Episode 41 - Being Playful with Public Speaking: Interview with Melanie Levenberg

<p>In this episode, I interview Melanie Levenberg. Melanie is the Co-Founder of Impact Entrepreneurs &amp; CEO of PL3Y Inc. She is also an international speaker and TEDx presenter. Melanie helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses with purpose.</p> <p><strong>What we discuss in this episode:</strong></p> <p><strong>Turning fear into excitement</strong></p> <p>Being an outgoing person, she did not have any problems talking to 30 people at once. However, the notion of being on stage brought fear into Melanie‘s head. It was way beyond her comfort zone. It made her become a version of herself that she didn’t recognize, she experienced behaviors like nervousness and fear.</p> <p>Telling her story became so serious that she no longer found it fun. Melanie wondered how she can turn something serious into fun. Having Play in your life allows us to turn into better versions of ourselves, as we are more creative and connected. So Play was a rediscovery. Play is for anything that had been turned into something serious.</p> <p>Every human has a different way to express some joy or spark that they get that makes them feel more alive when they have some sort of Play in their life. For some people, this may be like sudoku, or being witty or sarcastic. It doesn’t have to be the traditional definition of play, therefore, there are so many different ways we can play.</p> <p><strong>Shifting the energy of an entire room</strong></p> <p>People tend to zone out when they watch someone on stage pass a 20-minute mark. So when speeches sometimes go a little bit longer even to an hour, there needs to be some sort of multimedia resource provided, for example, a presentation. So Melanie wanted to coach the audience into meeting with her. Melanie‘s purpose when it came to being on that stage, it was not for her, it was for the audience. That TEDx stage was the biggest she had been on, not in the sense of the number of people but in the sense of how significant it was. Usually, TEDTalks have the spotlight on the person speaking, and it is so