having to give a presentation at work,
and the guy was freaking out, and Sheldon's like, I
(04:18):
can crack open a beer for you and calm me down,
but I can't help you with the presentation. But my
sister's an actress. She can help. And so I went
over there and I worked with this guy over the
weekend to get him ready to do his presentation at work,
and basically I rehearsed him the way you would rehearse
a monologue for an audition, and off he went to
do his presentation and he said it went really well.
And you know, I did a favor for my brother,
Sheldon and his friend. And then a couple months later,
(04:39):
I got a phone call from a friend that guy,
who said, you know that this guy now is considered
high potential at the company because now he can give
better presentations. Can you help me too? So that's when
I realized that there's a pain point for people that
work in corporations where they have to be able to
give presentations, and they have to be able to think
on their feet when they're being asked questions in the
(05:00):
middle of the presentation, and they have to be able
to manage their anxiety when they have a one on
one meeting with their boss. And these are all skills
that I cultivated through the world of theater. And I thought, oh,
this is much more fun than answering some guy's telephone
on attempt job. So I took two years off my
acting career and I went back to school to be
certified as a coach as a learning designer, and that's
(05:21):
how I'll start. So thanks for resking.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Okay, it was pretty comprehensive.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
No more questions, class dismiss.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yeah really, no, no, no, I know there's way more
stories in here than that. And weren't even gotten to you, Scotty.
So while your bio doesn't mention it, you ended up
as the head of advertising and marketing for a pretty
good organization in New York. So can you tell us
about how you ended up there?
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Everything is saying yes to it and then figuring it
out afterwards. Everything that I've done has been yeah, I'm
pretty sure I can figure that out, although as they
get older, I'm more clear about the fact that I
am going to have to figure it out, and people
seem confident in that. So I was running the improv
(06:11):
part of a theater company in New York City and
I helped them increase their board. They had a very
small board of all artists. If you're not for profit
in the arts, please don't just have a board filled
with your friends. Have a real board that will give money,
get money or get off. The board doesn't necessarily have
(06:33):
to be money, can be materials. Boards need to be functional.
So I did a campaign to increase their board, and
I brought a banker on. This guy who was a
vice president in one of the banks in New York
City and a great guy, and he said, like, if
I'm going to go on the board, I want to
take your improv class. Takes the improv class and he's
good right away, He's just like, right away, phenomenal. And
(06:55):
I said, you studied improv before he goes no, and
he goes, wait a minute, I think maybe I have.
I think maybe being a banker is doing improv. And
we connected just like that over the fact that everything
is improv and improv is everything, and we became fast friends.
And he liked the way I promoted the theater company.
He liked the way that I built the board for
(07:16):
the theater company, and he asked me to just as
a consultant, will you come in give your thoughts and
insights into what they were doing in terms of marketing.
So I went and I did, and that the board.
Their board, which was a very functional board, said we
like it. And I said, okay, so there's the plan.
Just do the plan. And they said, you want to
do the plan because we don't want to do the plan.
You do the plan. And so I ended up working
(07:40):
for not for profit financial institution for a number of years.
So it's just saying yeah, it's just yes and making
connections and enjoying meeting new people and clicking with people
and sharing your thoughts and ideas.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
It's improv well, life is improv I mean, I don't
know about you, but I don't get a script every morning.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Right, there's my script right now? Hello, Massie. I agree,
you don't get a script of any morning.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
He said, okay, we checked that off the list. Okay, good.
So Carol goes into businesses they hire you to talk
to their executives and talk about their presence and Scotty,
you've gone into businesses and organizations to train I don't
know if it's the same execs or different levels of
employees whatever else on improv and you guys sometimes work
(08:27):
together on that. And you also had a comedy troupe
a number of years ago where you did both sketch
and improv. It must be kind of nice work when
you get to work together again doing these things and
bringing other people into it.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
It is may I answer that because Carol often will
do the presentation side, and then I'll do the Q
and I Q and A. Did I say that right?
Did I say something off color? No? Q and A.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Check your notes, Check your notes?
Speaker 2 (08:54):
What was in the script? I'll do the Q and
A side so that we can work together. So time,
can I say the name of the city that we
went to because I want to talk about the food.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Sure, I don't see why not.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
We went together to Memphis, Tennessee, and my god, I
love catfish so much, and we had a very rewarding
and interesting experience in the workshop. And then immediately afterwards,
I ate three different kinds of catfish over three nights.
It's a fun time. So it was one of those
rare treats where we got to work together. And I
would like to do more of that, he said over
(09:28):
on a podcast in public. See what she says.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
So I guess I should. I should make sure that
I use that snip and broadcast it fully so people
know that they really want to hire you. Guys as
a duo.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Well, I want to see if Carol wants to do more.
That's the thing we'll see live on the air.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
We have to rustle up some clients. Anybody who's listening
that thinks that you could have Scott and I come
and help your participants practice difficult conversations. Scott shows up
as being kind of a mean looking client or a
mean looking bomb and they can practice with no risk
to their actual career because he's just an actor. Or
if you want to do an improv workshop and practice
(10:07):
thinking on your feed and then I'll help you debrief.
That's a lot of the stuff that we do together.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
And all you have to do if you're interested in
this is tell me what the big dish or food
your city is known for us.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Well, you know, we'll go to food. Now we're going
to come back to other things, but let's go to
food because Scotti is a food guy, and that's the
special and wonderful foods, and that's the basic food. Scotti
is the guy who taught my family the importance of
having sandwiches and carrying a sandwich with you so you're prepared.
We have been stuck a couple of times where having
(10:42):
a sandwich made all the difference. So you know, tell us,
tell us about your love of food and cooking and
all of those things.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah. So, Howie Mandel is from Toronto, which is where
I'm from, Toronto Native and when he was first breaking
I'm talking about all the way back when he had
hair and then before it became I think as germophobic
as he is now. He was being interviewed on a
local talk show and what advice would you give a
(11:15):
young comedian and he said, get a bus passed. He says,
you can't have a car, which I took to heart.
I take public transit as much as I can. I
love public transit and I love figuring out public transit
when I'm in a new city, by the way, so
that's the other thing you can tell me about your
city is how to get around. And he said, and
pack a sandwich because at the time sandwiches were a
(11:36):
couple of bucks. But then again, a couple of bucks
was a couple of bucks. And now if I'm in
an airport and I'm traveling, sandwich is fifteen bucks. Am
I crazy? I can make a sandwich for cheaper than
fifteen bucks, and it becomes a habit. It's the same sandwich,
but it's a fifteen dollars sandwich in the airport, and
it's a free sandwich if I pack it. So it
(11:57):
just becomes economy that I use that money in my career.
I don't use that money for a sandwich.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
And that's basically what you often. You're talking to us
about the arts right now, but your podcast is Marcie
Talks Money. So when you choose a career like the
careers that we've chosen, there's no predictable income path. You're
not getting a paycheck every week for the whole year.
You might be getting a paycheck every week that you're
in an eight month run of a show, but then
at the ninth month the show is over you have
to go get another show. So we both learned to
(12:26):
assess what we were buying through the lens of is
this a want or is this a need? I need groceries,
I need lunch, I need a sandwich. I want to
replace my milk crates with a proper bookcase. So you know,
I live with milk crates as a bookcase until I
was almost forty years old because I needed groceries. So
always pack a sandwich, because not only are you always
(12:48):
fed when you're hungry, and you don't have to worry
like where am I going to find a place? You're
saving money.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Well, remember it's Marci's talks Money and life, and it's
also about the life things. So for us, it wasn't
a matter of how much a sandwich cost. At the
times we were trapped. We had picked up a picnic
lunch when we were driving through I think it was
Yellowstone when the buffalo decided to walk on the road,
not across the road, on the road, so we were
(13:14):
stuck for about two hours. There wasn't a place to
buy a sandwich. I am sure the people in that
line around us would have paid us hundreds of dollars
for the sandwiches we had, which we were not giving up.
We wanted the sandwich. But it's just that that being
prepared for life happens. Another time we were trapped on
a plane and sometimes they just can't board or onboard
(13:37):
or take off or whatever, and you're trapped and the
stewardess aren't offering service at that point in time. So
you have a sandwich or you don't have a sandwich.
It's not a matter of you know, whether you're willing
to buy a sandwich. Not that I want to spend
fifteen dollars for a two dollars sandwich, but even so,
it's being prepared in life for whatever is going to happen.
(13:57):
I have a sandwich in my pocket right now.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
It's it's not like your batman or anything like you're
prepared for every eventuality. You know you're going to get
hungry somewhere down.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
The line, right And I don't carry a sandwich everywhere
I go, But there are certain circumstances in life where
you know has a better chance of being out of
your control, right, and you kind of prepare for those
better because you can only improve yourself so far that
improv imaginary sandwich. You can make it look delicious to
the audience, but you know it's not going to feed
(14:32):
you or them. But I liked it. We talked about
managing wants and needs, because I think that's important, and
certainly as as gig workers, because whether it's being hired
as an actor or being hired to coach people or
whatever else, those are gig jobs. You might have fifteen
people want you for one day now, and you might
(14:52):
have a period of time where nobody wants you for
whatever you offer, and that's that's a challenge that a
lot of people don't understand.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, Scott and I often talk about the fact that
when you go to theater school, which we both did,
they teach you how to be a very skilled actor.
You have a lot of technique. When you get a script,
how are youre going to bring that character to life?
They teach you to memorize a bunch of monologue so
that you always have something that you can audition with.
They get you ready for the work of being an actor.
But nowhere in theater school did they say to us
(15:23):
once you graduate, you have become a solo creative entrepreneur.
You have to go out and get work for yourself,
and you have to manage your own taxes, and you
often have to negotiate your own contracts, and so all
of those skills we were prepared to learn, because being
a theater kid means that you're prepared to learn all
the time. But they didn't actually give us a playbook
(15:43):
on what solo career entrepreneurialism was going to be like.
So that was a learned skill over experience.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
I remember the first time it is a television commercial.
I told my dad what I made just for the
day at the time, I think it was seven hundred bucks,
which was a long, long, long time ago, for the shoot.
And then you get Rezi jewels that pay every three
months for it's very, very complicated formula. But there's things
that I did twenty years ago that I still see
a check for two or three dollars at a time
(16:11):
coming in.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
By way, I gotta check last week for six dollars
and twenty seven cents for an episode of doc show
in Canada that I filmed in nineteen ninety nine. So
if you get a big part and you have a
good agent and you negotiated well, your residuals might come
later on. But sometimes it's twenty seven cents.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
So I tell my dad. He says, what'd you make?
I said it was seven hundred and fifty dollars seven
hundred somewhere in there for the shoot. And then I'll
get residuals as time goes by, And my dad says, wow,
you do one of those a week, you'll be okay.
And I had to tell them, you know, you do
one of those maybe every three four months. This big
chunk of money shows up, and you can't think of
(16:51):
that as a paycheck. You got to think of it
as an inheritance.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
That's a great way to put that. People don't understand
that there are careers and their even paycheck careers. I've
dealt with salespeople over my accounting career that this year
they make fifty thousand dollars, next year they make one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the year after they
make fifty thousand again. So if they've got, you know,
(17:15):
lifestyle creep, they're going to have a problem that third year. Yeah,
this brings me back to another of my favorite conversations
topics that Scott's going to want in on Google sheets. Spreadsheets.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
I do love a good spreadsheet. I have this calcula.
I am actually mortally afraid of mathematics. Doing any kind
of math makes me uncomfortable and I sweat a little bit.
And spreadsheets save you from that because you drop a
formula in there, you copy paste it down the road,
and math does itself. God, I love a spreadsheet. The
(17:49):
other thing I like about a spreadsheet for a person
in the arts is that's how the normal people think
we think creative, spark. A spark is spark, and I
think like that, I absolutely do. But if you want
to think like a business, spreadsheets are set up the
way businesses think, so it can make you take your
(18:11):
creative thoughts and put them into the little boxes that
your accountant, that the businesses, that the government needs to
see to understand your financial life. So just take a
few minutes, it's free, googles Google sheets and just figure
out a little bit about it, and I sort of
it'll make your life better. Brought to you by Google.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Well, and whether you have Microsoft and you have Excel,
or you use the Google sheets that are available the
Google docs and all of those, or Libre Office is
also another freeware out there. These all work similarly. You
can even if you save it in the right format
or open it the right way, they transport from one
(18:54):
program to the other. I love spreadsheets. I mean, I'm
an accountant. Spreadsheets are on a using tool at every
level of managing your finances. But I've got guess I.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Add something about spreadsheets please Carol, because because I know
Carol just sees spreadsheets as a necessary evil, I will
use them for an improv set because I can take
my actors and pair one two, three, four, five six
one three two. You see what I'm like, So that
(19:27):
everybody gets to work with everybody in different scenes. And
can I have automated that on a spreadsheet. So I
whip up my phone and I open up I open
up Google Sheets, and I put everybody's names in and
the set list pops up, so that I play with Carol,
and then you play with Carol, and then you and
I play. It just happens for us. Doesn't matter that
(19:49):
I can put sixteen people up on that stage and
you'll never see the same pairing twice because I've set
up set it all up ahead of time. So use
it my creativity too well.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
But I mean that's that's a great point, is that
tools can be used for many different things. Once you
learn how to use a spreadsheet. There are things you
know that other people would think to use it for
that I'd never think to use it for. And and
it offers a lot of power.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah it does.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
We have to tell Google high a former theater.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Kid or libre or you know. Yeah, spreadsheets are us. Yes,
have you used it to manage the dessert hierarchy?
Speaker 3 (20:29):
No, back to the food theme.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Oh, I gotta go back to the food theme. You know,
it's part of the and life.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
So tell them you're dessert hierarchy.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Well, we have a basic logic disconnect in that I
think the top of the dessert hierarchy is fruit pies,
and Carol says that they are brownies.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Cake and brownies are way above pie on the dessert hierarchy.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
So there's a basic disagreement there. Even a spreadsheet can't solve.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Well, I guess you have to have your own spreadsheet
on that. I have much more open minded I like
all desserts. You know, I am terrible about having favorites.
There are so many different things to appreciate and so
many different ways to appreciate them. There are times I
might be in the mood for a fruit pie, and
(21:17):
there are times I need a brownie, and that's all
there is to it. So I don't have overall favorites.
I have preferences at certain points in time.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
But over time I've seen you're also good at having
like taste offs, like let's taste all the flavors of peeps,
and let's taste.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
All You can't taste all the flavors of peeps, because
I don't even know how many flavors of peeps.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, for a.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
While it seemed they were putting out a lot of flavors,
and so we would taste them, and some were good
and some were what were you thinking? And there have
been times where around Easter they have all the different
companies now make their own little jelly eggs, so we'll
taste them. Can you guess which Easter eggs these are?
And they might be Starbars, they might be Skittles, they
(21:59):
might be whatever. But all these different companies, Jolly Rancher,
they all make their own eggs, and they're all about
the same size, and they're all whatever. There is nothing
healthy about them. And you gotta go really gentle because
that's a lot of sugar. All it wants your teeth
are dissolving if you go too crazy. You don't want
to do that. But it's interesting to see the take
(22:20):
all these companies have on flavors because they're all coming
from the perspective what we want it to taste like,
what our candy tastes like, because that's what the people
who like our candies are going to want. What's scary
right now is the big flavor. It seems to be pickle.
And I love pickles, and I love deep fried pickles.
But I don't want a pickle milkshake. I don't want
(22:41):
pickle potato chips. I don't want ice cream flavor. I
can't even think of all the things that I've seen
pickle flavored popcorn, the things I'm seeing out there. But
if you're not seeing it yet, you're pretty soon going
to be seeing the pumpkin flavored everything.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
I heard they're even making a pickle flavored pickle.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Oh no, that would be going too far crazy. So
now we've narrowed in on pickles, I want to broaden
back out about the importance, especially in a gig type work,
of having a diverse client list, a diverse whether it's
offerings that you have or services that you can offer
to keep a client coming back to you. What kind
(23:22):
of things can you tell me about how you work
within those I.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Guess I can start in terms of how I built
my business. So I started with this offering on helping
leaders increase their leadership sometimes called executive presence, and if
you're an individual contributor at a company, your personal presence
by sharing skills, techniques, that actors use to have great
stage presence, and now that we're in this kind of
(23:46):
Zoom world or Microsoft Teams world, you know screen presence,
and there's like very specific learnable skills to help you
increase your presence at work. So presence when people businesses
think about presence, what they think about is people giving presentations.
So after people have learned their presence, sometimes their presentations
still don't go very well, not because their presence isn't
(24:07):
good anymore, but because the presentation sucks. So then now
they need help with how do I put together an
interesting PowerPoint? What's the narrative? What's the story of the
actual slide deck that I'm showing, Because both the message
and the messenger have to work hand in hand. So
that became my second offering, which I now call No
More Death by PowerPoint, And that's applying the five part
(24:27):
narrative structure narrative arc that screenwriters use when they're writing
sitcoms or Hollywood screenplays. And you can lay that five
back narrative on top of a PowerPoint presentation and bring
your audience through the story of your data in the
same way that you can bring your audience through the
story of some murder mystery or horror show. So that
became the second one, and then a lot of companies.
(24:47):
Then Okay, now I've got these people that know how
to give really good presentations. They know how to write them,
and how they're presenting them is really good. And so
now I want to help my people get promoted. You know,
we really need to fill our leadership pipeline. Who's going
to be the next managing director after George retires? So
that became an offering around somebody's brand? What is your
personal brand at work? And Jeff Bezos has this really
(25:08):
powerful quote that says that your he meant company brands,
but I think it works for people too, that your
brand are the words that people use to describe you
when you're not in the room. So then how do
you find out what those words are? Well, those words
are dictated by how you show up when you're in
the room. So your presence is how you show up
when you're in the room. How you give your presentation
(25:28):
is how you show up when you're in the room.
So now there's an ongoing conversation then about personal branding.
You're shaping your brand by improving your presence you're shaping
your brand by how you put your messages together, and
now you're shaping your brand by what your virtual hit
is like. So your LinkedIn profile, how do you write
your text messages? How do you write your email messages?
So that's now all about language and languaging, and then
(25:50):
that goes into how do you be a better influencer.
So then there was a program about influence. So my
clients basically taught me what the next pain point was
and then I would develop curriculum to be able to
fill that. That's how it worked for me. So Scotty
might have a different story.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Well, Carol has just covered the diversity of your offerings.
I want to talk about your diversity of your clients,
because as a gig worker, you can't have one main
client because you are too reliant on that client. You're
a commodity when you're a gig worker that they can
use when they need you, and they don't have to
(26:25):
use you when they don't need you. So, same as
you want to have a diversified portfolio of investments, you
want to have a diversified client list. You want to
have a number of clients from a number of different areas.
In the economy so that at any given time you're
going to have work. So I have been on both
sides of that you talked about. When I was working
(26:47):
at the financial institution, I had somebody who was a
gig worker and they wanted to make me feel better
by saying you're my only client. And I told them
that doesn't make me feel better. That makes me feel
distinctly worse at your business because you're going to call
me and bug me for work, as opposed to I'm
going to call you and ask you to do jobs.
(27:07):
I worked with that person to diversify their client list
to get other clients, because you need to have that.
On the other side of that is having a job.
Once upon a time, having a job was I have
a job, I have my client list. Except jobs are
not as secure as they were in our parents and
our grandparents' days. People don't have a job forever anymore.
(27:29):
And you can diversify your client list through networking. If
you have a job, you are a gig worker that
only has one client and they're giving you a bunch
of tax documents, but you only have one client. But
if you're networking and you have a wide net of
people that you're just networking is just making friends. You
(27:51):
have that network, you have other potential clients that you
can fall back on. So for me, it's diversification in everything.
Diversify what you offer, Diversify who you're offering it too,
whether you are a gig worker or you're a full
time job worker. Have a network.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
And to Scott's point, this whole idea of have a network,
companies realize now that their employees need to learn how
to do networking. And quite literally, last week, I was
delivering a program that's called take the guest Working out
of Networking for a corporate client so that their employees
could learn how to do networking better. So it kind
of all feeds into itself.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
It's true. I have done role play as an improviser
around networking, around having a simple conversations. It's fascinating to
me how many of the younger executives that I work
with that only think of networking as networking. It's with
somebody higher on the hierarchy. You can just use the
(28:51):
same word twice than themselves, whereas networking should be mostly
lateral network with the other people on the same floor
as you. Let's say you work on the twelfth floor,
you should also be networking with people on the eleventh
floor and the tenth floor, all the way down to
the street. And then maybe you get if you're on
(29:12):
the twelfth floor, you get to network with the people
on the thirteenth and fourteenth. But that's rarefied air. If
you network with your cohorts and the people that you
can help, people don't rise at the same speed. Many
of the people that I started out with as an
actor and a comedian are now running theaters in Ontario,
and because I've kept my network active, I can call
those people. So network, Network, Network.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
So do you think that your younger selves, when you
were in school, in college, studying, acting and whatever else,
do you think they would be surprised where you are now?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
He swallowed his coffee very hard.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
A Surprised is an interesting word. I mean, certainly I
had a goal when I graduated that I didn't personally
have a goal to be famous. I wanted to be
a working actor. I wanted to be able to make
my living as an actor. So I had a goal,
and I knew that I likely would have to have
what Scott and I would call a joe job or
a civilian job in between acting jobs, so I knew
that that was gonna be the case. I don't believe
(30:09):
in you need to have something to quote unquote fall
back on. But we went through the financial meltdown in
two thousand and eight, and then we went through COVID
quite recently, and before that, in the nineties, there was
an economic downturn. So having skills that you can use
in transferable places, because I was already temping in offices,
I guess I already knew that that's true. So I
(30:29):
don't know if I'm surprised, but I'm I can honestly
say I'm a tiny bit disappointed, and I haven't been
on Broadway, but I'm also grateful that I have enough
skills to do work that I do find rewarding and interesting.
So that's how would answer that.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
What would you say, Scott, I think I would be
completely gobsmacked at how the entertainment world has changed.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
There were three networks. If I did a television commercial,
there was there was only regional and national. There was
not it's going to play on YouTube. Technology has completely
shattered the world that the young Scottie thought was always
going to be there. For example, auditions are the first
round of auditions are always self tapes now, which when
(31:12):
we were starting out, getting yourself on videotape was hard
to do because your definition videotape was was a rarefied
technology and now it is right here on my phone.
So all of that would have been shocking, the shattering
of the markets. That seven hundred and fifty dollars television
(31:32):
spot that I did that played all over Canada plus
residuals is now a seven hundred and fifty dollars television
spot that plays in different websites here and there with
no way for me to track residuals. It's harder for
a young actor now, I think than it ever has been.
So I would have been shocked by the change in
(31:53):
the landscape and the technology.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
Were there financial lessons that you learned, work ethic, things
that helps you to get where you are, that you
learn growing up, that you saw modeled in your family,
that you talked about that helped you to get where
you are.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Oh, I would say for sure. When I was a kid,
my dad was a contractor. He rest in peace and
he fell through a scaffold and he screwed up his
leg and his knee. So he was out of work
for a year, maybe a year and a half. I
was little, I don't remember how long, and I don't
even know if we were living on disability payments or
maybe he was getting disability payments from his work. So
(32:27):
my mom really was very skilled at budgeting, speaking of spreadsheets,
collecting coupons, looking for the sales, looking for the deals.
She really worked hard to make sure that we got
advantages to be able to go things like to go
to summer camp. But when I went to summer camp,
I was the scholarship kid because she got up in
five in the morning to stand in line at the
(32:48):
community center to get the three spots that were available
for the scholarship kids. So I saw my mom working
really hard in that way to be the person who's
minding the money. And I saw my dad working really
hard to go Like he would work all day on
a job, he'd come home for dinner, and then after
dinner he would leave again to go quote on a
job for the next week, which is a little bit
(33:09):
of the early lessons of entrepreneurship actually, which I kind
of didn't realize till after the fact. And then when
I was seventeen. My first job as a high school
senior was being a bank teller. And I got that
job because it paid five dollars and twenty five cents
an hour, and the other job that I had paid
minimum wage of like three dollars and twenty seven cents
an hour or something, so like, Okay, that's great, I'll
(33:29):
learn to be a bank teller. And why they hired me,
I have no idea, but may because I was an actor,
I knew that I could look the part, even at seventeen,
So that really taught me the importance of tracking every
dollar every day because you have to balance your till
at the end of the day, otherwise the next day
they don't let you come back to be a bank
teller to be able to earn that money. And then,
as I shared, you know, once I graduated theater school
(33:49):
and I realized, like, where's the next paycheck going to
come from? Oh, now I have to be a temp.
That's really where you know, we circling back to the
comment that you made earlier about balancing your wants versus
balancing your knee. So for me, that's how that happened.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
How about for you I'm a very different background that
I come from a blue collar union household. Yeah, teamster
and Canadian. I want to say CFL was this Canadian
football league.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
He was a firefighter, not quack.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
He was a firefighter out a quarterback. So money comes
from in our family, money comes from you have a job,
go do that job. We didn't have an allowance. For example,
if you needed money, you had to make a case
to my parents to get that money or go out
and get a job. So I quickly realized I didn't
enjoy making a case that I wanted money for malted
(34:40):
milk balls, which I love. By the way, don't tell
anybody right I love malted milk balls. What are you
going to do? Anybody doesn't know what they are? Look
him up, go get some. You're gonna thank me. I
love multed milk balls. And so I got a paper
route so that I could buy my own damn multed
milk balls. And I didn't have to tell anybody what
I was spending my money on. But different than my family,
that paper it was a gig. So I got on
(35:02):
to the gig work thing right away. That's my very
first job was a gig and a pretty much gig.
Even when I was working in the financial institution, I
thought of it as a gig.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
But even your dad, like in the early early days
of being a firefighter, when the union wasn't really strong,
he would work three days a week or three shifts
a week, four shifts a week, and he had another
part time job. Like I remember your mom telling us
that one of his jobs was filling up vending machines
all over southern Ontario, and that he'd come home with
bags full of coins, and then your mother would sit
(35:32):
at the kitchen table rolling coins and that was like
another way to get money in the families.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Yeah, they were very good with that. And then the
Canadian firefighters joined the Teamsters and Canadian Affiliation of Associated Labor.
I can't remember very strong union households. I will often
say when people people give a hard time to unions,
I say, I have Teamster teeth.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Well, we're also members of Canadian Actors Equity, Acters Equity.
I'm a member of SAG, So those are union. When
you're a gig worker, you need support of your brother
and sisterhood.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah, our Association Equity has been extraordinarily helpful, not just
in setting work standards, but by gully you can just
call them and say how does how does health insurance work?
Literally you call them and say how health insurance does
that work? I bet my voice is too high for
the for the broadcast, but yeah, and they will help
(36:29):
you out. That's that I think is that one of
the best parts about unions and safety standards and getting
rid of child labor is being able to call and
say help with this, help me with my banking, help
me with my investments, and they'll give you advice.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
A lot of people and a lot of different businesses, raids, gigs, whatever,
have resources out there that they're not necessarily willing to ask.
So I think it's it's great that you brought that up, that, hey,
there are a lot of positions you may not think
about the union beyond well, maybe I get my health
insurance there, maybe I get my what there, but that
they have so many more resources that if you ask
(37:04):
the questions, they're there for you.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
My goodness, you're absolutely right, and you know, let's take
it outside of unions. There's associations. I'm also a member
of the Apply to improv Network. It's just a loose
association of people that use improvisation in a business capacity
and they just have seminars. Somebody's going to come in
and talk to us about our taxes, and you sign
onto a zoom meeting and it's absolutely free and you
(37:27):
learn stuff. So wow, you're absolutely right in Arcie. Could
not agree with you more. Well.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
I love when people agree with me, So thank you.
Before we wrap up, have you guys got final thoughts
you'd like to share? Topics you wanted to hit that
maybe we didn't quite get to.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
I'll tell an anecdote by way of final thoughts. Scott
and I were in Memphis at this gig not that
long ago, and one of the things that we were
doing there was helping a particular executive practice getting more
comfortable giving presentations and getting over her stage right. And
so Scott took her through a particular improvisation warm up.
And so we just got an email from her last
(38:03):
Friday that she was on a family vacation after she
had worked with us, and she was just telling the
story of what had happened when she did this unique
experience with these two actors that were flown in from
New York, and you know what she learned from it,
and she has a five year old daughter. She didn't
even realize that the daughter was paying attention as she
was telling this story to her friends about what she
did with the improv. And then she sent us a
(38:24):
picture of her five year old daughter in her bedroom
that night, who had set up all of her stuffed
animals in a circle and was doing the little improv
game which happens to be called clap focus and was
doing this clap focus game with all of the little
stuffed animals in a circle because her mommy had been
standing in a circle learning this thing. And so I
emailed back to her, you know, you've got a budding
(38:44):
little actress. Maybe you should sign her up for classes,
And she emailed back, you bet, I am so there.
We are, like, sign those kids up early. Let them
become a former theater kid, so that the rest of
their lives they'll be able to use those skills to
transfer to whatever it is their heart desire that they
want to do for their life's work.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
I want to make a pitch for taking an improv class.
So many of the people that I have met that
take an improv class said it was the scariest thing.
I was so scared to do it and universally, the
experience that they had was improv is a collaborative community experience.
So people say they universally it was way more fun
than I thought it was going to be. It was
(39:24):
way easier than I thought it was going to be.
It was way more welcoming and warm and a sense
of community than I thought it was going to be.
So and every city just contact me and I will
hook you up with the improv workshop in your city.
This is not a pitch to take an improv workshop
with me. This is a pitch for people for your
listeners to contact me directly and I will find improv
(39:47):
for you in your city and go and take a class.
And many times the first class is free, just like
just like drugs.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
And again, as I said, we use improv in everyday life.
In my house, we have all taken improv classes, different places,
different situations, but we've all done it and it's an
amazing opportunity. And we are all a former theater kids
in this house as well, Riley doing the most as
he continued to do it on the side in college
(40:16):
and then I've done community theater and odds and ends
whatever else. It's an amazing opportunity. It's a way to
get yourself out of the stage fright, because in most careers,
at some point in time, you're going to be in
front of the group, and it's nice to know that
you're capable of doing it. It's nice to have that
little bit of comfortable in your pocket. I've done this
(40:38):
before for a bigger audience than this, So what are
twenty executives? When I had fifty people in the audience
and I was singing, So you know this is easy now.
So I'm going to include links for how people would
find you find your services in the show notes, so
those will be provided and available. This is been a
(41:00):
lot of fun. I hope you guys enjoyed it as well.
Carol and Scottie, any any last words of goodbye or
what have you.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Yeah, I'll do it, Scott, Scott all, I think we'll
appreciate this one. So when you're in rehearsal or you're
practicing in prov before the audience comes at the very
very end, just to be a little tongue in cheek
with each other, everybody says and scene meaning the scene
is complete. So for the podcast, we can I'll say and.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Scene thank you everybody. Thank you, especially to my two guests,
Carol Lempert and Scottie Watson. I really appreciate you coming
and stopping in at my studio, and of course I
appreciate the audience listening. This has been money Marcie, thank
you for coming by to Marcy talks Money in Life
and y
Host
Marci Grossman
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