In this solo episode of the Be Moved podcast, Sally Koering Zimney opens with a heartfelt "This Moved Me" story about an 11‑year‑old girl named Emerson who writes hand‑decorated letters that spark a wave of gratitude and connection among U.S. postal workers nationwide. She uses the story to illustrate how small, authentic gestures can move both sender and receiver. Sally then introduces her signature delivery technique, the "walk‑and‑talk," a simple rehearsal method where a speaker walks while verbally rehearsing their script (or outline) with a partner. She outlines the three practical steps: (1) find a walking partner, (2) have a printed script or outline as a safety net, and (3) walk and talk for about 15 minutes, allowing the body to sync with the words. She explains the benefits: moving the content from head to body, reducing reliance on memorization, uncovering new ideas, and increasing emotional impact. Sally invites listeners to share their own walk‑and‑talk videos using the #WalkAndTalk hashtag. The episode concludes with a promotion of her upcoming Signature Talk course launching in June and the free TED Talk Jumpstart Kit (including a PDF and community access via Movers U), encouraging listeners to clarify their talk topics and develop a reusable signature talk. Throughout, Sally maintains an enthusiastic, conversational tone, urging listeners to be moved themselves so they can move their audiences.
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Hey movers, it's Sally Z with Be Moved, and I help purpose-driven leaders transform their approach to public speaking so they can move their audience. And on the show today, I wanna share with you one of the key strategies that I use to help people take the first step in moving their script into their body. Hey movers, it's Sally Z with Be Moved. Let's go create some talks that will move This world. We're going to talk with amazing speakers, share tips, tricks, resources, and we are going to be moved so that our audience can be moved. This moved me. What is moving you? Well, hello, movers! Welcome to another episode here on This Moved Me. My name is Sally Koering Zimney, the speaker, coach, and founder of Be Moved. And I really think it's important that if we want our audience to be moved, then we as speakers and leaders need to be moved too. So that is what this show is all about. So of course we start with a This Moved Me moment, something that has moved me recently. And I've got to look this up because I really want to share it with you. This is like the best thing I've seen. And I feel like I've seen a lot of really good stuff lately. There's amazing things happening out there. So this is a really wonderful Twitter thread. By some guy named Hugh Weber, @HughWeber. Okay, so I'm going to read it to you because it's that good. It's worth it, I promise. Okay, so he says, Emerson, my 11-year-old, is on a bit of a wild ride with the USPS and our local mail carrier, Doug, and I think there's a deeper message to it all. First, the backstory. Em has a serious letter-writing habit. She maintains active correspondence with over a dozen of her favorite people, and if you've been the lucky recipient of one of Em's hand-decorated letters and envelopes, then you have a pretty good idea of the joy they bring. A letter from Emerson is likely to include some art, a joke or two, a mention of her younger brother, confessions of her love for Taylor Swift, and enough questions to guarantee a response. How sweet is this 11-year-old? That's me saying that. So when she decided to thank our mail carrier for the service he provides us, she left nothing out. In went Taylor Swift, in went the little brother, in went the jokes. Question, why do you never see elephants hiding in trees? Answer, because they're really good at it. I love that. Okay. Em wrote, I'm Emerson. You may know me as the person that lives here that writes a lot of letters and decorated the envelopes. Well, I wanted to thank you for taking my letters and delivering them. You are very important to me. I make people happy with my letters, but you do too. She continued, the reason you are very important in my life "Is because I don't have a phone, so how else am I supposed to stay in touch with my friends? You make it possible." She put it in the box, smiled when he took it, and that was enough. The next day, a package arrived with some stamps and 2 letters. Doug had shared M's letter with his supervisor, Sarah, and they both wanted to share how touched they were by her note. Sarah said that as an essential worker, Doug might not be able to maintain regular correspondence, but she sure could. Em started writing that very afternoon. Oh my gosh, I love this kid. This is when things get interesting. The next week, we got a letter addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Weber. It seems that Sarah had shared Em's note as a token of thanks in the internal newsletter for the Western US, and there were some postal folks that wanted to thank her. This letter, then there's a letter from Sarah basically asking permission to M's parents, asking if it would be okay if other people wrote to her. Today we saw Doug getting out of the truck with 2 boxes of letters from around the country. We snapped a quick photo, and this photo of their mail carrier is just so great, uh, through the door as he and Emerson met for the first time. It was a beautiful moment on silent reciprocity. It's just so sweet. I love it. Oh my gosh, these letters from mail carriers from all over the country are so deeply human. They are filled with family, pets, hobbies, community, and an overwhelming sense of kindness. Because M was fully vulnerable, they were too. M shared jokes, so they shared jokes. M shared her brother, so every gift that was sent came in duplicate. M shared Taylor Swift, and it turns that the U.S. Postal Service is filled with lots of undercover Um, undercover Swifties. Oh my gosh, it's so cute. I love it. Okay, so people sent stamps so that she would write her back. She got 218 stamps from people from all over the country. But Hugh, her dad, said there's something more in these letters. People felt seen, some for the first time in a long time. Quote, "I work alone in a small rural post office." Quote, oh my gosh, I'm gonna cry, "My kids all live far away." Quote, "Not a lot of people think about how hard we work." One wrote, quote, "I can't tell you how much it means to read your letter." Another quote, "I have a son in Kuwait, and if you have a second to send him a letter, he would love it." And another, uh, quote: I know you can't write back to all of us, but maybe I can drop you a line from time to time. Oh my gosh. With dozens of new pen pals, M did what she does best. She wrote the dad, she wrote the son, she assured the secret Swifties not to be embarrassed because her dad likes T-Swift too. She acknowledged that there were a lot of letters but that she had time. She sees them all. Oh my gosh, you guys, this story is just so beautiful. And Hugh says, I'm not sharing this because I'm proud dad. I would share it. I'm sharing it because it's relatively easy if we take the time to give others the one thing they need to be well: human connection. I have a friend that says we all just want to be seen, known, and loved. Em does this boldly. So Emily— I mean Emerson. So, so Emerson, thank you for this amazing gift that you are giving to people all over this country, and it's spreading all over the world. Thank you for your small but mighty gift of letter writing. I love it so much. And that moved me, obviously, a lot. Keep thinking about it. Um, and just a small little thing like a letter, it's powerful. And there are a lot of people who just need that. So thanks to an 11-year-old for reminding us how powerful our words and our actions can be. Love it. Okay, so you guys, that's— that took 10 minutes, but worth it. I hope worth it. We need those reminders that we can be moved and how we are moved as leaders so that we can really continue to move our audiences. So, okay, today's topic is all about the walk and talk. I know it sounds a little bit like a fast food restaurant of some kind or something, but it's really about a trick that I discovered about 15 years ago and can be really helpful in your delivery development. I was working with someone at this organization who was really struggling to get the content from the script that was running through his head down into his body. He worked really hard on the script. It was a beautiful script, but then when he got up to deliver it, it was like I could see the script running through his head, and it wasn't in his body. He wasn't really fully present with us. Like, the emotion didn't come from the body. It was just like a neck-up experience. And honestly, it's just not very impactful. It's not boring, and it's not that it's not kind of interesting because the content was good, but it didn't really impact the audience. Many of our talks live here in our heads rather than in our bodies. So as I was working with him, I wanted to try out this strategy. To just try and sync up his words with his body. And I want to share this little trick with you because now I use it with every speaker I work with. It is a part, the first part, the first step in our process of taking this thing that is written and beginning to put it in our bodies. It's called The walk and talk, as I said. And all you have to do— this is a pro tip, pro tip. This is gonna sound like, wow, people pay you for this, Sally? Yes, they do. Here's the deal. All you have to do is walk while you talk. Oh my gosh, life-changing. Blowing my mind, Sally. I know. But the next time you are bringing a script to life, I want you to find somebody to walk with you so you don't feel stupid walking and talking to yourself a whole bunch. And I think it's helpful to know that someone is hearing you, okay? So you're gonna find somebody and say, "Hey, can we walk for 15 minutes and I'm just gonna talk?" And you're just gonna sit, stand there and nod, right? Secondly, you're gonna print off your script, okay? If you want, if you've got one, it can be in your hands. You're not memorizing this thing, but you're really just using this script as a safety net to talk your way through your talk, right? If you have an outline, you could use that. That might actually be even better. That might actually be even better because you're going to discover things in this process, okay? And lastly, then you've got your script in hand, you've got your friend who you're walking with, you walk and you talk. Okay, what's so brilliant about this is that you cannot distract yourself with the complexity of the performance. It's not about the performance. It is simply syncing your body up with your words. There's no prep required. I'm gonna say that again. There's no prep required. You just walk and you talk. And here's the deal, my friends, I would like to I wanna see your walk and talks. If you are working on something right now, okay, and you're in the process of memorizing, I want you to try the walk and talk, okay? Take a pic of yourself walking and talking and tag me, Sally Koering Zimney, or Be Moved Speaking, so I can cheer you on. I would love that. Now, I have seen this strategy free people, from a few different things. From this feeling of, "I've got to memorize word for word." And also free them from this feeling of, "I can't stand up until I know it really well." And that's not true. This is kind of this beautiful in-between strategy, and it's so simple and so easy, you're gonna be like, Is this really something? But I want you to try it and use it and play with it. And as a little bonus, I'll tell you, I use the walk and talk right before I go on as a way to just remind myself that I do know what I'm talking about. And it gets me in my body again instead of standing in one place and going through it. But you just gotta sync up your body and your words. It will help you begin to shift it down out of your head. This thing that you just rehearsed in front of your computer with your slides, no thank you, that's not helpful. You're gonna get on your feet, you're gonna start moving your body, and it's really interesting what comes up, what comes out, the things that you think of, the things that change. It will change what you say and a little bit of how you say it, because now your body is involved. It is not just an intellectual exercise. You've just said, "I don't do this unless I do it with my body," and you set that expectation, and that makes all the difference. So such a powerful, easy, pro tip for you on delivery. All right, now, my friends, as you know, we are in the middle of stepping towards the Signature Talk course that is launching in June. I cannot wait, it's gonna be awesome. I'll share more with you about it another time. But really right now, as we are moving towards that, we are getting as clear as we can on the topic for that talk. Now, a lot of you come to me and you have a topic, but then once we sit down, we realize, you know, you have an idea, which is different than a topic. And so if you go download the TED Talk Jumpstart Kit, there's a fabulous PDF in this little kit that helps you get really clear on what your topic is. 'Cause really what we're looking for is, we're looking for your take on the topic. So you've gotta do a little exploration to get there. And so there's some powerful exercises in that PDF that will help you get clear on that. And at the end of it, What you will have are the basic building blocks of your signature talk, whether you're doing it virtually, whether you're showing up and using it in your virtual, all the communications that we're doing right now, the hundreds of ways that we are showing up for our audience, you can use your signature talk in all of those ways. That's what makes it so powerful. You pull it outta your back pocket and you can use it in all kinds of ways. Or for that moment when you can step out on that red dot and share your dream TED or TEDx talk, it is in you. And gosh, I can't wait to see it. I really can't. I love it. It's so awesome. We need, we need all of you to share what your brilliance is, your idea, your world-changing idea. That's what we get to do as speakers and leaders. So if you haven't checked it out yet, go to bmove.com/tedtalk and it will, uh, get you access to a really quick video training for me and this powerful PDF and gives you access to the community over at Movers U, which is growing and is like my favorite thing to spend time in right now and connect with all of you amazing movers. So I'm looking forward to it. And I wanna see you in there, bemoved.com/tedtalk. Okay, my friends, that is enough for today. You got to see me cry. Or hear me cry if you're watching this or listening to it. And I hope to see your walk and talks. Let's hashtag that puppy, huh? #WalkAndTalk. I'll take a picture of my next walk and talk too. All right. This moved me, my friends. What is moving you? I want to hear. Throw it in the comments. And I'll see you next week. What are we doing next week? Next week we're doing— ooh, next week we have a Movers Spotlight. Oh my gosh, I can't wait to share this convo with you. It's gonna be great. Have a good one, you guys.
