 Welcome to another episode of Executive Breakthroughs. I have a fantastic guest and my speaking coach, founder of Strategic Speaking, Tampson Webster, and she is gonna be talking all about her life, her career, and giving you some inside tips because she's also the woman behind the magic of TEDx Cambridge, and we are in Boston, so that's also a nice thing to work close by. It is a nice thing. It is. Welcome. Thank you. It's nice to see you. It's nice to see you too. So I love to give people a taste of where you grew up and a little bit about family and early influences, so why don't you take us back to that moment when you were that high that was the table or lower, so. Table or lower. Well, I'm a Navy kid, so we moved around quite a bit before I settled in, and I think that had a lasting effect both on me and my sister, actually. How did, how so? Well, because what's interesting is that both she and I have ended up in careers where we end up telling stories at a very small amount of time. So she is a screenwriter. She writes in LA, and she, most recent project, she was a writer and a supervising producer on The Handmaid's Tale, and who lives out there. Writes for movies, et cetera, but, and I've ended up in a career where I help people get big ideas across in short amounts of time too, and they end up being about the same amount of time between, you know, movie is a lot of ways equivalent to a keynote or a workshop, and a TV pilot is about an hour long, and, you know, a sitcom is about half an hour, which gets you about a tip. Do you tribut those, anything to anything that, like? I do, actually, because I think that when you move around a lot as a kid, you're in a situation where you have to figure out how does this place work? How does this group work? How do I make a mark on this group if I want to? Or how do I blend in, or how do I be a part of it? So I think whether we realized it or not, it was really good training into very quickly understanding what were the important moving parts in any place where we were. And because as kids that moved around to Fairmount, she ended up getting moves a lot more than I did because she was older, we, you end up being very self-sufficient. And so I think that you end up figuring out how to build your own stories, or how to build your own narrative around how things are working around you. And I think that has shown up in where each of us have ended up with our careers. And you had to do that really quickly because if you're moving spot to spot, the more time it takes you to get adjusted, the less time that you're actually in the flow and building relationships with people. And it can happen early. We stopped moving when I was five, but still when you move five times before you're five, there still is this pickup set down, pickup set down, pickup set down that happens. And that experience is very different than when we finally settled in, which is Virginia Beach in Virginia. I know I look like a total beach girl. That experience is dramatically different from the vast majority of other people who were in the same schools and all, even though there were a lot of Navy kids there because Virginia Beach is a big Navy town, it's still a different background than the majority of people who were born and raised in some place. And so you're already different coming in. And so you have to figure out how different do you wanna be? What's the nature of my difference? What's the nature of this place? How does, what does this group of people value? All of those things are pieces of information that I know now looking back on it that I ended up having to pick up. That you figured out. So what made it that you stopped moving if you're, did you get out of the military? Well, no, my father for, yeah, no, he was in the Navy for about 21 years. And my mother also worked as a civilian with the Navy. She worked with the Navy Family Services Center. So it's basically a social service center for Navy families. Because my mother was a PhD in anthropology, which was really unusual for a woman in the 60s and early 70s to not only have a career, but get a PhD. So she was an interesting role model as well. He decided he didn't wanna be on active duty on ships. And so he ended up taking a desk job in the Navy. But even then he ended up being away a lot because the best way for him to do that was to, for a number of years was to work up in DC. So he was in DC during the week and home on the weekends. So you kind of, even though you weren't moving, you had a lot of moving parts all the time. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of moving parts all the time. But my mother, who was kind of a constant through all. And so I think I give my mother a huge amount of credit for all of that. How'd your mother manage that? I'm just wondering. I still wonder that to this day. Because she, I mean, it's, I, yeah, I've got two kids. I don't know how she did it. I really don't. And yet sustained a career. She did all the things that I think a lot of people would aspire to now. And was doing it in a much more difficult environment than we have now. Definitely. So she's always been very strong in her convictions. She's always been an observer as well. And so as an anthropologist, as a child of an anthropologist, I think a lot of our observational skills came from her. And you don't really realize what you pick up from your parents. But I can see it with my own kids, is that I'm very much into reading and stories and art and theater and was never very much into sports. And that's the same with my kids, but they do what they see. And so I think the same thing was true of my mother. We observed her observing. She always is making comments and just noticing things. And she was your constant. And she was our constant. And so I think my sister and I picked up that kind of anthropological observation that just manifested in different ways based on what our own individual traits were, which is really interesting to see. That's interesting. Did you have any other role model? I'm obviously her mom must have been some level role model growing up being in that environment. But is there anyone else who was like a role model or a significant influence? I think it was one of, I mean it's commonplace now, but growing up and given all that, that situation and with my dad being there and not and my mom and all of that, I think it was a, I would say my biggest influence was a group of people that I grew up with. So that I had a very close group of friends in middle school and high school that are all oriented around things that we were all interested in. And I think in a lot of ways it was a lot of peer mentoring that happened. And I see that now with people who were the age I was then but I don't think it seemed like that was an early wave of it. And I see it now going forward into the careers where there's a lot of particularly women my age who look and because of the progress that women have made in the workplace, there aren't all that many women in a role that is five, 10, 15, 20 years ahead of us that provide mentorship back. So I am part of at least three or four different groups of peer mentoring masterminds and coaching circles because that's what's there. If you don't have somebody who's been on the path before you then you end up trying to figure out that path together. And so I think that's what we did a lot in high school. And as it turns out, a lot of the kids that I was friends with also were the children of military of one sort or another or their parents were split up or they had a parent that had a more active role and wasn't around as much. So even though we had this affinity around the arts or other things, there's this other underlying consistency on this mindset that each of us had based on, well, we kind of have to figure this out on our own. So let's figure it out on our own together. And have to be very self-sufficient. And yeah, self-sufficient independent. I'm not sure how my parents feel about that now. I think sometimes they regret that they raised two very emotionally independent kids because we're like the anti-millennials. Like there's, we love our parents dearly but we're not neither my sister nor I or the kind that are constantly on the phone and always checking in. Yeah, my parents are somewhere in the South China Sea right now, having a great time, I'm sure. See they're having a good time. They're having a great time. Yeah, and we're really split up. My sister's in LA, I'm in Boston, they're Pacific Northwest. So I don't think we could be further apart but that's really not because we couldn't be. It's just the way that it worked out. The way that it worked out. So what happened and went to school? Yes, I came here to Boston for school and it was funny because at the time, why, well that's a good question. I ended up that I came here because a friend of mine thought that all the other places I applied would be absolutely not a good fit with my personality. So having a bit of an independent streak, I decided that I wanted to go very non-traditional college and so just about all the colleges I applied to other than let me apply to Harvard and Amherst just to see if I can get in were non-traditional. So Evergreen State, out in South of Seattle, Bennington, Hampshire College, out in the Berkshires here in Massachusetts. All places where you essentially designed your own major but all of them were rural. And I had a good friend in high school who was like, yeah, I was like, you were gonna eat that. Even though Virginia Beach wasn't exactly a city, he was like. It's still a lot different in the rural community. Exactly, he's like, you don't want sheep in your front yard. I'm like, no, that's probably right. And I had gone to a summer program that Harvard runs for high school students between their junior and senior year. And I really loved Boston and Cambridge in that summer that I was up here. And so he was like, why don't you just go to BU? Boston University. He was like, okay, let me apply there. And they ended up, that was the biggest financial aid package I got. And it ended up being absolutely the best place but not because of the school itself in a lot of ways is because it was the city. That was the best experience for me. What about the city was? Well, a number of things. I mean, one thing was to give BU credit, I was allowed and able to essentially design my own major but within a little bit more structure than I would have had someplace else. So BU had what's called a collaborative degree program. Since I had gone in Virginia, I had been essentially a prep school. So had taken a lot of advanced place, of course, I started with a lot of credits and I had a college counselor was like, you know, you've got enough credits that you could do a second degree while you're here. Said, okay. And so I had started in the management school studying marketing and market research. And then I added a liberal arts degree on top of it in American Studies which was very much a study of culture. And I like to say, I don't know whether it found me or I found it because it was absolutely a codifying of how I think about things. So American Studies is an approach to studying culture. It isn't really about like, go America. It's about picking a time period or picking an idea and looking at everything around that. So I picked the intro war between World War I and World War II. And so my role in American Studies was to look at that time period from every single act, from art, from the economy, from politics, to just every culture, political dynamics, I already said politics, but just interactions of everything. But it's kind of anthropological too. It is anthropological, yes absolutely. Yeah, it's like just a tongue twister but it was like, yes, it definitely, you can see that. Yeah, I can see that. And my look at it was I was kind of bored with just marketing and business and the kids that were in the business school weren't really my people. And so I was looking for, well, what would I pair with it? And I said, well, if I'm gonna be in marketing then I want a better understanding of the culture to which I'm going to market. So I wanted that ability. But your question was about why the city? And as it turns out, because a family was not wealthy, I needed to work the whole time I was in school just to have pocket money and things like that. So I ended up working in the nightclubs on Landstaff Street here in Boston, which is really surprising to people. And they're like, what did you do, Tamsin? And as it turns out, I was the box office girl because as one of the managers told me, I was the only one they could truly trust to A, B with the money and B to count it correctly. And so I was the one that took all the money at the door and divided it up and put everything, sold tickets and all of that. I was also the popcorn girl on Sunday nights for movie night. But what was interesting about that was it allowed me at a time when I think a lot of people set their world perspective on what people are like and what their in-groups are and who they wanna be. It showed me a much bigger spread of people than I would have seen in any other way. Because actually before I worked on Landstaff Street, I worked in this totally sketch nightclub that was in Kenmore Square called Narcissus. And anyone who is from Boston would be like, oh my God, you worked at Narcissus? Yes. Because Narcissus was actually where the locals came. Like Landstaff Street was where all the college kids went out at night, but Narcissus was where the kids who live on the north, like Revere and all these, your classic Boston accent people, like they came into town and they worked at Narcissus. So to see and become friends with those people and then to get to see a different group of people at the clubs on Landstaff Street, it taught me a huge amount of things, huge amount. The first was that a college degree was not necessary for someone to be a fascinating, fully formed, interesting human. And yet that, particularly coming out of a prep school, like that's the narrative that you're taught, like you could go do your work. Well, they have to sell you that. They have to sell you on that. And all of a sudden I was like, well, a lot of the people that I go to school with, I don't like, but these people that I work with, many of whom barely, if they got out of high school at all, were amazing people, really interesting, smart, just well-rounded real people. And so many of my friends from college are actually not from college. They're people I became friends with while I was in college. And even if they happened to have gone to BU, they weren't in my classes. It was because we worked in the clubs together. That's why. And it's crazy. But yeah, little known fact. Little known fact. I mean, that dovetails with a lot of what you're talking about, the meeting people and the stories and learning all about all these different people from all walks and shapes and forms all over the place. And then sort of just being friends with them outside of the mainstream because that's not where you had come from at all. So it just makes sense. It's now looking back. It looks like, OK, that makes a real logical sense that you'd be attracted and want to be doing that and outside the norm. So you left school, and what happened after that? What was the next? I went. Well, when I graduated college, it was still really in the early 90s. And this prior to the financial crash of 2008 was like the next most recent really bad time to be graduating college because it wasn't good. And that was one of the reasons why I went into business in the first place when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be because I was horrified that my sister, who went to Stanford because eight other people, and I'm not kidding about that, went to Stanford. I didn't even apply because I'm like, I'm not going to Stanford. Everybody else did. I was just horrified at the time that she went to Stanford for theater. And I was like, you go to Stanford, you get a theater degree? What the heck are you going to do with that? Of course now, I was like, OK, that was smart. But it was not a good time to get a job. And so I love being in school, frankly. I love learning. I haven't stopped, obviously. It's one of the reasons why I love doing TEDx so much. I feel like I get little intense. Any time I work with a client or any speaker, I get an intense education in that particular topic. And it's fun. So I went straight on to grad school. And I went to Dallas, actually. I went to Southern Methodist. And I went to SMU because they had a grad school program that mimicked what I had done as an undergrad. So SMU has a program for arts administration. And I wanted to be an art museum director, where you would get a master's in arts administration, so essentially a liberal arts master's degree, and an MBA simultaneously. So it was two years, two summers. And I'd get two master's degrees out of it. And so I was like, all right. It happens to be in Texas, so I'll go. But I was open to that. I mean, there was a reason why I wanted to go away from home to go to college. I wanted it. I consciously wanted a different environment for grad school. Because I felt like I knew the West Coast because my parents were there, my sister ended up there. I'd been the South-ish with Virginia, New England I got. And I'm like, here's this giant part of the country. I don't understand. Like, let's go there. Let's go there. And let's go to Texas. And the food was good. That's awesome. Texas and I didn't really get along all that well because I wasn't any less opinionated or any less brunette in Texas. And particularly in the late 90s, when the economy started picking up again, that was neither of those things were terribly popular. Particularly in the business community coming out of SMU at the time. But it was another one of those things where I'm really glad that I did it. Because always having my feet in two experiences allowed me to have a better perspective on both. It's kind of, you think about it. There's a reason why you have two eyes. It gives you depth perception. It's the thing that allows you to get a better perspective on something. And so being able to do that the whole time allowed me to have that perspective. So I ended up getting my MBA at 23, which is super unusual. And that's why I wish that MBAs still had continuing education. Because I'd love to go back. Now that I, once I've been out in the world, I'd love to go back and be like, oh, that's what this was all about. But it was a really interesting experience. Because it was, I think we had 114 people in the class. There were fewer than 20 women in that whole class. I was younger than everybody else by at least six or seven years. So it was, again, an interesting kind of fish out of water mix of people. But that's where, so the marketing was what I did from undergrad. And so when I went to SMU, what I really wanted to focus on was, well, if that's external communication, how does internal communication work? So what I focused on in undergrad was organizational behavior and organizational structure and management communications. How do you get something to work internally? Because I was already starting to figure out that a message was never going to work externally if it didn't make internal sense first. So that's where that piece came in. And I got it when I was, I worked both at Banana Republic and got a job at a consulting firm in Dallas while I was there with the former Pritchett Associates, now Pritchett Inc., Price Pritchett. And it's that typical story of they just threw money at me and I said, OK. Like, what art museum? All right, it's fine. But after about a year, I was like, this isn't what I want to do. I was a change management consultant. That absolutely marked forever the kind of work that I liked to do. But doing it in Dallas at a consulting firm wasn't the right match. It wasn't right. So where was Next? Next was, I was like, well, the heck with that, I'm going to go back to the museum world. And so I took a 50% pay cut, moved back to Boston, and started to work at a museum that's north of here called the Peabody Essex Museum up in Salem, Massachusetts, of Witchfabe. Yes. Yes. And originally started in what would now be called Development Communications, which is the communication strategy behind fundraising. So a sat between essentially the marketing department and the development, the fundraising department. And that evolved into more of a long story than we probably have time for. It evolved into my taking over the planning of the exhibition schedule for the museum. So I put into place their first five-year rolling plan for that, helped manage their bicentennial exhibition and helped bring in one at that time, the most popular exhibition they had had to date, which is the story of Ernest Shackleton's journey across the Arctic after, Antarctic after, his boat got crushed in the ice. Oh, yeah, you know about that. So that was a fascinating time. So that was Next. I was there for about three years, which is my normal tenure. Three years, a magical time. It's a magical time. But my next job was longer than that. It was four and a half years. I think I had more to do. I learned later that it usually took me about three years to build a system. And then after the system was built, if I didn't have an opportunity to build a new system in that same place, I tended to move. But the next place I went was still in the arts, but the other, all the rest of them. So I went into, I became the head of marketing and communications for a local college here called the Boston Conservatory, which is a performing arts college. And they have music, dance, and theater. It's now part of Berkeley College of Music. But at the time, it was still independent. And that was a really interesting, it built on a lot of what I had started to see when I was at the PVDSX Museum, which is an institution that wasn't fully comfortable being itself. So the PVDSX Museum really fought against the fact that it was in Salem. They had all of the papers and all the artifacts from the witch trials, but they didn't want to put them on display because that was somehow low culture. And there's this vision of we want to be the MFA of the North Shore. And I just wanted them to be the PVDSX Museum. I thought there was more strength and more value and more difference there in saying, yeah, we're actually all of this. We are the quintessential. This is trying to fight it off. Yeah. This quintessentially New England Museum. I mean, what other museum could possibly extend from everything from an imported Chinese house all the way to? And that's actually hurting you because that's what you're known for. Why not leverage that to get more money and funding to do a lot of the other things that you want to do? They come to that. I think it was an internal struggle of seeing what worked and what didn't over time. And so when I went to the Boston Conservatory, I started to see a very similar thing because Boston is lousy with A, colleges, and B, with conservatories and music schools. I mean, there's a ton of them not only built into the universities are here, but there's another conservatory. There's the New England Conservatory, which is the one that most people actually know. And so when I got there, the Boston Conservatory was doing everything it could to look just like the New England Conservatory. It had a logo that looked like it. The way it talked about itself was that, and yet, the New England Conservatory is just classical music. And the Boston Conservatory was music, dance, and musical theater. So there was just this. I mean, any image you might have in your mind about what dancers and musical theater kids would add to that mix, and you're completely right. It was not this stayed formal place. And in fact, when I started talking to the students there to try to get a better handle on what would be a better way to represent the conservatory, the analogy that they kept coming back to, and different groups of key people would come back to, is they kept describing themselves as the island of misfit toys. But this was the only place that they'd ever been, where they felt not out of the group, but it was a whole group of people who were outsiders like that. So we just revamped everything so that it was much more focused on that energy and that happened from this cross of all those different disciplines. It sounded like they had a little bit of an identity crisis. Oh, absolutely. And it seemed like both of the places, a lot of the stuff, it seems like people, they're having a crisis about who they are. Yes. And trying to pull it out. Right. Yeah, and trying to figure out a way to talk about it that makes sense. Makes sense to everyone. Yes. And so, and in fact, that the answer is, as I started to discover. Which is the same thing you did in school, right? I mean, it all really goes back to the American studies, right? And so what did you know? Because it's looking like you have to look around everything 360 and what's the theme and all the different things that are going on and be able to pull all that out to really understand what's going on. If I do one thing, it's I help people make things make sense. Retroactively, proactively, internally, externally. Just what is it that you need to make sense? OK, we're going to figure that out. Going back to mom. Because I mean, that's what anthropologist does. That's right. They were able to look at stuff from the outside perspective and bring it all together without moving as much bias as possible in the process of doing it. Exactly. So it's never been not that. But I didn't necessarily see it that way at the time. At the time, I'm like, I'm just going to explain this. Now it's the rest of the arts. Because there's still this part of me that was like, well, I wanted to be museum director and I'm not. And so what's going on there? Did you have a lot of resistance in there? You know, I didn't. And it was funny because I broke every rule about how you're supposed to rebrand an institution. I mean, the whole thing you're supposed to do is you're supposed to do the research first and come up with a strategy and come up with all of that. And then you come up with the logo and all of that stuff. Because I had no money. I mean, my budget was nothing. You didn't mean you can't do that, then. And then it's hard for people to argue. Oh, absolutely. Because you have no money to do it. So what I did was I reversed the process. I had a designer that I trusted very much. I said, come up with three radically different directions based on my impressions so far of what I thought was representative of the feeling of the rate. And then I took that to the students. I took it to the faculty. I took it to the staff. And I used that as the basis of the research and said, which one of these is right? Why? And it all circled in on really one that represented the energy of it and energy of everything else. And as a product of doing that work, we were also happened to be working on the organization's mission statement at the time. And that was an enormously collaborative process. But one of the things that doing the rebranding and doing it visually back rather than strategy forward helped to crystallize it much, much faster. And it also helped us figure out as a group that the thing that really made the Boston Conservatory different was its focus on working artists. And you might think, well, why is that important? Well, this college costs a lot of money to send somebody there. And if you think about a parent, and now we're into the first wave of millennials given the time. This is the time when the millennials were coming in. That's the earliest, the oldest millennials were starting college at the time I was there. And this was also in 2001. So there was September 11th happen while I was there. Ooh, there's all sorts of stuff. But these were parents that were much closer to their kids traditionally than Gen Xers like me or Boomers. They're about to spend a whole bunch of money to send their kid to art school. Their concern is this kid gonna work. Right. And the kids are just, they have a dream and they've got enormous talent and whatever. The parents are like, are you gonna work? Are you gonna have a job? Is there a way to survive? Yeah, exactly. Especially after going through the downturn. Right. And so what we really focused on was not that we were subsuming quality because my feeling was anytime a college comes out with like, we've got diversity and we're student centered and we've got excellent faculty and that's table stakes. You can't distinguish based on that. Everybody knows that. Everybody, and if you don't, what the heck are you doing in business? So it wasn't that the quality of the education wasn't important. It was just, we were looking at it through the lens of how can you work if the quality isn't great? How can you work if you don't replicate working conditions? And that's where the presence of all three disciplines there was really helpful because students who came to be classical musicians were playing in the pit orchestras of the dance and the musical theater productions. Which is, by the way, where the vast majority of classical musicians end up working is in pits of shows, not at the Boston Symphony Orchestra or something like that. And so it ended up being a really powerful way to not only attract the right students to the organization, but eventually a really powerful basis for fundraising. Because you could say, let me be clear, the conditions that were not great. In fact, when I first started there, they had a picture of some other institution theater on the front of the materials that were sent to the students. Like they were so, we don't know, but it became the basis of a very successful fundraising that happened that really saw its peak after I left. Where they could say, if we can get this kind of quality with these conditions, imagine what we could do if they were good. And now they've become so successful, they've built two, they were renovated a building, they built another one, they acquired and renovated a third, and then the successful so far merger with Berkeley. That's been cool to see. I mean, I can't take any credit for that piece, but it was fun to see it at the beginning. It could be part of the evolution of everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, left there, that was a little bit longer. It was, because it was meteor. And I got to, and the shift was, once we had the brand in place, it started to be, how did we swing the strategy of the school? I got to be involved a little bit more in that. How do we start, how do we set the curriculum up differently so that we can achieve this aspiration we have of a truly interdisciplinary. That's a pretty complex problem. Yeah, but then from a career standpoint, I was looking at it and saying, well, what am I ready to do? I still loved the consultant aspect that way back from Pritchett and Dallas. I was like, well, do I want to be a consultant or do I want to go forward in, still towards the path of nonprofit administration? And given the fact that my background was always in marketing, you don't get very far in nonprofits unless you know how to raise money. And even though I helped with both admissions, communication strategy, and fundraising communication strategy at the conservatory, it wasn't my main job. And so I was like, well, I want to see how a great fundraising operation works. And I want to cut my teeth on that. And so the next place I ended up was as Harvard Medical School, at which point I couldn't claim any arts at all, but it was really a very calculated decision to figure out how does this other piece of this work. And I went to Harvard Medical School and was in charge of the Fundraising Communication Strategy. And so my job was to figure out how to help the gift officers, the people who had to go ask people for money, how to ask people for money for Harvard, which if you stop and think about it is not that easy of a job because we're Harvard country, its endowment would be a GDP equal to the 18th largest country in the world. I mean, they've got money. So needing money really couldn't have been the message. So it was a fun puzzle to have to figure out of, well, how do we make that case? Why would people? How can we make a compelling case for people to give us money when we can't use the fact that we, you know. Well, we can't use the fact that, oh, help us keep the light on, light on, which was part of the message at the conservatory. Which was most of the time for the office. Right, so it was a fascinating thing to see. And it got me into the scientific world because there's this extra layer of difficulty, an extra layer of difficulty for the medical school because unlike every other medical school in the world, Harvard doesn't have its own hospital. It has 17 of them. So there's a bunch of hospitals here in Boston, Brigham and Women's, Mass General, all sorts of, they're all teaching hospitals for Harvard, but it's not like Johns Hopkins University has Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Which means that as Harvard medical school, we couldn't fundraise from the patients of those hospitals because they had their own fundraising arm. So the people that we could talk to were people who were interested in science and medicine in Boston, but probably weren't scientists or clinicians or doctors themselves. So the other thing we had to do is how to explain what the actual work of the medical school was. And it's something that, it's called basic science, which is not basic at all. And so the way I ended up describing it to most people was that fundamental science. We were really interested in what are the fundamental questions of why do people get sick? Why are they healthy? Why don't we know the answers to these questions yet? And it was really my first, the first time I started to codify in any real way that there were certain fundamental questions that people needed to have answered about something before they would act on it. And it was, I loved working there because it was one of the projects that I did right, right almost off the back because we were trying to develop all these new materials was I interviewed close to a quarter of the entire faculty of the medical school. So just to be able to talk to these world-class... Yeah, that's pretty amazing. ...academics, researchers, scientists about just everything from neuroscience, to systems biology, to macrobiology, to infectious diseases, to just all of this, all of it. And just seeing what were the frustrations and why were they doing it? What were they passionate about? And trying to figure out how to take all of that and weave a narrative together that would make it easy for someone to go and have a chat with some business person has no background in science or medicine and be able to really powerfully and effectively explain why investing in the medical school was the path to that individual donor achieving their own personal goals. That was fun, like flat-out fun. It was great, I loved that. But the ride had to end. It did have to end because personnel changes, it was a time of enormous upheaval at Harvard as well. So in the time that I was there, there were three presidents, I had three different presidents of Harvard, two, three different deans of the medical school and then three different bosses in my office over three years. So everything was changing at every level. And eventually just got to a point, I was just like, I need something that doesn't change for just a little while. Because that was also the time where I had my first son and I was like, okay, there's too much. I just need things to stop for a little while. And you were at your three years too. And I was at my three years and I built that system thanks to the change. It didn't survive much after leaving. But those contexts are still really powerful. All the other people on the, I still do work for people that I worked with there. And with TEDx, it's interesting how much in two ways it comes back. A, a lot of the sponsors and partner, organizational partners for TEDx Cambridge are some of those people we were asking money for, money of 15, 20 years ago now to 15 years ago now. And second, my ability to speak science has come in very handy. So that summer I spent talking to scientists and understanding what they do. It's whenever I meet a scientist now, it doesn't take very long before they're like, what did you study? Because they're trying to figure out how I understand. How do I understand what it is? Because they're only used to other scientists being able to understand it. So I like to say now that I forgot to study science because I adore science. But I was coming out of high school as I said, I was worried about getting a job and being an art museum director. And so science didn't play a part. I'm glad I came back there. Well, after that, I decided that now was the time that I wanted to head back into consulting a bit. I wasn't ready at that time to be an entrepreneur. I contemplated it, but I'm glad I didn't then. So I went to work for a company that I had hired while I was at the medical school that we worked together to put all the materials together, the ones that didn't end up really getting used. But they're a local brand strategy firm here in Boston called Samet's Blackstone. They still do wonderful work. They tend to focus on cultural institutions, higher education, companies and organizations with a mission, with a purpose. Even when they were working for corporations, they're best fit as for corporations that do more. And so I ended up, I wore a lot of hats there. So I was part brand strategist based on the fact that I'd been at that point 15 years as a brand marketer. I was also business development to some extent. And this is now the late 2000s. So this is when social started to pop up. So I ended up being their first digital and content strategist. And then because I was one of the only people who had managed people when there was a shift in responsibility for their IT group, I ended up taking over and managing their web development team as well. So I did that for three years. Wearing those multiple hats and really helping them move their brand strategy thinking, I'd like to think I helped them move their brand strategy thinking into what does it look like dispersed digitally. It helped me understand what is it that an organization buys when they buy brand strategy? Where does that work? Where does it break? Because Samus does a wonderful work with positioning and they do great work in graphic identity and getting something that really captures an organization and what it's for. But I could see how organizations would really struggle because they would ask us. They were like, well, what do we say day to day? And that wasn't Samus' role. They were always very clear on it. But there was a gap with what do you do day to day with that? It can be a wonderful brand, a wonderful strategy. But what do you do day to day? So that became the next question I wanted to answer. How do I make that make sense? How do I make a big, high level brand make sense day to day? And that was a place where having gotten in early and social ended up working out for me very well because I was connected with other people here in town that were also doing similar things. And so a friend of mine who was heading up the kind of an experimental digital marketing division of a local advertising agency, a place called Allen and Garrison, said, hey, do you want to come be part of that? And I need somebody who understands. He saw me as someone who really understood how influence networks works because he'd seen me do it. He'd seen me figure out who were the people. And you've been doing this in all these different ways. I've been figuring out how to do it. So he wanted me to come in and do that. And over the course of three years, I ended up taking over that group and expanding it to a broader community management, content, digital, social. And really figuring out, well, where was the break in, OK, now I could figure out, well, this is what we need to be able to produce day-to-day and how important it was to have a high-level strategy that made sense. But I could also start to see the seeds of there's still something missing in between, which is there's still this gap between day-to-day content and high-level brand, which turned out to be messaging, which was a big hole in offerings in the marketplace in general. So we started to build that out a little bit. And then as often happens in organizations, there was a change in leadership. Yes, not so much at the highest level in this case. What happened was the agency acquired another agency, and that changed all the internal dynamics. And things that were, and because they wanted to become a bigger agency, it meant that the boxes around positions got more sharply drawn. And I was at a point in my career where I didn't want that sharp of a box around me. And so I had seen the sparkle of the next step because there was a group that had come in to do training for us while I was at Allen and Garrison on how to develop messages for sales presentations or for pitches, which people in advertising have to do all the time. And I was very involved in almost all, I'd say a significant portion, a majority of the new business pitches, because at that time, everybody wanted social to be tacked on to their creative strategy. And so that was usually where it was, because I had spent so much time presenting on behalf of the organizations I'd worked with before and always focusing on communications, I ended up being a lot of times the very last presenter. And so the person that was in the position of wrapping up the pitch. So when this company came in, it was a company called Oratium, it was a two day workshop after the first day. I was like, I went up to the CEO of the company. I said, this is my dream job, how do I get it? And six months later, I was working for them because I was like, now I don't want to figure this piece out. Like, how do I figure out messaging? How do I do that? And so that's where I ended up next was Oratium, which was a boutique messaging consultancy. It was probably the best way to describe it. So the Oratium training and consulting firm, I think the training was very much where most of the money and the profit and the revenue came in. Training around presentation skills that weren't really about presentation skills. It was much more about understanding how the brain works. The CEO was a big fan of neuroscience. And so this is where I got my science thing fixed back in was a big fan of how do you match messaging to how people's brains work. So it was super interesting. And this started the entrepreneurial edge. It did because they were gracious enough while I was there to allow me to be entrepreneurial while I was there in certain ways. Because at this point, I had learned enough about my career that I really liked working individually with people. And yet this was a company that started training to large groups of people. And I had cut my teeth on training per se in Weight Watchers, which I know we haven't even gotten to yet. So I was very comfortable in that environment, but I really loved just being able to sit down and figure out like, how do we do this? But you also were like at this point, sort of getting the big picture, getting the middle. And then you got yourself into a box at this point that there really, there wasn't anywhere else you could go other than on your own. Yes, because there wasn't really anybody doing the things that I wanted to be doing. So while I was at a radium, one of the normal and natural evolutions out of training was that we would train people on how to build a better sales message and then they would want to do that. Or we would train them on a better way to put a high stakes talk together, like a sales kickoff speech from the CEO. And then they would want help building that. And I ended up being the one that helped do most of that. Coaching, particularly the one-on-one with executives, because at the same time I started at a radium, I started at a radium, it was the same time I started at Tedx Cambridge. And so as the executive producer, where I was coaching those speakers on how to put those talks together. So I developed a coaching methodology with Tedx Cambridge, which then I mapped over to our clients at a radium, which I was between the two of them. You basically were testing out your business before in a startup inside of the business that you already had. And then you knew that you had something enough to go out. Yeah, and it was a very amicable separation because it's coaching and consulting on that level is not a scalable model for a business. It's not. No. And I'm clear on that as an entrepreneur in it. I, you know, that's been clear for me for the get-go. I'm not trying to scale me. Like, if you hire me, you're hiring me and I want to set it up so that you get me and you feel like you're getting me. And so that made sense. I was like, I really want to focus on coaching. I'm like, and I get that doesn't make, that doesn't make you guys money. And so they said, well, great, you know, Godspeed. And I still, if you want to do larger scale training on great understanding of the better way to build messages more broadly or sales pitch, or radium is the way where you should go. It's great stuff. Great stuff. Let's talk before we get into what you're doing now, get into the Weight Watcher story. Cause I think that's like pretty, I don't know what it's like. It's a, that's pretty, pretty important story. It is a pretty important story. So, which feeds into some of the Dallas stuff. Because it was in Dallas where I reached my highest weight. And so, so that's all kind of tied into it. So when I came back from Dallas, I weighed- So it made you very self-conscious being in that environment? Oh my gosh. Yeah, you just add to that. So A, outspoken, B, brunette. I know I'm making a bigger deal about the brunette thing. But I mean, there were literally times where I went and was like, I went in to get my hair done. And people were like, don't you want it to be blonde? And I'm like, oh my God, no. I was like, terrible, blonde hair. Like is it really that important for it to be blonde? But no Englander, outspoken, brunette, and add to that, overweight. And which was not friendly in the bubble that is the villages of southern Methodists. Like you are expected to be- I mean, in the warmer the climate, the more- Yes, the smaller they expect you to be, right? Yeah. Well, the more people see you because you can't, I mean, you have to wear less clothes because that's how you can be. Yes, because it's hot. It's hot. Yes, exactly. And so it was my working there. So I didn't notice it really while I was in school. But what started it all was, my mother had come to help set up my new apartment right before I started at Pritchett. And the night before we were, I was gonna go for my first day. You know, I was just like, well, let me just test out the suit that I'm planning on wearing and it literally didn't close. And I was just like, what? Because I had spent the whole summer in stuff that was loose and form-fitting because I had spent the summer back up in Boston and not in Dallas. And stuff was loose and form-fitting. I hadn't worn anything tailored. I literally could not close the suit that I was supposed to wear the next day. How did it make you feel in that moment when that could happen? Like, what? I was just floored. I really was just so baffled by it. I can look back now and be like, whoopsie, I was in a hurry. It beats a beer the whole time. Like, what do you expect? I was so floored. I just was, and it was panic because I was like, what the hell am I gonna do? Like, how do I feel strong in this new place when it's something that I've always felt very secure about, how I look and how I dress and always feeling put together. I always felt put together. I don't say that I ever felt anything more than that, but I always felt like I'm put together. That all of a sudden, that was just like, coosh. That story was just completely crushed. Yeah, absolutely. So, I would tell this story later in my Weight Watcher meetings, but my mom, she was like, all right, we'll figure this out because the only suit that did fit didn't have buttons on it. It was like one of those things I had bought and then just hadn't gotten it. So, she was like, all right, we're going. Like, we, she like bundled me in a car. We go to the only place that's open at that time of night, which is Walmart, and then like, and Walmart, at least at that time, still had a sewing section. So, we could get, we picked up buttons and we like, picked up a scale, which I stood on and cried because I was like, oh my God, I had never seen that number associated with me. And, but, you know, we got it all put together and my mother's inimitable way. It was like, oh, we're just going to figure it out and we'll figure it out. And so, it started there, but even then, I had mentally changed my perspective of myself that I was the average American woman because at the height that I am, five, four, which is the average American woman, that the weight that I got into was also the average American woman, but the average American woman is overweight. But it had so sunk into my psyche that that's what I was, that it didn't even occur to me that I could be any different, even though all through high school and college, I was small. I mean, I actually weigh the same now as I did in high school. College was more and it just kind of kept going. But it just didn't occur to me. And then I remember meeting, there was this woman, I believe her name was Janet, or Janice, at Pritchett and she was just talking to me and some of my girlfriends at work one day and she was like, yeah, I used to be overweight and she's like, I used to weigh X and she named the number that I was and she's like, and I'm only five, four and I'm like, that's how tall I am. And yet this was this tiny woman and I was just like, wait, what? Like, hey, huh? And it was really interesting because she ended up, she had lost her weight through Jazzercise, such an early nineties thing, it's awesome. You know, and I went to a Jazzercise thing and I'm like, okay, Jazzercise is not for me but it was enough to set this little spark in my mind that there was something that it was possible. I'm like, wait, she did it and I would never have guessed that she was overweight and she was describing how she felt before she lost weight to a T. She was sleepy and it would, yeah, all this stuff. And then she was this super energetic, beautiful, tiny woman and I was like, huh? So it took me a couple of years before I was like, all right, I'm done and I was home, this back in Boston and homesick one day and that was another thing that just got me annoyed, I was sick all the time and I was watching Oprah, homesick and Oprah had on Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York who at the time was Weight Watchers folks person and this was hysterical back and forth between the two of them supposedly trying to make chocolate chip cookies when neither of them clearly does any cooking for themselves at all. So it was very funny from that perspective but I also remember Fergie talking about how she could still have wine on Weight Watchers. So I was like, well, all righty then, I wanna figure this out and that plus the fact that my mother-in-law at the time had successfully lost weight on Weight Watchers like the next Saturday I went in and signed up, lost over the course of, from a total high point in Dallas to where I am now is a total of 50, 52 pounds which I've sustained now since 1999 across two kids. And so yeah, I gained weight with both my kids, lost both that so which it's funny because when I talk to kind of anybody about that but particularly doctors they're like, you know that that's really unusual, right? Yeah, this is sustain it. Sustain it, yeah. Not to have the up and down. What do you attribute that to? I think at the beginning it was being a Weight Watchers leader because I was someone who was really, it's had its dark moments for me as well but it's really so tied into A, people's expectations of me but ultimately the way I've grown into that is that it was really important for me to be, the word I like to use is consonant which it's the opposite of dissonant. Congruence is another word you could use for but it was really important for me to be consonant and I became a Weight Watchers leader. I started working for Weight Watchers first as a receptionist which is what they call the people who weigh people and for a year and a half I just did that because I didn't feel like I was the right person to be up in front of the room but that was great training as well because the person at the scale is the person who has to deal in the moment with somebody's reaction and that's the person who has absolutely one-on-one interaction with everybody that comes in. So you end up being the person that learns where people struggle, that learns, starts to figure out what are the concepts that people are getting and they're not getting. What are the things that I can tell people really quickly that it's gonna help turn it around and I had enough people, both receptionists, fellow receptionists and members alike were like, why aren't you a leader? And I was just like, I don't know. So I decided to get the training to become a leader and then never really look back but I always maintained being a receptionist too. So I, at the high point, and I was always doing this in addition to my full-time job, so the most that I, at the high point there was about a five to seven year stretch of the 13 years I was a leader where it was five meetings a week that I would lead. Two on Sunday, there was Wednesday night, Thursday morning, Saturday, and then I would also, it was a receptionist, at least one night a week as well. And so I think part of what helped me maintain at the beginning was that there was no way I was gonna get up in front of people and not do what I was asking them to do. And so it was a form of self-accountability and it became so effective that in fact, eventually that was exactly the same reason why I stopped being a Weight Watcher's leader because it had become so second nature that I was no longer able to really put myself in the moment where they were and I didn't think that was fair. Yeah, because you had just, like anything else, and be honest, your whole life had been three years and a half. So 13, like my longest running job was Weight Watchers and it was 15 years. For me to do have done anything for that long. But that's weird, but three is the number that does, it just, it ran its course and I think it ran its course, what you were doing it, because you thought it would just have it in second nature anymore. It's like you're going to, and I think the end of it, I think the important thing is to know when the end is and then go on to the next thing. And that part, that happened, it was another one of those things where a bunch of things happened at the same time that made it clear that it was the right time. So I got divorced right around that time. Weight Watchers changed its program again. And the thing is that any time Weight Watchers changes its program, the program is as wonderful as it is. The programs are really geared towards losing weight and not so much maintaining it. And because I had always been so successful on Weight Watchers, I had nothing to lose. So I couldn't experience the new program as somebody losing weight. I could only experience as somebody maintaining it. And I just got to a point where I was just like, I can't. Time to go. I can't make that up. I will not be anything but truthful. And I don't want to represent that I'm still struggling with it when I'm not. I get that I can stand up there and be a role model for people. But I know for me, it felt like I was most effective when I could be right there in the trenches with them and go, I get it. Of course, emotionally, and when you can't, then bridge the gap. Yep. So let's go where you are right now, doing a lot of great stuff and then we'll put stuff in the show notes about speaking and how can people reach out to you. So what advice would you have for someone who wants to create a great speech? Because people always say, well, I want to go create something great and fast track it and not take the slow boat of doing it. Like what are a few things that you would tell someone to start doing in order to get down that road? It builds on that idea of consonants that I was saying. I mean, it's the best speeches and the best messages because really that's ultimately a speech is just a crystallization of a message. Come from that congruence, that consonants between a couple different things. One is, and the most important pieces is it consonant with you and who you are. And one of the biggest mistakes or one of the biggest missteps, I think I see a lot of people do when they're putting a speech together, particularly if they've got like TEDx or something on the bucket list, is they go looking for an idea that they think will be popular rather than one that is what they've been doing the whole time. And it's- Or eternally motivated. Yeah, and you can look at it as coming from either direction, but if you think even everything we've talked about today, the strongest always, the strongest basis of change is where you are right now. And if you're not happy with where you are, then you can't make that leap. The biggest leaps start on stable ground. Like that's a thing I learned at Weight Watchers. The people who would walk in, you could come up with as many different things and rules of thumb for who would be successful and who would not. But the only one that was consistent over time, the only one that was consistent over time was somebody who was happy with who they were as a person. They may not have, and they've just felt like the outside didn't match. And they weren't waiting to be a better person when they lost weight. They were already happy with where they were as a person. And that same thing is true. They felt enough sort of a la Brene Brown today, right? Yeah, that this is stable. That say, you know what? I get that, like the way I always described it when I, when people say, well, why did you lose weight? And I say, I lost weight because I wanted to reduce the traffic noise in my head. Yes, there was some vanity there, but I just wanted, there were too many other cool things for me to focus on rather than how much my hips were shaking when I was walking down a street. Like that was distracting for me. And I'm like, it's distracting me from things that I care about more. So I want that to go away because I want to be able to focus on the things I want to be able to focus on. And the people that I would see be successful from Weight Watchers, the brands I would see, the companies I'd see that were most successful are the ones that managed to capture and build on what they were already manifesting. Like what they already were, rather than here's the thing I want to be, what do I need to do to build there? Because when you focus only on where you want to go, you're focusing on that end goal and the bridge, and you're completely ignoring that it's not anchored to anything. And so when it comes to a great speech, you are, everybody is already living a really powerful message. Your job is to figure out what that message is. Not to go manufacture it, to reveal the one that you're already. If not, you're gonna keep struggling with it all the time. Always, you're always... Or you're gonna come up with a good speech but not a great speech. Right, so can you make money on it? Can you have a good speaking career? Can people invite you to speak with it? Yes, but I've discovered in this year that I've been an entrepreneur and doing this work that I'm for people who want more than that. I want people who, I want people who really say, I really want to be great and I'm willing to do that work. I'm willing to do the research, I'm willing to do that digging, I'm willing to do that work to really figure out what that is. And I'm willing for that to be surprised by what that is. And I see that with my corporate clients because I do the same process that I do for speeches with companies as a pre-branding exercise because one of the things I learn from being a brand strategist is like that doesn't, it doesn't matter how much money you spend on a brand strategy if you don't actually understand what your company's all about. So what I discovered is like we can do the same thing, the same thing that helps, can help us get to the core of an idea for a person. I can do in the same amount of, half day to a day for a company and come to the same kind of clarity. If you start there, everything is stronger. So that's the first thing is like, is that consonants with the message or the red thread as I call it that you're already using. And then the other consonants that's important from a speech standpoint is it needs to be constant with what your goals are. So, and what I mean by that is if you wanna be a keynote speaker at conferences, but your message and the thing that you totally love is like down and dirty workshops, then those are two things that are not on the surface necessarily going to line up. So that means you need to be really clear about not that that's not possible, but it's again gonna take more thought and more work in order to make those things work with each other. Either it means that you're gonna have a different, are we over our time? That's possible. 438. Yeah, probably. Oh, okay. And sorry, we're in the middle of something. Is there any way that we can extend? Yeah, you could actually, yeah. Yeah, would that be all right? Super, thanks, so sorry. Okay, thanks. Sorry. All right, we can edit. We can just edit it out, so, yeah, I'm sorry. Where's the best place to start? So the other thing that we have to be constant about is between what that message is and what your goals are. Because if your goals are to be a keynote conference speaker, but the message that you have is a really tactical down and dirty how-to, then that means that it's not that that goal is impossible, but it means that you're gonna have to be willing to do some different things in order to get those two things to line up. Now, different things, one of them can be, well, why do you want to be a keynote speaker? Is it an income thing? Because you could probably make just as much money as a really effective trainer and get to it that way, right? Or you can say, are you willing to bust the model of keynote speaking and make it much more experiential? That's a way to do it, too. It may mean that you're harder to market. It may mean that it's gonna be slower for you to get to where you're going, but again, are you willing to do that? Then the third thing that I think that needs to be consonant for a great speech is that you need to be consonant with what the audience needs in the moment. And that, and so this is a place where I differ from some people because there's some people who say, well, you should be, if you are a jeans-wearing cowboy boot-wear in person all the time, then never change it. And I'm of the mind and of the opinion that the message is more important than anything else. So if that means for a particular audience, it makes more sense for you to shift a little bit. And I'm not saying to divest of your normal personal style, but shift a little bit. You can still wear the cowboy boots. Can you wear them with a suit instead? Like you are, Jason. Can you shift that or your style? Because if you're super, super casual, but you're speaking to investment bankers, I think your message is gonna be heard better. It's gonna detract. It's gonna detract. And so being able to be fluid in that way, I think is where the most power comes. That's fantastic. Well, thank you for being on another episode of Executive Breakthroughs. She's a fantastic speaking coach, so I'll just give that out. Thank you. And we'll give all the information on a lot of other tidbits in the show notes that you'll be able to take your speech, whether you're on a corporation or an individual up to the highest level. So thank you again for being on the show. You're welcome. Thanks for having me.