Episode #126

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (00:04): Hello. This podcast is care of Speakers Associates, the global speaker bureau representing a select group of the world’s finest thinkers and thought leaders. Founded in 1999, today Speakers Associates operate out of nine offices across seven countries covering the UK, Europe and Middle East. I’m Sean Pillot de Chenecey, author of the Post-Truth Business and Influences & Revolutionaries. In this series, I interview a range of fascinating individuals, proudly represented by the bureau. These change agents and industry experts give an update on their specialists areas of knowledge, and also on their motivations and viewpoints regarding the future of business. Today, I’m really pleased to be joined by Julia Goodman. She comes from a long line of artists and entrepreneurs. And she’s worked alongside Laurence Olivier, Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith, Tom Courtney, Albert Finney, and Peter O’Toole to name just a few. In her 30 year acting career, Julie appeared in many leading productions in theater, film and television. She’s appeared widely on screen and has played leading Shakespeare in roles all over the world.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (01:23): In 1989, she set up Personal Presentation Limited, and her philosophy and unique approach have been transforming people’s understanding, ability and enjoyment of personal communication ever since. Her company’s rooted in the world of theater and business and her methodology unites head, heart, and body and energizes your personal communication so that it works in any situation, whether it’s a conversation, meeting, presentation or pitch. Since the company started back in 89, they’re proud to have worked with some 15,000 people from more than 300 companies. In their fairly glittering client list, it has to be said, includes those like Diageo, McKenzie, PWC, Unilever, CNN, and Deloitte. So to finish off, I think one of the key points she makes and I love this statement is that this isn’t coaching it’s liberating souls. So Julia welcome.

Julia Goodman (02:27): Well, after that, I feel like leaving the room. I don’t think I can follow up on that really.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (02:32): It sounds fantastic.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (02:37): So tell me in terms of coaching and liberating souls go on then, what’s it all about? Where are you coming from with this sounds dynamic?

Julia Goodman (02:45): Okay. Yes, indeed. It is dynamic. I think I I’ll give you a brief story, which opens my book actually, which everyone kind of relates to a little is, I’ve been acting and directing and producing in various different ways. And ever since I left drama school, when I was about 21 at Central, Royal Central and I had a great career. I had a really interesting, exciting career, which even when you are having a really good, exciting career is usually seven months of the year. Not much more, and the amount of money you can actually accrue unless you’re doing a decent film or a television shows of which I did is it doesn’t last, you very long. Come 1989, I’d just been playing Lady Macbeth all around the Europe and various places and came back thinking if I can’t play this quality of role for the rest of my life, with some choice around it, maybe I’ve done as much as I want to do.

Julia Goodman (03:38): And maybe I can take my skills and my insights into another, into another place. So swim in another pond. And I had this idea in the bath and it worked as you do.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (03:49): Fantastic.

Julia Goodman (03:52): And I thought, okay, where can I take my skills somewhere else? And I thought, what I realized was that the psychology, the science, the techniques, the philosophy of the communication world of performance, which I’d been in for a long time, had to be able to help non-actors. And like a lot of things that create a sort of myth around it. It’s almost like you can’t come in, if you are not one of us. And I wanted to break down that wall of myth around this, to help people become much better versions of themselves in a way that they find like a lot of us, difficult.

Julia Goodman (04:35): We feel self-conscious, we’re not sure how to express certain things. And especially when we’re under pressure or in difficult situations, we very often lose some really key elements of our personality in our presence. So I took four years to make this methodology up and I used to walk around the garden with a Dictaphone sort of talking into it and then getting to the end of one bit and thinking, oh God, what’s the next bit. Oh, yes. I know. And then I would start to work with people and have the same experience. I’d come with all and think now what’s it. Oh yes, this is another bit of it. So it was a bit like the engine of a car. And I had the bond and I saw the engine and I knew what it did, but I didn’t know how it was put together or how it worked.

Julia Goodman (05:17): So that’s what I did. And then I started that work and it’s called you brand, um, because it is about the brand of you, but it is really about You Brand. Now, what that means is you can be comfortable and confident in many situations, as we all can. And we feel we’re coming over to our best. And then we’re not. We’re not in a place where we feel comfortable or confident and we lose ourselves. We undermine ourselves, or we sabotage ourselves with our feelings. And I realized that if you’re gonna have a brand, a person is gonna have a brand. If you, Sean has a brand, you have to be met and experienced and understood wherever you go as you. You’re only seen and experienced in one place. And then you are experienced and seen in another place and you come over differently, you don’t have a brand.

Julia Goodman (06:06): So it’s a very different thing from the brand of you. It’s about your ability to take yourself everywhere. And that’s where the skills of the theater and the methodology that I put together can help you transform your, transcend, your fears. If you like and use what we call performance energy. And performance energy is emotional energy expressed, not repressed. So it becomes your fuel. And once you know how to use that, you can take that and be more of you wherever you go. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s in front of 500 people or one person or a very small group, you are always able to perform yourself. But the getting to the yourself bit is where the work really comes in, because that starts to unpack who you really are, what and all, the unique. Because you are unique, I’m unique. There’s bits of that uniqueness. We don’t think are appropriate or acceptable, but they are very much part of us. And if we leave those out or we try and sit on them, we are not the whole, we’re not the complete thing. So bringing that to bear, bringing that out, making people much more aware and less self-conscious of it starts to create a really unique brand, which they can then with the skills that we give them, take anywhere. So it’s more of you with skill. So there you are. That’s a quick one.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (07:28): Yeah. Fantastic. Can I just say on that, by the way, in terms of, you know, performing yourself, being yourself, you talked about sort of performance energy with that being with that energy, being expressed, not repressed. Do you find, I mean, over the years, I know you’ve been doing this for a long time. You’ve got an incredibly impressive client list. I mean, culturally, are there certain cultures that you find amongst your client list that tend to get this naturally more than others? I mean, does one have other national stereotypes linking into this or not? I mean, one, just imagine off the bat, you know, are you faced with super confident Americans that can naturally do this versus repressed Brits? You know, I have no idea.

Julia Goodman (08:12): Well, that’s a very interesting and good question and I’ll answer it like this. In the earlier days when we were doing a lot of pitch work for some of the big four accountancy companies and they bringing in their people from all around the world to be part of a pitch, let’s say, yeah, in the day we could be together.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (08:31): Yeah, yeah, exactly

Julia Goodman (08:32): What I discover very quickly, which I think you’ll find will resonate as a good British guy is that the Americans who are brought up to be much more comfortable within the school curriculum, you know, debating and getting up in class and all those things and bringing that a more of a sort of slightly hubris version of themselves to it, which could be called slightly fake. But anyway, the skill of being able to perform and not feel too self-conscious is there, which it isn’t with the British, when they go into the corporate world, they become this force kind of person. It’s very strange. So you see the smile on the lips, but it doesn’t reach the eyes. And it’s a particular thing that they get into, which is very uniform with the Brits. You really have to dig them out of a hole to start with because of the reservation, et cetera. But once you got them out, they flew and they were, they were very much themselves. They were quite unique. They were very, they could get much more emotionally connected. And I think that’s an interesting thing because, you know, when you think about it, the British are some of the greatest performers in the world. They need that outlet.

Julia Goodman (09:47): Whereas the Americans and people like that, don’t particularly, it’s not the same for them. So they, the whole, you know, because a lot of actors are introverts and that need to bring out their inside and inform a part, which is what a lot of good actors do is they use, I think it’s 95% of ourselves to inform the character, which means bringing out that inner world and using that to connect to the authenticity and the really interesting character that you are forming. So that’s when I gain, came to realize, well, why can’t anybody do that? Why can’t we perform ourselves? Well, we can. And that’s what the work does. So very interesting question, but quite on, quite different from what you think.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (10:31): Yeah. Yeah. How fascinating, and are there, again, are there any particular sort of industry sectors that come to you needing this sort of help for their staff or is it just a really, really, you know, just broad spread of clients.

Julia Goodman (10:48): It’s pretty broad, but on the whole, when I first started, I had one of the questions is who was your, you know, who was instrumental in giving you that big break?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (10:57): Yeah.

Julia Goodman (10:57): Quick story. So I’ve started my business. I’ve got one person who’s helping me do all the administrative staff. I have a very tiny office in Canalot Studios in Nottinghill. And I hear via a friend of a friend of a friend that the outgoing senior partner of one of the big accountancy companies. I’m not sure whether I can use names here, but I’m quite happy to

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (11:25): Feel free. We’re amongst friends.

Julia Goodman (11:27): It was then I think Coopers and Lybrand which then became PWC, of course.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (11:33): Yeah. Yeah.

Julia Goodman (11:33): And, they were, somebody had said this guy needed a bit of help because he was doing an after dinner, leaving speech, a leaving speech. So he was the outgoing partner, senior partner. So would you come along Julia and give him some help? So I went a long charming man had a nice chat about it and everything. And that was great. Came out. And as I was standing by the lift to go back to the office, a chaplin I had met once before, came up to me and said, oh, hi, Julia, what are you doing here? So I told him, and he said, so you’ll be coaching all the new applicants and candidates for the senior partner, won’t you and I went, yes, of course I will.

Julia Goodman (12:14): Ran back to the office and said, quick, find out who’s competing. You know, who are these people? So we got a list of 10 actually, by the time I got do it, which was sort of the end of the day, there were four.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (12:28): Wow.

Julia Goodman (12:29): So I wrote to all four and I said, look, you’re about to go out and do something you’ve never done before, which is they were going out on a presidential road trip. So actually gonna be in front of audiences who were gonna vote as to who they thought was the best person, which had never happened before.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (12:45): Wow.

Julia Goodman (12:46): So I said, look, I can help you. I’ve got this methodology and I think it might help you to perform yourself really well in this situation. What do you think three of them kind of look down their nose, rather? Who is this woman?

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (13:00): Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Julia Goodman (13:02): Who thinks they can help me? I’m very speak. And one who said, okay, Julia, I’ll give you a day. He came and had a day. And as he left, I said, and he was a huge intellectual and a big introvert. And I said, okay, it’s up to you. You can either do it, or you can bottle out. And he said, okay, anyway, he did it. He got the job. And then he passed me right through the company forevermore. And that’s what started my whole career in that world. So to answer your question, finance, engineering, science, you’re going to get the introverts who need to get out and market themselves more. And that’s what was happening in the recession. Cause I started in a recession 1989. It was suddenly going, especially in the financial areas. Oh God, it’s not just gonna come to us. We’ve gotta go out and market ourselves, which they’d never done before.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (13:58): And then can ask. So and what about in the world that we now find ourselves in, with, you know, endless homeworking, Zoom meetings and all the rest of it. How does this adapt to online coaching, online behavior, online performance?

Julia Goodman (14:16): Very good. We we’re the educational learning process of this like,

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (14:22): Yeah. Yeah, sure.

Julia Goodman (14:23): But what I’m finding is we have three offers now that we’re working on one that we were starting before all this happened, which was an actual, what we call the DIY learning platform. So anyone can register in and get to work. And then we were, then we’re talking about in the meantime, and in the meantime means I can have you on screen in a zoom or whatever, and I can do some coaching online, which you can then take away because we can record it, look at it, come back with thoughts and we can then discuss stuff and we can move on. And you can do that in let’s say no more than two hour sessions. You can’t do more than that. It’s too, too draining.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (15:03): Yeah.

Julia Goodman (15:04): And then coming up in September, hopefully fingers crossed. If the tech works, we’ll have our own platform where we’ll be actually able to do online in the moment, record and play back coaching. So we’ll be able to do it in situ, in the moment. And that’s going to transform our offer because I know as a client said, we’re not going home. We’re not going back to where we were without a doubt. I suspect and hope that we’ll have a bit of a hybrid mixture. So it’ll be online. It’ll be audio and it’ll be in person, but people are looking at it and thinking I don’t have to travel. I don’t need to. There’s a lot less that I need to do. And this actually works quite well. And when you’ve got the tech working well, which is still people, what people are struggling with, you can actually have very intimate sessions online with people. Once they start to realize that this is going to be of just as much value as if they’re standing in a room with me or talking to me, you know, wherever else, because it’s now become much more critical because in the pre pandemic place, when I’m coaching people, although I do film them and play it back in situ, we now see ourselves all the time.

Julia Goodman (16:22): We can see that we look shit.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (16:24): Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Julia Goodman (16:26): See that, oh, sitting there sort of slump blacking your chair with your arms folder, looking up at the ceiling, ain’t really gonna work eventually because this is where we’re going to sell. And if we don’t know how to sell ourselves online, then you’ve got a problem. Our new business, we’re hoping our new business will be able to pick up on that opportunity that we can coach people online to look good and be authentic online, which is a whole.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (16:53): Yeah, I think it’s just such a huge issue. I mean, since a couple of days ago I was interviewing the head of strategy, one of the biggest ad agencies in the world and he, and he’s pointing out that over the last month or so they like everyone else have been just having endless, you know, fairly senior sort of, you know, global, sort of zoom sessions with the, you know, again, heads of marketing from some of the biggest brands in the world. And every single meeting has started with about 10 minutes of everyone going, you know, Hello. Hello. Can I ask? Can you see me? Can I hear you? You know, you’re on mute and it’s the extraordinary, the chaos that every one of us is going through.

Julia Goodman (17:28): But interestingly, and I think what we are doing is when I’m coaching people, I build in 20 minutes to get, to get sorted a bit like you did with me, you know? Okay. We’ve gotta get sorted before we can move on. But what I’ve noticed that I have a play reading, zoom meeting, you know, this is for me, I have a poetry one, which I did this morning and I have company ones that we have every week, as I’ve learned, ’cause I’ve put down a download for people, all my clients I’ve sent it out to them. So it says some dos and don’ts and hints and tips about being online. And I’m doing ones that are now gonna show me demonstrating that. And that’ll be the next thing they get. And these are freebies. Yep. What I’ve noticed is that as we practice, which of course is the magic word and we look, we are quickly picking up what works and what doesn’t. And as long as you’ve got a reasonable toolkit around you, you start to get better. So all my online things now with people apart from sound, which is a purely technical thing, which has got a, some way to go, everybody is performing much better, looks much better. Lighting has started to come in a bit backgrounds and all those things. So your stage, if you like is much better, a much, much more supportive place for you to look good, sound good, and then to connect and communicate.

Julia Goodman (18:53): But it’s, you’ve gotta do it. And it, and it changes over time bit by bit because we see it.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (19:00): It’s so interesting that whole, exactly that point you’re saying about that you, it’s a very unusual situation. We now find ourselves in a context of this conversation from the point of view of ourselves, seeing ourselves, generally looking slightly awkward and odd, in a generally speaking sort of badly lit room, you know, stuffed into the corner of an office or whatever. And, you know, again, all those points that you’re talking about seem to have an incredibly, you know, incredible relevance, because we are, it’s being evidenced around us all the time.

Julia Goodman (19:34): Absolutely. And one interesting thing is just before the lockdown, one of our major clients, a big P, private equity company, who’s, we’ve been with for about seven, eight years now, we’ve transformed a huge amount of their communication, their AGMs, and all the rest of it by getting people individually, to be much more able to perform themselves. If you see and get in front of the gushly jargon and all the crap that goes with it. And 92 slides, with gushly stuff on it. That’s all gone. They suddenly had this AGM coming up really important for their investors vital that the information gets across and they couldn’t go to the hotel they normally do, et cetera, et cetera. So we said, okay, let’s do it on audio because they weren’t ready at that point. And we weren’t to film it. Let’s do it on audio. And what they realized was, or they didn’t affect initially. So it was first of all, oh, well, that’s good. I’m not being seen. I can sit back home the table and I can relax and then put my feet up. And I’ll just, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (20:35): Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Julia Goodman (20:36): No, you can’t. So what we did we got them up as we would do anyway, when they were, you know, sort of on stage. And so I got you up now talk to the, talk to the audio as you would do, get the energy, the head, the heart, and the body, get the energy flowing. So you are really telling your narrative, we’ve worked on their stories, et cetera, get out and do it. Oh, do we have? Yes, you do get up right. Did it. Now bring it back to the intimacy of the radio.

Julia Goodman (21:06): That’s a difficult combination for people.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (21:09): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Julia Goodman (21:09): To have a natural ability to project your voice like you are doing, but how you get that intimate connection as well, is quite difficult for people because they’re not.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (21:24): So, and then can I also, and what about in terms of having, either a combination of best practice, but also authenticity? I mean, probably the best known, let’s say speaking platform in the world, or one of them, obviously a Ted talks. And I find it interesting that on one side, when you are going up to give a Ted talk, speakers are endlessly coached to give the, like the Ted approach, which is therefore by some standards felt to be the most perfect way of giving and delivering a talk, on the other side, you have the audience that says the problem is, is that suddenly everyone gives talks like a Ted speaker. And so therefore it’s taking away any sort of personal authenticity because they’re all doing it to a set rigid framework. So just, we’re interested in your sort of viewpoints on the Ted approach, whether you are a fan or not. And what your sort of a, like top 10 tips or top five tips are for speakers in terms of right, you know, you’re on stage tomorrow, up in front of your company or your audience, where do you start?

Julia Goodman (22:30): Okay. Well, one of the things that we do in our work, You Brand is the, we talk about what’s called the story wheel. Now, initially it’s just about getting people back to understanding that a story has some very important components and it isn’t a list or an explanation of stuff, right? It’s a lot of it is description. There is a narrative arc, all those things that I’m sure you know about. So what does that entail? Well, it entails a beginning, a middle and end a plot, a theme, images. And where do you start now? As we are, as I’ve spoken to you about internal nervous energy being expressed, which becomes our fuel, which is what we call performance energy. How do you get energized? First yourself, so that’s the first thing. Because if you can’t energize, if you are not energized, you can’t energize anyone else.

Julia Goodman (23:24): You can’t, you’ve got no fuel in the tank. You can’t fill anyone else’s tank. So you start off with what’s called an eye statement using personal disclosure. Our personal disclosure maybe is you sharing something vulnerable about yourself, but the key is that only confident people can do that. So what you are actually doing is you are demonstrating that you are self aware, you are able to communicate something in a confident way that is quite difficult because it’s coming from your inner vulnerability. So it might be experience. It might be something that means that as soon as you get that out. So when I was coming to this Ted talk, I was thinking we’ve got into this rigid place of everyone having to do it to a certain time. Can you imagine the people listening to us on the Ted talk eight minutes and I’ve gotta bring myself to you.

Julia Goodman (24:26): And I thought, well, how do I feel about that? Where is that taking me? Now, if I did that, the chances are everyone in the audience would want to know more, put them in. You’ve intrigued them around something that they can relate to, that they would probably feel themselves. You’ve questioned me about it. Yeah. It’s a great thing, why? That would lead you into then your pathway for your narrative, if you like, because it actually gets you on message. It gets you to create your message because it’s coming from a real authentic place, which is you. And it had come from you. That’s the point. And I was doing a workshop with some, a business foundation up in the Coxwell a little while ago, and I had a woman on it and she said, God, I wish I’d had you when I did my Ted talk. So I said, oh, what, why is that? And she said, I was, you know, rigidly sort of drilled within an inch of my life, but nobody talked about me and what I needed to do, and you are telling me that that’s the most important thing and that doesn’t happen. And I think that’s part of the problem.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (25:35): Yeah. How interesting. Because I think, yeah, exactly that meant people often talk about going to conferences or events of any sort or be it workshops. And, you know, we’ve all been there and all businesses have been there virtually every conference is identical and half the audience are asleep in the first 10 seconds, you know, we’ve all been through a thousand workshops, which are all utterly or many of them are incredibly tedious. That sort of, you know, the, that the official Ted talk speaker way of standing, all that sort of stuff. So I think it’s really interesting how your approach about, you know, taking the really personal,

Julia Goodman (26:11): You’ve got to, and you’ve got courage to do that and prepare it. And that’s what our work helps some our clients do is to have that framework that says, right, this is where I start. This is how I fill my tank. Once I tank is filled, I’ll probably know where I’m going, you know, because you work it out accordingly because it drives you and it motivates you. And, but people are frightened of doing that. It’s scary.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (26:34): And then what about angle of helping, you know, event organizers to actually put on events where, you know, the speakers can then do their things so alongside helping people to present brilliantly, do you also help event organizers, you know, to, I know structure how the whole thing should look, I have no idea.

Julia Goodman (26:56): Well, when we first, as I can only usually do it by actual narrative that I’ve experienced. So going into this big private equity company, which we were sort of reluctantly brought in because the CEO wanted sales training

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (27:11): Yeah.

Julia Goodman (27:12): So when I went in to meet him, they’ve got the woman who the HR woman had brought me in, ’cause she’d been referred by somebody else. And I sat there and he came in slumped in the chair, arms folded, basically saying, you know, okay, convince me. So I thought, okay, fine. By the end of this meeting, I’m gonna have you leaning across the table, listening to my every word. So anyway, I did achieve that because I really brought him to the point of what do you mean sales training, sales training is about you. It’s about what you are conveying to me right now in this meeting. Is that what you want? Cause I think you look stupid.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (27:47): Wow, brilliant.

Julia Goodman (27:48): I’m, now give him justice. He says, okay, I’ll give it a go. And then I got two ambassadors within the company who just took it off and went mad to Americans. Just loved it. So it kind of went viral and that’s where, why we’re still with them. But, that sales training attitude meant that he did give me a chance. And I said, I promise you Hugh, that when you’ve got everybody into this new way of thinking and working, it will save you money, time and energy because you’ll be doing something that’s really effective and takes very little except you. And he went, okay, I’ll hold you to that. And that’s kind of what happened is eventually it changed how they communicated, how they work. And in the process, we started to be able to fill, sort of like tentacles spread out into the organization of putting on the show.

Julia Goodman (28:43): You know, this is something that all my coaches and I have trained and been brought up in. How do you put up the show? What are the important things? You have to have four or five things working on parallel lines in order for the show to happen. And the show is paramount. Everything has to be disciplined into that place. And everyone has to work together. Whether they like each other or not, doesn’t matter as long as you communicate and you all keep each other in the loop because that’s the way it happened. Although any one of those things falling out, you’ve got

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (29:16): Yeah. Yep.

Julia Goodman (29:18): So that’s how we got into organizing conferences in AGMs and now people are beginning to go, oh, would you come and do it for us? Yes. Okay. But you’ve got to take us as the professionals. We’re not lighting camera people or, you know, people who put up the slides and the comfort screens. That’s nothing to do with, we don’t want that.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (29:39): Yeah. Yeah, sure.

Julia Goodman (29:41): We have to, but the purpose of putting on the show is the show is the thing. And it’s all about you.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (29:47): And then, and then just to come back again to that issue about putting on the show, and again, I’d take totally onboard your point about, you’re not the ones who are sorting out lighting, all that sort of thing. But, I think one of the great criticisms of most conferences, stroke events tends to be that, you know, you in the audience are confronted with an identical setup within reason or identical format for virtually every event. As in here we go, two speakers, coffee break, two speakers, lunch, two speakers, coffee break, you know, panel two speakers, wrapper all up bank finished. And there seems to be real sense of frustration that, you know, who said that was the law that it had to be like that. And so it just seems to be that there’s far more interest building with events that are themselves creatively put together before anyone actually gets on stage in any format.

Julia Goodman (30:43): Well, I think, I mean, in the theater, what happens is that everything, as I said, has to work on parallel lines in order for the show to happen. And that means the actors backstage front stage lighting, everything, it has its place, and it all has to be part of the overall journey. And it will come from what is it you’re trying to say? What is the message? What is the thing that you are wanting to land? How do you want people to feel about it and consequently do about it? And if people are all working in isolation, you’re not gonna get that because in the theater, what you get is designers theater or lighting theater, or we’ll do it all in the car park, which can work. Cause you’ve probably got the narrative of the play going really well and you don’t need all the rest of it.

Julia Goodman (31:32): So it’s all about bringing it all together. And what we did with this company is do exactly that. We did. We were disruptors. We dismantled what they did. So what they have now is a very simple staging. We have people in rooms sitting around talking to people and telling stories. We have young people up there that they’ve never met before and realizing that a company isn’t just about two speakers brought in from wherever to impress people. It’s about the internal dynamic of the company. And what is that saying? Because that’s where you’re putting your money, et cetera. And that’s changed hugely how they do it. And they’re all on board for it because they know they are very much part of it and they’ve gotta be creative. And we started off with something that comes in the business, which is called an aim map. So it’s audience and arena impact mapping. So what you do is you do what happens for us in the theater, which we have five or six different teams, all putting into the show, being right for you to go out on that stage and do the goods, deliver the goods.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (32:45): Yeah.

Julia Goodman (32:46): Absolutely has to be free of anything that distracts from that. So everybody works together, ’cause that’s the focus, right? So a mapping is a way of bringing all those different linear, lateral, emotional, physical, and technical information that you need that allows you, the person, the individual to go out and be your You Brand in that place. And you have to do that yourself. But what it’s doing is making you ask questions and looking into things who is this audience? What do I want to go with thinking, feeling and doing? What’s my narrative? Where is it coming from? What’s my plot. And that is like a little computer where you feed in all the information that you know, and you’ve got. It forces you to ask questions, you probably wouldn’t have answered. It challenges you to really look at the personality of what you are doing there and the people involved.

Julia Goodman (33:37): And then you come out with something that isn’t just about a loaded stuff, being thrown a wall and hoping it sticks. It’s got aim, it’s got a target and you’ve given it good intellectual, emotional and physical focus. That then means you’ve got much more of something you can own. And the whole show starts to change. And we do that with the company’s senior people and we make them do it cause it took me three years to get them in a hotel room and do an AMAP with them and make them really contribute what they wanted to really say. And gradually has become a hugely creative process and out of it comes something very simple, but it has a really potent and relevant impact.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (34:24): Whoa, very good. So, I mean, it’s been actually fascinating. So just as we begin to sort of finish off, cause we’re keeping all of The Speaker Show podcast sort of short and snappy to make them sort of, dynamic bits of content. I mean, I know you mentioned it, I think. So you mentioned September, you’ll be coming out with the, with your own platform from the point of view of recording and playing back, sort of, you know, live material central apart from that, anything else on the horizon for yourselves?

Julia Goodman (34:53): My book is, which is You Brand: A Manual for Confidence and that will take you through all the things that I’ve been talking about and more, and that’s now been put back to come out in September, which is fine, ’cause we’ve got, I wanted to do a bit more work on it. And I’ve got a right chapter now about being online, which wasn’t in there initially.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (35:12): Yeah, sure.

Julia Goodman (35:13): That’s happening. So with those, I’ve been doing videos for all my clients, just sitting in front of the camera and talking to them and sending it out as a sort of, support thing. And that’s about as much as we can do at the moment with all those other things. So that’s it really at the moment as we don’t know what’s gonna happen at the other end yet, do we, we’re having to work very much in the moment

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (35:37): Precisely. Okay. Can I just to pick, to finish off then just so, that the listeners, wherever they may be in Asia, the US, Middle East, Africa, Europe, et cetera, just to give them a, like the real elevator pitch. So where crystal clear about exactly why it is that they should be approaching you and what it is that you can do for them, give us the whatever two or three minutes hard sell.

Julia Goodman (36:02): Yeah. Okay. Well, we’ve worked, as I said, with all nationalities all over the world and it doesn’t matter whether they speak our language or we don’t fundamentally human behavior and how they put how they express themselves and how they are genuinely seen as authentic. And that’s going to be so important in the coming years is we’ve gotta be more transparent. We’ve gotta be more authentic. We can’t pretend we are green when we’re not all those things. It’s gonna be vital that every single person has that ability to inspire and motivate and speak truth to power, whatever it is. And it doesn’t matter where are you come from, what nationality you are. This works at a very sort of basic human level and it works. And if you want more control over how your impact is who you are and how you come over and how you speak and how you connect and how you motivate people, this is the work for you.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (37:00): Very good. And then finally, Julie, so how do people contact you? Where do they find you?

Julia Goodman (37:05): They find me on Personal Presentation, www.personalpresentation.com. And in there, there will be all the news about You Brand and our other offer, which is called The Practice Room, which people can go in and do all sorts of different things. And our work is very experiential. It isn’t, you don’t sit behind the desk, you have theory, but you do, you practice, you work at it, you see yourself, you transform .

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (37:34): Very good. Well look, it’s been actually fantastic and I’ll certainly be buying a copy of the You Brand: A Manual for Confidence when it comes out later on this year. But Julia Goodman whose philosophy and unique approach transforms people’s understanding, ability and enjoyment of personal communication. And who says this isn’t coaching it’s liberating souls. Thank you.

Julia Goodman (37:56): Thank you. Thank you, Sean. Very much.

Sean Pillot de Chenecey (38:01): Thank you for listening to the speakers show podcast. Please leave a rating on iTunes. We’d really appreciate it. And also it’d be great, if you could subscribe to the podcast itself. You’ll find it also on Google podcasts, SoundCloud, or your favorite podcast app. Thank you.