Make the investment and watch it pay off
About ten years ago, I wrote something in my journal that I still think about: "I feel like I've lost my voice."
Which is a strange thing to write, because nothing had actually happened to my voice. I hadn't been humiliated in a meeting. Nobody had given me bad feedback — if anything, the feedback was great. I had just made a huge career pivot out of advertising and into leadership development at Aritzia, and pretty quickly I was standing in front of rooms of a hundred people, running workshops, facilitating trainings, doing the kind of public, on-your-toes speaking I'd never really had to do before. And somewhere in there, for no reason I could point to except my own ego, I stopped feeling confident saying words out loud. I wasn't nervous, exactly. I just didn't feel like myself.
So I did the thing I always tell people to do when something's nagging at them: I paid for it.
I hired a speaking coach.
The apartment, the book I hated, and the lesson I wasn't ready for
This was hard to find, back then. "Coaching" in 2017 still got you an eye-roll unless you clarified you meant soccer. There was no ChatGPT to ask who the best speaking coach in your city was, and there definitely wasn't a slick online program promising confident public speaking in six weeks. So I found a woman the old-fashioned way, and I'd go to her apartment — which sounds a little sketchy, and honestly, kind of was — and every single session, she'd have me read a chapter of The Untethered Soul out loud. I still don't love that book, mostly because I don't love being told what to read. But she was lovely, and she was a seasoned vet, and we'd watch other people speak and pick apart what worked.
There's one session I still think about all the time. We watched a TED Talk together — I can't for the life of me remember whose — and afterward she asked what I noticed. I told her, honestly, that the thing that struck me was how much I liked the speaker, and that I was a little confused by why I liked her, because she seemed almost under-prepared. Casual. Not polished at all.
My coach smiled and said, "Exactly." Her point was that we all think we're supposed to sound scripted — no ums, no ahs, no pauses — when the truth is people respond to hearing an actual human. It's funny to think that conversation happened ten years before all of us started asking "is this AI?" about every piece of writing and audio we come across. Apparently the answer was right there the whole time: people can tell, and they prefer the human.
The coaching relationship ended not long after that, and something about it never quite landed. Looking back now, I know exactly what was missing: I wasn't using the skill anywhere that actually mattered to me every single day. I was using it at work, sure. But not in a way where the stakes felt real.
150 episodes later, the money finally did its job
Now, a decade later, 150 episodes into this podcast, and I feel more comfortable in how I speak than I ever have — not because I think I've become some dramatically better speaker. I've gotten more fluid, sure, practice does that. But mostly it's because I know I've actually done the thing, over and over, for four years. And my ums, my ahs, my pauses — the exact stuff that coach and I were trying to smooth out — I don't cut any of it anymore. It's what makes me sound like a person. And not one single listener has ever penalized me for it.
The craziest part is the timing. In the same two weeks that I hit this milestone, I got complimented on my vocabulary and my speaking three separate times — which almost never happens to anyone, in my experience. Ten years after paying someone to help me sound better, and after that relationship not even really working the way I'd hoped, the compliments finally showed up. Just not on the timeline I paid for.
So here's my actual point, and it's not a "life lesson from a podium" kind of point — it's smaller than that. If there's something you've been wanting to get better at, and some part of you keeps saying "I'd love to pay someone to help me with this," pay the money. Not because the coach or the course or the program will fix it on schedule. Because the investment is what makes the intention real. A goal on a piece of paper is easy to quietly abandon. Money you've already spent is a lot harder to walk away from.
I have a client who's doing this in real time with pottery, of all things — she's set a goal to make a strawberry bowl by the end of the year, which sounds delicate and specific and slightly ridiculous in the best way. She doesn't know exactly how she'll get there yet. She just knows that showing up to the wheel every week, with that goal in mind, is how it happens. That's the whole trick. Not certainty. Just repetition with intention behind it.
Good things take time. Sometimes ten years. But the process gets to be enjoyable while it's taking that long — and every now and then, you get to look back and be honestly a little stunned by how far you've come.
And now, the actual milestone
This episode is our 150th. We're coming up on four years of this show, and in that time I've had a baby, been postpartum, and now have a school-age kid and a preschooler — while also, somehow, landing in the top 3% of podcasts globally, charting in six countries and counting, and just posting a 372% increase in listens in July alone. I genuinely don't fully know how we got here. I think it's mostly just consistency, and every single person who kept hitting play.
If you want the whole story — the Aritzia workshops, the apartment meetings with the book I hated, the TED Talk that changed how I think about my own voice, and exactly what's happening with the podcast's numbers right now — that's Episode 150.
