Coaches often push speakers into a generic formula that kills their natural voice. The fix: strip away all the techniques and let them speak like themselves. Real coaching teaches skills without erasing who they are.
One of the mistakes that even the most experienced speakers can make, and people have been in the business a long time can make this mistake, is they stop being themselves on stage and they follow a formula instead. And they go get coaching from a coach who teaches everybody how to speak the same way. And you can watch that speaker and go, oh, I can tell who they just got coached by because that coach did not bring them out. That coach applied their model to that person. You see it all the time. I've worked with speakers and coached speakers that have been way overcoached. And so when I get them, I actually try to reverse engineer all the coaching they've gotten. I say, just everything you've been taught, forget it today. Everything. What if you just talked to me? What would this sound like? And what's amazing is how good they are when they stop thinking and they start being themselves. Now there's an art to that and there's a science to that. It's not just like I'm gonna ramble, right? But it's helping them discover that that's beautiful. The clients can feel the difference, 'cause wow, that's the person offstage that's onstage. That's real. And that's what a great coach does. They bring the best of you out onstage. Now, they're gonna teach you skills they know and they know how to use, but for you to use it as you, not to become the coach, right? And that's really critically important for speakers.
