Where to Look When You Don’t Know What to Say
Last week I met with someone who asked for help with presentation coaching.
She’d put it out there publicly, in a WhatsApp group we’re both part of. I responded, we made a plan, and a few weeks later we finally sat down for coffee. I didn’t know much about her yet. So we did what you do: we talked.
She told me about her life, casually, the way you do when you’re just getting to know someone. That she’d lived in LA for years, working three jobs at once to make it all work. That she’s moved cities and countries more times than most people dare to — LA, India, Florida, Texas, Montreal, the Azores, and now Lisbon (or something crazy like that!). She’s in her late 30s, a mom of two daughters, and finishing a business degree remotely.
She was hoping to be selected to give the commencement speech at her university. There’s a two-minute video submission first, two questions: how the school prepared her for the future and what it meant to her. She was staring at that blank space where her answer should be.
(Oh and she mentioned the main reason she wanted to be picked was so that her daughters could see her on that stage. That was the whole point. That was why it mattered!)
And she said something I hear more often than you’d think:
“I don’t know what I have to say.”
Sitting right there across from me, she still couldn’t see that everything she needed was already in the story she’d just told me.
She was even considering getting an internship! For the sole purpose of having something new, basically manufacturing something she could point to in her submission video.
That’s when I stopped her.
Here’s what I see happen allll the time — with founders, with executives, with people standing at the edge of a big visibility moment:
The instinct is to look outward. To add. To find something recent and impressive that proves you belong in the room.
But the most powerful thing you can do when you’re put on the spot — when someone hands you a microphone and says tell us about yourself — is go in the opposite direction entirely.
Go inward. Go back. Start excavating.
Here are the three things I told her. Three things worth remembering. Ready?
1. Your personal experience is the raw material. Not your CV.
Credentials tell people what you’ve done. Story tells them who you are. And who you are, the specific, lived, sometimes chaotic version of it, is what actually moves people. And we’re here to be moved!
She isn’t going to win that commencement spot by listing achievements, let’s face it. She’s going to win it by making every person in that room feel seen in their own struggle. The LA years. The three jobs. The daughters. The degree that took longer and looked different and meant more because of it. THAT is the whole speech.
2. The instinct to add credentials is usually a sign you’re looking in the wrong direction.
When we feel underprepared or exposed, we reach for proof. We think: if I just had one more thing, I’d be ready. But that “one more thing” is almost always a distraction from what’s already there — the experience you’ve actually lived, the perspective you’ve genuinely earned.
An internship wouldn’t have made her speech better. It would have made it generic.
3. The “messy” stuff IS the story. Not the obstacle to it.
The non-linear path. The multiple countries. The working-three-jobs chapter. The late-30s degree that doesn’t fit the template. We’re conditioned to apologize for these things, to explain them away, to lead with the polished version. But in storytelling, especially in high-stakes moments, the TEXTURE is everything. The specificity is what makes people lean in. Nobody connects with a perfect trajectory. But everybody connects with a real one.
So she left that café with a completely different brief for herself.
What do I already have that’s worth saying out loud?
The answer was right there the whole time. It always is.
How about you: are you working on a big visibility moment (a pitch, a speech, a presentation) and not sure where to start? Do me a favor and start with your story. The nuggets are already in there, I promise.
BTW that speech is like 10 months away, the video submission is end of the year. I’ll keep you posted on how she does! 🤞
Have a lovely, messy week!
Joana