Whenever I need to speak publicly, even if in front of people I know and are comfortable around, my anxiety and heart rate are up. This is something that has happened since I was a kid and although I aware of it, I tend to say the word um when I'm nervous. Earlier this week, I removed the word “um” during a presentation I did at work, and it made a noticeable difference. I felt more confident and I did not walk away second guessing how I sounded, which is something I do often when talking in front of an audience. It was a small change but definitely had a positive impact on how I felt during and after the meeting.

My new main character identity is: I’m a captivating storyteller who has great stories ready to go, and I’m hilarious in conversation and can connect with others instantly through masterful small talk.

I have been keeping plugged into news, doing work and volunteering around the clock and wanting more unstructured joy time for myself and with my kids. I want more out of my career and long for that daily. I have been annoyed by work demands, egos, have been shrinking beneath any big ideas, watching TV before bed and feeling stuck. I know I can have and be more than this and also giving myself a little grace after my partners busy work time that ends today. Grateful to reflect and make these changes even when I feel not ready..😀

Hi, community! I am Rachel Davis and glad to be here. I want to be a grounded and connected person and my communication skills have never been trained. I speak in big rooms with confidence and I am also a mom who wants to be softer. Already I am learning a lot about myself and glad I am not alone in these behaviors. I crave growth for myself, my career and -of course-mostly my babies. I need to work on my tone and I look forward to growing my awareness. I can't thank you enough @Genesis Be 🙏

I've been on stages for over 20 years. And I want to be honest with you about something, it was not a straight climb upward. There were big wins, yes. But there were also very public failures. Bouts of real shame. Moments where I missed the mark badly enough that I had to sit quietly with a question I didn't want to answer: Am I actually built for this? I want to talk about that question specifically, because I think if you're wired the way I'm wired... observant, internal, introverted, someone who processes deeply and feels things more than you let on, failure doesn't just sting. It tends to confirm a story you've already been quietly telling yourself. That you're not quite enough. The people who make it look effortless must have something you don't. Maybe you should have waited until you were more ready. That shame spiral is a particular kind of trap for people like us. Because we're already doing more internal work than most people realize, and when something goes wrong in public, it doesn't just sit on the surface. It goes deep. It gets absorbed. And it can stay there for a long time if you don't know how to work with it. Here's what I eventually learned...not from a book, but from actually failing repeatedly on stages, in front of people, and having to figure out how to come back. Failure, when you don't let it finish you, strips your ego down to something more useful. It teaches you how to listen without defending yourself. How to take feedback without collapsing or shutting down. How to look at what went wrong with enough honesty to actually fix it. That capacity... to stay open when everything in you wants to contract... that became the foundation of what I now call magnetic confidence. And I want to be clear about what I mean by that, because it's different from what most people teach. Magnetic confidence is not the belief that you won't fail. It's not performing certainty you don't feel. It's not telling yourself you're the best in the room. For people who are quiet by nature, that kind of performed confidence doesn't just feel fake — it feels like a betrayal of who you actually are. And it never holds up under real pressure because it was never real to begin with.