Naming a business is always fun. Well, fun at first, when you are full of ideas. Then it gets a bit sticky – because you start second-guessing every suggestion and discarding ideas left, right and centre. This one is too, that one is too hard to spell. There is a great deal of import hanging on a name. It has to immediately say what you do as well as conveying a sense of you and your values. It has to have meaning, in more ways than one. How could I convey a sense of me as a Voice and Confidence Coach, without sounding like a singing teacher or yet another public speaking trainer?
Let’s see, some of the names my friends and I came up with, were;
- Speak Easy
- Chatterbox
- Words not Whispers
- Yggdrasil (because it’s the tree of life, innit? And I’m part Actress, part Life Coach)
- Speak Up
Aaaand so on and so forth … I distinctly remember throwing out my post-it notes and list of ideas. Which was just as well, they were not great.
Then I spoke to my good friend Richard, who I had worked with aeons ago. He was a superb sales trainer back in the day and a brilliant negotiator. He was fantastic at lots of things and taught me a great deal, back in my young and impressionable thirties. Why not Generally Speaking? he said.
Bingo!
I love it because it’s totally me. And it’s totally what my business is about. I want to help people speak up and speak out in everyday situations, in work, in life, in conversations and meetings and daily interactions, in a broad scope of general circumstances, where so many of us feel awkward and backward. Where we go home and think of all the things we could have said, or berate ourselves for staying silent, holding ourselves back, and missing opportunities. Not just coaching people to make presentations or speeches, or public speaking or at grand events and whathaveyou (though of course, I can do that too!).
And you know that feeling when you just know it’s right? Yep, got that straight away. Like, that’s it! And so it was. Richard, I can’t thank you enough.
