Nearly ten years ago, Kelly got connected with Stephanie Weaver – a speaking coach assigned to him for a TedX style talk in Chicago. Now, Stephanie has written a book, “Bitter, Sweet: How to Heal Yourself When Your Family is Broken.” Warning, this episode contains discussion of family sexual abuse. Please listen with care. 

As you know, you were assigned to coach me for a TED-style talk, something I was initilly reluctant to receive. 

“I’ve been a TED-style speaking coach for 15 years, I’ve coached over 300 speakers in total-ish. And I get either hired by individuals who are paying me to help them, and they are very motivated, and then I also will get hired by an organization like NIC or the National Center for Organ Donation Alliance, I work with them now, and they’ll get the people lined up and then they’ll kind of give them to me. There it’s a varying degree of buy-in because they’re not paying for it. And also people don’t realize how much work they are. So then they stick it halfway through and they’re like, ‘My God, what have I signed up for?’ And so I have to be really flexible.” 

You do a lot of public speaking, what’s the difference between the doing and the coaching? 

“I learned a lot about improving my own speaking by being a coach. I never used to rehearse anywhere near as much as I do now. The format of the TEDTalks, the reason they’re so popular is because they’re about a single idea, which is not the case for a keynote or a pitch or different types of speaking that people might do. A presentation might be about 10 ideas, right? So, they’re about a single idea that’s supposed to make the world a better place. That’s the conceit of it – if you want to call it that. But I also look to help the person find the story behind the facts. I do this process that I call the nugget where I interview the people. I have a 10-session process and the first one is an hour. And I’ll ask them about their hobbies and their background and where they grew up. And what I’m looking for is something that can act as a metaphor for the talk and kind of frame the talk, but also, I want to see them light up when they talk about it.” 

Your book deals with family trauma, but it’s also a memoir of your life beyond that and it’s framed by your mom’s recipes. How did that come together?  

“What happened was my dad had passed, and then my mom passed, and I inherited her recipe box. And there was so much in there about her life and my life and our family’s life. And going back to when she was probably in Steno school in the thirties,  there was a couple of typewritten yellowed recipes she must’ve typed up. And so, I started thinking about, well, what would it be like to tell this story? And I really wanted to tell it because I did forgive my parents, even though they never apologized. And I did reconcile with them, even though they never apologized and never acknowledged that this had happened. And I felt like that was an important story to tell. There’s a lot of trauma memoirs out there. There are a lot of great trauma memoirs out there. I didn’t really feel like I needed to add to that canon.”

Photo By: Laura Rosen Bashar