Diary of a Speaker Coach

A Spanish scientist / tech-preneur (Jenifer Clausell), a British innovator / professor /TEDx curator (Adam Montandon) and a Romanian speaker coach / business English trainer /marketer (yours truly) walk into a… video call.

They’re talking about an investor pitch that will make the Nordic startup scene remember the name Develop Diverse.

How did we all get here?

Jenifer started out as a scientist in cancer research. She noticed how the gender inequalities reflected from family life and society reflected into the work environment, even for highly educated women. used to be a scientist and researcher. She noticed how few women were working in her field, and decided to do something about it. She decided she couldn’t wait another hundred years for the gender gap to close on its own, so she started using her scientific research and tech skills in the field of cognitive gender studies and linguistics. This is how she founded her company Develop Diverse – currently a tech start-up helping companies build diverse and inclusive workplaces using Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, the tool is able to recognize gender, race and age bias in the language and images used across the company’s communication channels – including bias that is not immediately obvious, such as words subconsciously loaded with male / female, cultural or age-related values – and propose neutral alternatives.

Language that is not loaded with stereotypic terms, Jenifer says, can make everyone feel like they belong to that group.

Adam and I met Jenifer for the first time in the context of TEDxOdenseWomen, where Jenifer spoke about the impact of words on social and professional groups. We worked on her talk and it became a turning point for Jenifer as a speaker. A few months later, she became involved in the Katapult accelerator program in Oslo, where her “graduation” would consist of a series of pitches before various panels of investors. This is when we got in touch again.

And this is what came out of our second round of coaching sessions with Jenifer:

Congratulations, Jenifer!

Find Jenifer Clausell Tormos on:

• developdiverse.com

• LinkedIn

*Image credit: TEDxOdenseWomen

*Video taken at Katapult Oslo

"The small overlap between what we want to create in the world, and what is within our power to create, is the space that designers look for." Emilie Møllenbach, PhD, Product Design Lead at MobilePay, Denmark, finds meaning in the exploration of human behavior and looks at how insightful digital design can serve as a model for a more honest way to be human.

Insightful Design for Giving a Talk

At one point in our coaching process for TEDxOdenseWomen, I told Emilie that if I ever start a blog about speaker coaching, she would get her own chapter. So here it is.

Emilie, put very simply, flipped a switch in my head, with this one thing she said in one of our sessions: “We’re raised in a mindset of scarcity”, she said, “in the constant fear that there is not enough in the world for everyone, and that we are not enough. And it’s just not true.”

Emilie herself had started on her TEDx journey from a powerpoint of 52 slides, in which she had her ideas written down. During each of our sessions, almost every sentence was a new opportunity for a yet another talk. Yet another rabbit hole to go down.

Lots of explaining, an infinite supply of ideas and lots of trying to be clear enough, thorough enough, comprehensive enough and good enough for the audience. As I’m sure many of you know, having a mind bursting with ideas is both a blessing and a curse 🙂 

By the end of her coaching process, Emilie had zero slides left, and one message that came shining through:

Wake up, on the morning of your talk, and know that you are enough. If you’ve been picked to give a talk on a particular subject, it must be for a reason. Do justice to this reason and stay true to who you are. You don’t really need your powerpoint slides, you don’t really need the perfect shirt, and you definitely don’t need to explain it to death.

You are enough.

What you stand for, your raison d’etre, is what your talk should be about, and how that can help others. And not much else.

Emilie’s pledge for a mindset of bounty rings in my head to this day, every time I talk to a speaker, a conference organizer, a session moderator, and really whenever the idea of giving is being discussed. There is infinite creativity in the world, so be generous with yours and share it with whoever is listening. More will flow.

You have enough. You are enough.

And that is the essence of insightful (talk) design.

Thank you, Emilie!

Find Emilie on LinkedIn.

*Image credits: Jonas Vester Legarth | TEDxOdenseWomen & Emilie Møllenbach