# 3 - The accidental judge and the woman who moved a wall.

“Do you want to be a judge then”? ...

When I went full time with Amplify I leapt from doing supply teaching to pay the bills (and sometimes jumping up on tables and singing Justin Timberlake to get pupils attention …) to going full time barista at Kahaila - a coffee shop on Brick Lane. That’s when I did my first “meetup” - which led to this moment, of becoming an accidental judge.

I turned up at 19:00 in Bank, London, fresh from my coffee shop duties, ready to coach in the back room for a 1.5 hours workshop on presentation skills. In the front room was a startup pitching competition - and I literally knew NOTHING about startups (I thought B2B was a TV shopping channel, honestly). So when one of the judges pulled out and they said to me “Do you want to be a judge instead of doing the workshop?" I said yes and to this day I don’t really know why. What the heck was I going to say?

I sat in between two Venture Capitalists, and waited for the first person to  pitch. She got up, presented a lot of stuff I didn’t understand … and thankfully it turned out I wasn’t the only one. The investors either side of her started tearing her pitch to pieces - which I didn’t think was very helpful. So when it came to my turn, something took over, I leapt out of my seat and asked her to face the wall nearest to her and to push against it for 30 seconds. With each second she had to apply more pressure. About 10 years before this wall-pushing moment I had had another wall-pushing moment when I auditioned for drama school. I had delivered my monologue in front of another judging panel and the head of voice for the drama school wanted to release my voice more. So she got me to push against a wall for 30 seconds, and when I felt intense pressure build up to use it as a lever to bounce me around to the room and deliver my first line. It had worked 10 years previously - when I bounced around there was so much energy in my voice it completely changed my speech - and I got into drama school. 

I only had a minute with this startup founder and I knew that somewhere amidst her jargon was a story and a voice that needed to get out. I could see how deflated she had been when she received critique from the 2 VC’s, so this was my sixty seconds to help her get something back. And to give her total credit, she did everything I asked, she pushed against the wall, bounded back into the room and not only said her name but actually said, very simply what she did. The room was amazed, I was amazed and she was amazed! 

It is amazing what energy, released at the right time, can do to our stories. We all have energy waiting to get out of us and according to Albert Mehrabian 38% of what we present is tonality - how we say what we say. If we deliver that with no energy it will land like a lead balloon in the room. But if we deliver with energy everything has the potential to change. It did for the startup founder that night and it did for me - it propelled me into a startup scene that desperately needed storytelling skills. From that night on I stumbled into Wayra, then Microsoft Ventures, then Techstars where I met the brilliant Jon Bradford and Amplify truly lifted off. And with every startup I coach I always seek to release energy and story. Since being coached by me, startups have gone on to raise over 8 billion dollars (thank you Jon for helping me to track them on Crunchbase). Brilliant founders are not always brilliant storytellers - but I have loved unlocking there voices to become brilliant storytellers.

I can’t guarantee you 8 billion dollars, but why not prepare for your next presentation/pitch by, instead of reading quietly over the slides and your notes, find a wall, push against it for 30 seconds then deliver your actual first 30 seconds with your new-found once-latent energy. It could just change everything …