THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Lex Vernon:
What are the messages that they want to be known for, how to be able to move through all the sensation that comes up when they have to get visible and when they’re calling people to take action? In some way or another, that’s what I’ve been doing for over a decade now, is helping people with presentations, with high stakes communication, and with cultivating their thought leadership.
Speaker 2:
It’s The Inspiration Place Podcast with artist Miriam Schulman.
Welcome to The Inspiration Place Podcast, an art world insider podcast for artists, by an artist where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman:
Well, hello there, passion maker. This is Miriam Schulman, your curator of inspiration and you’re listening to episode number 184 of The Inspiration Place Podcast. I am so grateful that you’re here.
Today, we’re talking all about becoming more visible and embracing more speaking opportunities. Now, you may not think you want to speak and you’re not looking for opportunities, but you might be asked to speak and you don’t want to turn those opportunities down. You’re going to speak.
They’re going to ask you to speak about your art, whether that is in a workshop for students, maybe it is in front of artist peers, or you have a meet the artist day or a gallery presentation. These are all opportunities that if you embrace them, they will build your art career, so you do not want your fear of visibility and public speaking to sabotage your success.
By the way, before we dive into today’s episode, and I have a special guest today who is an expert on all things speaking and visibility, I wanted to make sure that you knew about my free masterclass, how to sell more art without being in Insta famous. So, you do not have to spend countless hours building a social media following to sell more art.
In this free masterclass, I’m going to break down for you the five most common artists’ mistakes. Fear of selling is one of them that may not surprise you and the five things you should be doing instead. You want to make sure that you don’t miss it. I’ve just added additional show times to make it even easier for you to join me. So, if you tried to join before and the date didn’t work out or the time didn’t workout, now, I have lots of times for you to pick. So, head on over to schulmanart.com/sellmoreart and I’ll see you there. Now, back to the show.
Dubbed a Moxi Maven by President Obama’s White House of Public Engagement for her unique and effective approach to high stakes communication and leadership development. Our guest is a sought after keynote speaker and communication and thought leadership coach advisor, and fractional chief communications officer. She supported thousands of leaders, coaches, and speakers through her Step Into Your Moxi keynotes, corporate offerings, online training, live events, and mastermind programs.
She’s also the creator of the first of its kind Step Into Your Moxi Certification, which prepares business leaders and the coaches and trainers who develop them, to speak up for the ideas and issues that matter to them as they show their employees and clients do the same.
Since winning the Miss Junior America competition, hot stuff, our guest has delivered public speaking, corporate communication, and leadership programs for Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, government, and educational institutions. Ooh, there’s a lot of credentials here, professional associations, United Nations, and she is a TEDx woman speaker.
Our guest has contributed to media such as CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS entrepreneur.com, forbes.com, inc.com, European Business Review, and Women’s Health magazine. She’s also the author of multiple books, including the award winning, Step Into Your Moxi: Amplify Your Voice, Visibility, and Influence in the World. She’s also the creator of the popular LinkedIn Learning course, Communicating to Drive People to Take Action and the host of the Moxielicious Podcast. Please welcome to The Inspiration Place, Lex Vernon.
Lex Vernon:
Woo-hoo. Thank you so much for having me.
Miriam Schulman:
I was like saying your last name and realized I didn’t confirm how to pronounce it with you. I was like, “This better be right.”
Lex Vernon:
You can call me Vermon like my very first radio interview where he consistently called me Vermon throughout and it was a radio and it didn’t feel like there was an opportunity to correct. So no, you’re great Vernon it is.
Miriam Schulman:
I’m like the queen of malapropisms anyway, because I have a ideological processing problem. I had one guest whose name was Esty, I kept calling her Etsy, so embarrassed.
Lex Vernon:
Well, it makes sense, because Etsy’s something that you can easily cling to. It’s probably a site you use, so therefore you make that association.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. Anyway, I want to dive in a little bit into your book.
Lex Vernon:
Okay.
Miriam Schulman:
Right away. This is just the biographical stuff. You spent some time in the south in Alabama, then you were in New York and…
Lex Vernon:
I have not been to Alabama, although that’s fun.
Miriam Schulman:
Wait, where was the Space Camp?
Lex Vernon:
Yes. Yes. Yes. That was a week of my life. You are totally correct. I did go to Space Camp when I was 11 or 12 years old.
Miriam Schulman:
So, that little story brought me right back to when I was probably a little younger, maybe 10 and we had just moved to Atlanta. I’m this dark haired, Jewish girl with a lot more hair than all the blondes who lived in my Southern town, right outside of Atlanta. Well, it was Atlanta, but not the city and that was… I’m 50, so this was a long time ago before all the New Yorkers moved down to Atlanta and it was all very blond. I wanted to look like the blonde friends I had and I cut my eyebrows off in the fourth grade. I was-
Lex Vernon:
Oh no.
Miriam Schulman:
… like, “I want to look like that.” It was not a good look for that year, not a good look.
Lex Vernon:
Kids can be brutal. So, for some context, yes, I absolutely got picked on for having long arm hair when I was 11 or 12 years old and went to the space camp, but it was super passive-aggressive where nobody said it to my face. Instead, they were all writing about it in the little year books that they gave at the end of this experience.
Miriam Schulman:
So mean.
Lex Vernon:
The last day I saw it open at lunch and it said, “We’ll never forget our hairy beast,” and it was right next to my photo. Interesting, since I have published the book, my daughter is now eight years old, but the year the book came out, she was four or five. A girl in her class had already told her that, “You have a lot of arm hair and I don’t like it.”
Miriam Schulman:
Oh really?
Lex Vernon:
I mean this happened to me in 11 or 12, but I’m like, this happened to her in preschool, pre-K so four or five years old.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s so sad.
Lex Vernon:
Kids, but particularly girls can be really brutal. I find that my daughter like me, very sensitive, artistic soul. It’s so hard to be able to block out that, that’s that person’s beef and not internalize it. Even if, she’s a butting feminist and she knows a lot more than the average young person about body image and empowerment, but still she’s like, “Even though the girl’s acting like a jerk, it still hurts.”
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. I don’t recall getting picked on for that reason. I probably got picked on for other reasons. I think that was more like, I just knew I was different and I wanted to make myself the same as everybody else and they all had wispy blonde eyebrows. I was like, “Oh, there’s my answer.”
Okay. You were speaking up about yourself in Space Camp, and then somehow you ended up in New York at some point in the block?
Lex Vernon:
Yeah. As a kid, I moved around a little bit, not as much as somebody whose parents were in the military, but I was born in Los Angeles, wound up moving to Seattle, middle school, high school years. Did a lot of crazy summer camps and then moved to Las Vegas for my undergrad and wound up in New York City for graduate school and lived there for the beginning of my career before coming back to Las Vegas where I am now.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. I’m in New York now. When I was a kid, we moved around a lot too. Again, not because of military reasons, just because parental divorces and deaths and things like that. Yeah, we moved around a lot too.
You took us on this journey in this book, which it’s beautiful the way you wove in your stories of things that were happening throughout your life. Some of them much more painful than others. I don’t know if we’re going to get into that today, but I want to know fast forward to where you are now.
You quickly became somebody who you took your theater experience and your speaking experience, how did you leverage that into someone who speak? I mean, it makes sense now looking back, but when you started, you weren’t there yet, right? It was not like, “I’m going to grow up and be a corporate speaker trader.”
Lex Vernon:
No, although, when you look back on your career, sometimes you see all of these seeds and you’re like, “Why did it take me this long to figure it out?” But I almost never get asked to tell the story, but I’m going to tell it because I think it’s relevant to probably a lot of people in your audience. That, when I moved to New York for grad school, my vision was being an off-Broadway experimental theater, performing artist person and I did that.
I didn’t have the dream of being in Hollywood. I wanted to make cool crap that was provocative and that played in that liminal space between pain and pleasure and sexuality. So, NYU had this experimental theater program, it was a perfect fit for me. I wound up having a graduate assistantship working for this organization that used to be housed at NYU then it moved to the city, University of New York that was all about using the creative, performing arts to explore social justice and issues of diversity and so forth.
I had a pretty decent graduate assistantship that then morphed into a full-time role ride as I was finishing. I had a salary, I had health benefits. My boyfriend at the time still lived in Las Vegas. He was able to come to New York and we became a domestic partnership, it was wonderful. I was working for an experimental theater company in the evenings. I was producing a burlesque show, I was doing all of these performing arts things. I was teaching theater and women’s studies for a couple of universities. Then, I wound up being featured in backstage, which for those who are in the performing arts, you might have some context. That’s a big deal to be featured as somebody who has this non-traditional really successful performing arts career.
I remember reading this and sobbing because I was so burnt out and I was 26, 27 years old. I was a kid, but I was working 60, 70 hours a week, doing work I was pretty jazzed about, but making in total $40,000 a year. I thought, “If I’m an archetype for success, there’s something seriously wrong.”
Shortly after that, my now husband asked what at the time felt like a really rhetorical question, “Will you marry me?” Because I could answer that question, we’d been together for a pretty long time at that point, but I couldn’t answer what in my opinion was a much more pressing and provocative question that I needed to answer, which was, who do I want to be by the time I get married? I don’t want to say I do to somebody else if I feel like I am out of lockstep with myself.
And so, it was around that time that some other folks who knew all the things that I was caring said, “What’s the part of your work in our organization that you really enjoy the most?” I thought about it and I said, “The facilitation,” and they said, “There are people who facilitate transformation, that’s their full-time thing. They do that one-on-one and they do it in groups and that’s called being a coach.”
And so, I got really curious, I signed up for all the coach exploration courses that I could and within nine months time, I was determined to build my own coaching business. Dave noticed of my organization, convinced them to actually let me take this, one of my favorite projects, which was producing this New York City student Shakespeare festival and doing it as a consultant and turning it more into a teacher coaching experience while I built my own thing, but I had no idea really what I was building.
Sometimes I was coaching creatives and artists. Sometimes I was coaching non-profit professionals. Sometimes I was coaching people who were doing grassroots activism and none of the coaching was really profitable. What started to happen was that, I would get asked to speak all of the time. I started to recognize that, not only was I good at speaking, but also speaking was a way to bring clients into my business. And so, over the course of the next few years, there were a couple of events that happened in close succession, where I realized, “This is not just a zone of passion for me, it’s a zone of genius.”
I’m really good. I’m actually even better at coaching than I am at speaking in terms of helping people figure out, what are the messages that they want to be known for, how to be able to move through all the sensation that comes up when they have to get visible and when they’re calling people to take action? In some way or another, that’s what I’ve been doing for over a decade now, is helping people with presentations, with high stakes communication, and with cultivating their thought leadership and I love it.
Miriam Schulman:
I love the way you just told that story, but one thing I want to put a highlighter through that everyone needs to answer this question for themselves is, who do you want to be? Who do you want to be?
Lex Vernon:
Yeah, I didn’t want to be broke and I didn’t need to be rich. I’m really honest. I’m not somebody who’s inherently motivated by wealth, but I’m inherently motivated by financial comfort.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah.
Lex Vernon:
I think having a parent who is an entrepreneur, where like one moment he’d be renting a limousine to pick me up at school and all of the carpool kids for my birthday in a limo and taking us out for a meal. Then, it was like applying for financial aid the next year. All of that whiplash was something I was determined not to recreate. And so, even though another driver of mine is justice and being able to elevate marginalized voices, I wanted to do that work, but I needed to do it in a way that I wasn’t always feeling like poverty was at the door. Because I don’t know if it’s the Jewish genes, the Greek genes, a mix of them, but I’m definitely wired for anxiety. And so, having that financial safety net was really important and entrepreneurship for me was the pathway toward that.
Miriam Schulman:
I don’t know Greek history, but ancestral trauma, of course the people who survived the Holocaust, the programs were the anxious ones who knew to run and get out or hide.
Lex Vernon:
Yes, and that’s 100% our story, right?
Miriam Schulman:
Right. That’s our story.
Lex Vernon:
I lived in Brooklyn right before everybody else who stayed and was cautious perished.
Miriam Schulman:
So, that’s why we have so many neurotic Jewish people because those are the people who survived, of course. Okay. So I want to now make this really relevant for my audience, the people who listen to me and what I know that some of them are struggling with.
I serve a lot of visual artists. They’re very comfortable in their studio. They’re introverted. I’m actually introverted, but I also am comfortable because I liked the theater like you when I was in high school. That was something I did it, but it’s really hard for someone who doesn’t have those experiences and they’re in their studio and now, suddenly, they’re asked to speak.
I have one client in particular who had to speak in front of a professional organization about her craft. When she came to the coaching meeting, it was an hour after that whole thing had happened and she was still blushing because it was so hard for her to speak in front of other people. So, let’s talk to her and everyone who is like her, who they know they’re going to be in situations where if they want to improve their career, they’re going to have to speak, meet the artist day, speak in the galleries, speak to collectors. It’s hard, whether it’s an audience of 10, 100, 1,000 or even two, it can be hard for people, so let’s start there.
Lex Vernon:
There’s so much I want to say about this where I suspect it will be most helpful for people who are listening, is to invite you into a reframe. That reframe is that, what we’re typically feeling when we are getting ready to speak or when we’re actually speaking, whether it’s on Zoom or whether it’s in front of an audience that’s live, is sensation.
The reason I’m being really specific about labeling it sensation is, the minute we say, “I’m feeling scared, I’m feeling anxious, I’m feeling fearful,” we immediately go into a story. It starts a chain reaction of negative results where we go into shallow breathing, where we tend to repeat the fear and so we magnify it. We cut off blood flow and we start to feel like we’re a victim of the sensation rather than no, we’re a co-creator of it. We have choice in how we respond when it comes up.
So, to hang out in this sensation space a little bit longer, it really is a habit like anything else. But one of the things that started a chain reaction of positive result for me, because I similarly am an introvert, even though I was doing a lot of speaking, I was shaking. I talk about in the book the very first time that I ever gave a speech in front of my classmates, I was laughed at. I didn’t have a great history with public speaking and it wasn’t until I recognized that, most of the meshugas was really coming from the minute I started to feel something going into gloom and doom rather than changing the narrative to say, “Oh thank goodness.”
That is literally my go-to now. Oh, thank goodness, because a few things happen when we start to, not only normalize, but actually celebrate the sensation. It triggers within us that sense that’s true that we’re in the game, we’re doing something, we’re speaking up. In the arena, we’re playing to our edge, whatever analogy is helpful to use and it means that we are stepping into our thought leadership.
So, that’s like a foundational point is to notice and to celebrate, but then one more thing and then you can take this wherever you want to go, Miriam. Is to then be really cognizant of, what are we doing with our breath when we’re feeling that sensation? Because the greatest gift we can give ourselves is to slow down. It’s to slow down and that can take a variety of different forms.
Visualizing the punctuation we’re using so that we are very cognizant of putting in commas where we take a quick breath. Imagining when we’re speaking that we put in periods at the ends of sentences and hold. It also means that we give ourselves permission to stop and smile anytime we’re saying something and our brains and our mouths are out of lockstep.
So, whenever I do the strategy, whether it’s somebody who is truly telling themselves they’re terrified with public speaking or it’s an executive who is simply working on more executive presence and I say, “Anytime, you’re not sure what you’re going to say next, stop, smile with your mouth, with your eyes. If you’re on camera, look at the little green light. If you’re in front of a room, stop and smile, and actually look at the eyes of the people you’re with, it will slow you down. It will weed out those filler words, but perhaps most importantly, your heart rate will go down because you’re bringing more blood flow throughout your body.”
And so, looking at the physiology is as important as having great content to share, because all the great content in the world doesn’t matter if our bodies are revving up and we don’t know how to be present with that sensation while we speak through it.
Miriam Schulman:
You shared such beautiful practical advice just now. I mean, I think people are going to want to rewind and listen to it again. There was two things I just wanted to add to it. I mean, you really gave a very practical way of approaching it.
One thing that I like to talk, or at least I shared to this woman during the coaching call, I said to her, she was like, “how do I get that feeling to go away?” I said, “Well, it’s not that, it’s like when you were a little kid and you’re waiting into the waves and the wave is going to knock you over.” Actually, this analogy comes from Pema Chodron, so I’d love to take credit for it, but she’s the brilliance behind this.
There’s a little book called Fail Better that she gave as a commencement speech and this is part of that. But the idea is that, when you first wade into the ocean, the waves are going to knock you over and you have sand in your bathing suit and it’s a horrible experience. Now, as you go deeper into the ocean, the waves are still coming, but they no longer knock you over, so it’s exactly what you’re talking about, Lexi, is like that you’re just embracing that feeling and you’re going with it. You’re riding those waves. Those waves are still there. Whatever those emotions are, they are still there and they’re still coming, but you are going with it.
I also love what you said about visualizing punctuation. I’ve never heard that tip before. I think for a visual artist, that is very powerful. One thing that I use myself when I’m in a podcast, when I am the guest on a podcast and I’ve had a difficult question lobbed at me, I will pause and I say, “That’s a really good question.” That gives me that time to just regroup and gather my thoughts and think about what I have to say. So like you said, so I’m less likely to use this filler words while I’m thinking of what to say. Now, I do want to talk about Moxi, let’s go there. What does it mean then to step into your Moxi?
Lex Vernon:
I refer to it as the process of developing the mindset and the skillset, to be able to walk into any room, into any conversation, onto any live or virtual stage and unapologetically speak up for yourself, for the ideas, and issues that matter most to you and to call people to take action. There’s a lot embedded in that answer because so much work about speaking focuses on speaking confidence.
I would say by the time I was 30, 35 years old, I had easily gotten my 10,000 hours of FaceTime in front of live and virtual audiences. But I still felt like I wanted to retch most of the time, because the problem was, not that I didn’t have experience, it was that I hadn’t shifted my relationship to what I was feeling.
The reason this definition is so important to me and fuels all the work that I do is that, it’s not just about having confidence, nor is it about being word perfect and never using a filler word again. It’s really being clear that your communication is driving people to take action. So, anytime we open our mouths and we want someone to do something, whether that’s to think differently, whether that is to shift a habit, develop a new behavior, purchase something from us, we’re trying to move people to take action.
I’ve encountered a lot of people who are really sanitized and polished communicators. They’ve got the expert thing drilled down, but people don’t follow them. They seem credible, but there’s no warmth. There’s no humanity. There’s actually no mess and as a result, it’s actually getting them in their own way of making the kind of impact that they want.
And so, I get really excited whenever I’m working with creative types, whether they’re entrepreneurs or whether they’re artists, because rarely is the problem that you curse too much, that you use filler words, that you’re a little quirky and sometimes your humor’s inappropriate, that’s the stuff that makes you. Usually the problem is that, we don’t have structures that we can use in everyday communication, but presentations that let us just quickly identify, what’s my end goal here? If I’m successful, how will I know? What’s my metric for success? Then, using that as a filter for what it is that we’re going to say so that we’re not just speaking because we’re entitled to, but rather our communication is moving the person or the people who are listening towards some outcome.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. Let’s talk about the outcome because that is something else that trips some of my listeners and my clients is that, really putting out that strong call to action and being clear about what they want people to do next. So, what are your top tips for being clear about that?
Lex Vernon:
Every time you’re about to open your mouth, stopping for a minute or 30 seconds and saying, “What am I hoping to achieve here?” If you have a presentation that’s coming up or an interview asking, what’s the ideal call to action? That’s different than saying, “I want somebody to invest in my program, buy my art, sign up on my list.” That might be a piece of it, but the best calls to action are two-fold.
One is the, how do I demonstrate I’m ready to take action? That might be the signing up for a call, joining somebody’s email newsletter list, whatever it is. But then there’s the other piece of, what do you want someone to do for themselves? Spoiler alert, I have an agenda today that people who are listening will recognize that, if they know that their ideas, their creative work, their products, and services can positively, or perhaps radically improve people’s lives, then it’s not only an opportunity to get visible, but it’s really a responsibility so that we can positively impact more people. That is totally my agenda.
I use that then as my filter for, what is it that going to say? Is it moving people toward that awareness? Because what I’m saying is, either moving people toward it or it’s getting in the way of people moving toward it, and then I need to stop talking or say something different to get back on the train that I’m trying to move forward.
Miriam Schulman:
Lexi, I’ve been calling Lexi this whole time. Is that okay?
Lex Vernon:
Yeah.
Miriam Schulman:
Is it Lex or Alexia?
Lex Vernon:
Lex, Lexi, or Alexia-
Miriam Schulman:
When people call you Lexi is fine?
Lex Vernon:
… all work.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. I don’t know. Lexi, it feels right to me. Okay. If people wanted to come meet you in person and come to Las Vegas and learn these skills, do you have any way for them to do that?
Lex Vernon:
Yes. I have a home, they could show up there. No, you don’t want to show up at my home. I lead an event that is called Step Into Your Moxi live, which just so happens to be coming up. It’s April 21st through 22nd in Las Vegas, and it’s all about how to develop the confidence, the charisma, and the communication skills to get visible, to speak up and stand out as a thought leader.
It’s one of those events where people are not sitting and being lectured to, you’ll see on the event page. Every picture is of somebody standing up, doing work as a group, because it’s really about getting people up. Actually replicating the feelings that come up when they’re getting visible, giving people those strategies and tools to be present and speak through it. But also, to clarify their message and make sure that they’re having the impact that they’re being persuasive in an ethical way, the way that they want to be.
Miriam Schulman:
I love that. Okay. I happened to have the URL right here. It is stepintoyourmoxi.com/live-event/. You can also find the link to that in the show notes, which is schulmanarts.com/184, I think I said that earlier.
Lex Vernon:
Yeah.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. By the way, don’t forget if you like this episode, then you have to check out my free master class. If you’re afraid of selling, if you’re afraid of what people might think of you, if you raised your prices, don’t worry my friend, you’re not alone. You can be unapologetically you and sell more art. To learn how go to schulmanart.com/sellmoreart.
All right, Lex, do you have any last words for my listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Lex Vernon:
There’s so much that I want for people who are listening and perhaps at the very top of that list is, to recognize that if you are somebody who identifies as a quiet, introverted person that, that can be your superpower with speaking.
90% of the clients that I’ve worked with for 15 years at this point have identified as introverts. So, if you’re an extrovert, it’s not that I don’t love you, but I’m really speaking up to the introverts here. That the key is not contorting yourself into who you think audiences want you to be, rather it’s being unapologetic about who you naturally are and giving yourselves opportunity to layer in some simple strategies, both so that you can embody your message and feel more presence in your body and so, that you can clean up some of your messaging. But that speaking, like most things, there’s an art and a science to it and when you get a little bit of both of those things, there’s no end to what you’re able to achieve for yourself and for your business and your creativity.
Miriam Schulman:
Oh, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me here, today, Lexi. I’m so happy to have you. All right my friend, remember you can find links to everything we talked about today in the show notes schulmanart.com/184 and I will see you the same time, same place next week. Stay inspired.
Speaker 2:
Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place Podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram @schulmanart and of course, on schulmanart.com.
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