“How we present is directly tied to how present we are. We can never be our most passionate, communicative, vulnerable, inspiring selves if we are in our own heads and doubting ourselves the whole time” - Lucia Cesaroni

Unlock Your Charismatic Stage Presence with Lucia Cesaroni

In this episode of the Confessions podcast, we chatted with Lucia Cesaroni, an opera singer, entrepreneur and self-styled evangelist for bringing business and the arts closer together. Lucia shared her journey of pivoting from a successful opera career to launching her own consulting firm focused on empowering corporate executives through performance skills training. 

Some of the biggest takeaways:

• Develop a growth mindset. Look for opportunities to apply your skills in new ways and don’t be afraid to push into uncharted territory. You never know what might stick!

• Focus on the “how,” not just the “what.” Lucia teaches performance skills to equip her clients with the tools they need to communicate with confidence and charisma. We spend so much time preparing the content of our work, but we often neglect how we show up to deliver it.

• Practice self-compassion. Even the most skilled performers don’t always execute perfectly. Learn from your experiences and then move on without judgment. Your worth isn’t defined by any single interaction or event.

• Find what fuels you. For Lucia, empowering others through her performance skills training lights her up. Look for work that ignites your passion, so you can show up fully for your clients and community.

We hope Lucia’s story inspires you to embrace new possibilities in your own work. Keep pushing boundaries, follow your passions, and don’t be afraid to forge new paths. Abundance awaits! Let’s go get it.

Connect with Lucia Cesaroni:

Cesaroni Consulting: https://www.cesaroniconsulting.com/

Lucia Cesaroni (Website): http://luciacesaroni.com/

Linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/lucia-cesaroni-b4821051

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/luciasee/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/LuciaCesaroni

Connect with Cindy:

Cindy Wagman Coaching: https://cindywagman.com/

The Good Partnership: https://www.thegoodpartnership.com/

Connect with Jess: 

Out In the Boons: https://www.outintheboons.me/

Transcript:

00:00:00: Cindy: Welcome to the Confessions podcast. I'm Cindy Wagman.

00:00:03 Jess: And I'm Jess Campbell. We're two former in-house nonprofit pros turned coaches and consultants to purpose-driven organizations.

00:00:11 Cindy: After years of building up our separate six-figure businesses from scratch, we've thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall and have lived to see what sticks.

00:00:20 Jess: We're on a mission to help other nonprofit coaches and consultants looking to start or scale their own businesses past the six-figure mark by pulling back the curtain.

00:00:30 Cindy: Whether you're still working inside a nonprofit and thinking of one day going out on your own, or you've been running your consulting business for years, you understand that working with nonprofits is just different. We're giving you access to the business leaders who serve nonprofits as their clients. You know, the people who truly get it.

00:00:52 Jess: No more gatekeeping, no more secrets. This podcast is going to give you an inside look at what running a successful nonprofit coaching and consulting business looks like. Basically, we're asking people how much money they make, how they get paid, and what has and hasn't worked in their businesses.

00:01:10 Cindy: Listen in as these leaders share their insights, their numbers, and the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to building a nonprofit coaching or consulting business. We're going to empower you to make the power moves that give you the income and freedom you set out to create from day one.

00:01:27 Jess: You ready? Let's go.

00:01:31 Cindy: Hey, Jess.

00:01:32 Jess: Hello.

00:01:36 Cindy: Hey, Lucia. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited for today's conversation. Lucia, you were on my old podcast and one of the top-performing episodes, which is no surprise because you're a performer.

00:01:56 Lucia: Wow. Wow. I'm honored.

00:01:59 Cindy: For those of you joining this, I'm so excited for this conversation. But for those of you joining our guest today is Lucia Cesaroni, and she's the founder of Cesaroni Consulting. She's also a world-renowned opera singer. And I feel like we should just kind of dive in to how you made this transition from being like a full-time opera singer, kind of like at the height of your career, and then the pandemic hit. And we all know, because a lot of us even work with arts organizations, like, not fun. So tell us what happened.

00:02:42 Lucia: Well, suddenly, I went from a full schedule, first of all, delighted to be here. Hello, Jess. Hello, Cin. Thank the world of the pod. Full schedule on theatres in Europe and America and Canada to tumbleweeds, you know, it's like, okay? Well, out of necessity, I need to fill my time. And so I started thinking about what actually if I had to enumerate and clearly articulate my transferable skills. That's where I started my business journey. And so I realized pretty quickly that there were a few needs not being addressed in the sort of creative way I thought I could address them in the corporate sector and the tech sector is where I started looking because. I thought it was logical to assume the kind of skills that I can bring namely performance skills, communication, bringing more charisma and a wider sort of expression and expressive palette, you know, to your communication skills, executive presence, body awareness, you know, all this kind of stuff, dealing with nerves, high-pressure situations, dealing with public feedback, it occurred to me that while there are a lot of executive coaching options for, you know, corporate people, none of them come from this very dynamic, very artistic, risk-taking milieu from whence I come.

00:04:16 Lucia: So I sort of said, I think I could leverage the opera sequence nature of my ideal into the, shall we say, slightly more beige world of banks and big consulting firms, et cetera. So that's, in a nutshell, how I got started. Now, I do workshops for teams and executives. They are from 45 to 90 minutes. Sometimes they'll do a half day, but I find that my stuff is best communicated on your feet, active learning. And it's extremely detailed. And I'm getting literally like up in people's business, touching their rib cage, working with their face and jaw, releasing their potential to literally take up more space in the world, which is always really fun, because you see people in real time, discover, you know, find more groundedness, literally grow taller, you know, and that has of course an emotional impact on people and it's really fun 45 to 90 minutes, sometimes half day, corporate, a lot of tech.

00:05:33 Lucia: I wanted to start with what seemed to me the sorts of people who would need it the most, people who maybe aren't going to get this training elsewhere, be it teams, but then also the outward facing people, the higher level executives who really need, you know, to be in front of cameras sometimes and make board presentations and all kinds of stuff. And now it's also transitioned into doing workshops for MBAs because I started to think like, why are we waiting? And this is the thing I also identified as a hole in the market. Why are we waiting until people are already up there? Why don't we empower them with these skills? you know, closer to the beginning of their journey as leaders.

00:06:14 Lucia: And then at just as an opera singer has to do, they can practice the skills over time. You know, a lot of us by this time have read our Toronto's own Malcolm Gladwell and Outliers. And we know, of course, give or take, generally speaking, 10,000 hours and the truth about performance psychology and about the science of practice. And we know that the longer we can give people to build muscle memory and new neural pathways, the greater we can empower them and the more options they'll have to express themselves. That's what I'm interested in imparting. empowering people to think more like artists think, which is to say outside of the box, having more play and fun, you know, taking themselves less seriously and being performers. My tagline of my business is be a performer.

00:07:13 Cindy: Okay, so I was recently introduced to this concept of intro infotainment. And I'm really curious, because I feel like this might make people listening like prickle a bit. Because, you know, when you're running your own business, you show up as a thought leader. And I think that there is a heavy emphasis on information versus entertainment. And I'm just curious, like, yeah, do you think that that's a responsibility of, of business owners, thought leaders to entertain or, or not?

00:07:53 Lucia: Well, you know, frankly speaking, I entertain, so I come in and do it differently. I know what a lot of the other workshop offerings are. For example, I don't use the PowerPoint. I don't use screens because as you say, you know, There is such an emphasis and it's necessary for professional development to get the information right we need that so to me it's sort of like in the marketplace ideally there would be a balance of I don't think it's the responsibility of every business or every offering to entertain. And it's better for me if they don't, because I certainly will. And this is another part of my mission, which is to better articulate the value of artists and the arts in our country.

00:08:44 Lucia: Speaking of entertainment, we undervalue ourselves and we exist, unfortunately, especially in the classical arts, in a scarcity system and mindset often because, you know, we're always in the red and sort of hand, hand, cap in hand to the government or to, you know, various sponsorship corporations, et cetera. And so that means that often we don't realize our value going up and out, like looking up and going like, wait a minute, people need what I have to offer. And so I think one of the things we have to offer is entertainment, right? And so finding how to plug that in in a valuable way for for other sectors. I don't know if I would use the word responsibility, but for those who can tap it, it is certainly not juiced in the way it is absolutely not being leveraged and really, I don't want to say exploited, that has sort of a negative connotation, but kind of juiced for all it is.

00:09:54 Lucia: I think there's so much more potential to make things more fun, take ourselves less seriously, and still impart the information. Yeah, it's not. I understand why you would say a prickle because it's not necessarily the easiest question. It's not a straightforward answer. It depends on, I think, probably the material. What kind of material are you trying to impart? You know, mine is body, body first, brain second, science-based. But why does science-based have to mean dry ever? You know, so in my case, In my case, it's very hands-on, which I think we'll maybe do a little demo later. But yeah, if you can, make it fun.

00:10:36 Cindy: Yeah. And I think the interesting thing, I have so many thoughts and directions right now, but I want to stay on this because I think that part of what comes up for people is that when we are presenting, when we are doing these trainings and stuff like that, It's really hard for us to be entertaining when we're scared or when all these imposter beliefs come up and we don't have the training that you as an opera singer have to manage our physicality and our mindset to be able to be it's like being entertaining to me is a very specific skill set that's like a add on to the basics.

00:11:25 Cindy: And I think if we're so stuck in fear around the basics, it's really hard to like bring humor or fun activities. So, I mean, I think that's what makes you unique in that you actually teach people how to do these things. So tell us a little bit about how you, what are some of the techniques that you use that we can use if we're like, Damn, I want to be on the stage. I want to be in "infotaining". How do I get out of that? Like stuckness of just being like, okay, I got to just not fuck this up.

00:12:07 Lucia: Yeah. So I hear we hear the words creativity and confidence like bandied about it sort of like sitting there talking about this a while ago organic what does that even mean anymore you know these words that kind of seems to have meaning. I took them though creativity and confidence and broke them down into what I think are their composite parts as I have practiced them as a performer. Namely, body first, brain second. When I go through, we always start a workshop with some breathing exercise and body awareness exercises. Why? Because fundamentally if we do not engage what is called our parasympathetic nervous system now many people will be familiar with this by now that is the override switch to the fight -flight freeze.

00:12:56 Lucia: Phenomenon that happens we want to engage through breath work and body awareness and mindfulness the parasympathetic nervous system number one. Then from breath exercises, it is very valuable to do just a few vocal exercises. Why? Because most people talk all day, we all do in the world, but we have so little awareness, therefore so little choice, and we are reactive rather than active, right? So a lot of the times people's nerves come from, I don't know, I can't look ahead and know what's going to come out. We spend so much time preparing "The What". And very little if any time preparing "The How." And I work with how to prepare the how, which has to start with dealing with nerves, right? Focusing the body and then the mind. I take also my participants through a few very simple mindfulness meditations, very short ones that I myself use when I'm walking to the theater.

00:13:59 Lucia: I also go through building everyone's toolkit so that they have a pre-performance ritual. This is well documented in performance psychology. You talk about a tennis player. You talk about an opera singer. Pick a high-performing under pressure person they have a specific routine that they act why because it engages the parasympathetic nervous system telling the body tells the brain "Hey buddy". You know and that muscle coordination, actually shuts down the parts of the brain, this never ceases to fascinate me, that have to do with overthinking, overanalyzing, and self-criticism.

00:14:48 Lucia: Literally, they turn off when you engage this series of muscle coordinations properly, right? Then let's just say we do all of this, and we can do a little demo. But let's just say it still doesn't work. Your mind is still racing, or whatever. Then I also can give you some tips for what if you have dry mouth in the moment? What if you just need to quickly slow your heart rate? What if you need, et cetera. So I have real applicable and repeatable skills for you to take away and use when the pressure's on. And that's just the nerves.

00:15:28 Cindy: Okay, let's start. Let's dive into this because like, you know, we want exercises and examples because as you said, like, you kind of have to do it to understand it, right? So walk us through some of those exercises or rituals that we can undertake.

00:15:47 Lucia: So first of all, let's just start with what I call coming in for a "soft landing." So just like I'm sitting on an exercise ball, so I bounce around and try not to make people seasick. But so just find your sitz bones, right? Really find your sitz bones and start rolling your shoulders open. And we're all sitting at computer screens all day. And actually, how often do you properly open? Yeah, ow, Jess is saying.

00:16:10 Cindy: I'm pretty sure I have tendonitis in my shoulders.

00:16:16 Lucia: Yeah, I mean, finding that space, right? So first of all, whether you're on a screen or in person, rolling your shoulders just for a minute, what does that actually telegraph to everybody else in the room? You are physically taking up more space, but also for yourself. Power and vulnerability project in the same way.

00:16:42 Jess: Okay, we're back for another round of rapid fire questions. You ready to play? Okay, what you talked about fun, incorporating fun, having fun, you clearly are fun. What do you like to do for fun? Oh my god.

00:17:00 Lucia: I love a party. I mean, that might be some like basic bitch info, but I really do love a party. I love being at events. I love connecting interesting people. I really garner a lot of pleasure from being like, "Hey, weirdo from this sector I don't know much about, but I think is interesting. Talk to my friend who's designing interiors for the Four Seasons." Go and like I watch that magic, I find that really fun and entertaining. What else do I love to do? I mean, I do get to go to Italy a lot because I'm, I'm citizen. I have a house there and going around to vineyards is pretty fun. That is, yeah, that's a good one. I spent the summer, not the summer, August, uh, in all over Southern Italy to some places I hadn't yet been that I wanted to explore. And, highly recommend Puglia as a region destination. Monopoly was the area we were kind of centered in, really, really fab, so travel fun.

00:18:06 Jess: Love it. Love it so much. So you are an opera performer. You've sung on many stages. What is the best venue you've ever performed at?

00:18:19 Lucia: Oh, Great cue. There's a couple of cool, weird ones. So I got to sing with Andrea Bocelli in New York. And this was actually a smaller venue. It was called the Columbus Citizens Foundation, which is this mafia place where all these Italians, it's an Italian club. And I mean, it was delightful for so many reasons. You know who Anthony Scaramucci is? Remember him? He was there and what's that biz fox business reporter woman who's Italian anyway. They're like all these famous Italian media personalities. I was like what's going on? Anyway that was cool, another really really cool one was the O2 arena in London that was a big one to I under.

00:19:09 Lucia: You understand in a way that opera singers usually don't when you're in a venue of like 20,000 people, you walk out on stage, you're like, "Oh my God, this is what Mick Jagger feels like." I was there on a tour, but that was pretty rad. Another really cool one was just last year in Romania in Bucharest. I was in this, bananas, this former Soviet, of course, radio music hall. And it is like the size of Radio City, like it is huge, like 4000-something seats of like, you know, communist splendor. And, you know, and that was bananas because just the scale of the place was really, yeah, intimidating, which is like what they wanted. And that was, that was cool. That was a cool, and that one's on YouTube.

00:19:59 Jess: Okay, cool. We'll have to go check it out. And then lastly, who do you watch or follow or just find as a really great example of, info or entertainer infotainer entertainer?

00:20:13 Lucia: Oh, that's a good, yeah, that's a good question. There are a number of podcasts that I love for this kind of thing. I like to, well, I guess they're sort of, how I built this is, is a great one. I really enjoy, 99% invisible. I really love design stuff. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. There are a few kind of geopolitical economics ones. I like Tyler Cowen has a great one called Conversations with Tyler. It's interesting. In a lot of the media I consume, I listen to, if I think about it, a lot of economists. And I think that's because it's completely different from my line of work. And I learned so many strings come threads come together when you're looking at a macroeconomics perspective and I've learned a lot.

00:21:09 Lucia: Do you know Barry Weiss is the free press? I like some she has some interesting guests that I. Again, kind of heterodox thinkers, sometimes I dip into that world, I find that interesting. Again, though, very different from what I do. And then there's some great pop, like straight up comedy, like entertainment. Like I love Comedy Bang Bang. I will be like a devotee of improv comedy, you know, forever. I love it so much.

00:21:39 Lucia: How did this get made? Do you guys know that? I think Cin and I have talked about this. No? Maybe it was Kate I talked about. Cannot recommend it highly enough. It's a podcast about three improv comedians who now have become famous enough in their own right in movies and TV who break down terrible movies. And like, it's anyway, I absolutely love it. So yeah.

00:22:04 Jess: Yeah, those are good.

00:22;06 Lucia: No, like, I don't know music podcasts, no sort of like nothing like that. It's all it's all far from what I do, which maybe turns my brain off in a good

00:22:16 Jess: Totally. Okay, cool. Thanks for playing.

00:22:23 Lucia: Openness and exposed throat. Right? This is an evolutionary truth. So consider that as you want to inspire and communicate and write in your work context, or maybe in your personal one too, right? Vulnerability has great power. So opening up draws people to you subconsciously. That is a human deep old lizard brain truth. Okay. So finding our sitz bones, opening our chest cavities and shoulders, closing our eyes. And we would take three breaths together. And the way we do this is inhaling through our nose. I will guide it and then exhaling through our mouth to our sound we want to be able to hear the exhale for three counts of three and the idea here is just as we have come from all different contexts all day we now need to arrive and come in for a soft landing together facing the same direction right so that's really important to set ourselves up to be present.

00:23:41 Lucia: Huge for the parasympathetic nervous system, okay? So we'll just do one for now. Let's just practice taking, rolling your shoulders, closing your eyes, finding your sitz bones, feet in the floor. Really feel your feet in the floor. Wiggle a little bit in your pelvis to feel those sitz bones. Feel that the earth in the chair is holding you up. Nice, open, expanded and tall posture. And we inhale for three through the nose.

00:24:08 Lucia: And exhale for three, two, three. Roll the shoulders open, eyes. Already one breath different, right? Small but mindful breath in through the nose, out through the mouth, okay? Next thing I think is very important is actually waking up some of our facial muscles because a thing that we don't do, especially on camera, right? is actually bring awareness and blood flow to these muscles. So just take your peace fingers and put them either side of your earlobes. We are all really crunchy. Open your mouth and rub it. This is your jaw hinge. It's usually pretty crunchy.

00:25:01 Cindy: Can I just tell you a big confession? I actually ended up getting Botox in this muscle because it was so tight that I couldn't, I was getting headaches almost daily from just that tension in the jaw muscle. So there's my.

00:25:19 Lucia: Extreme.

00:25:21 Cindy: That's a confession for a whole different episode, but I'm just saying, girl.

00:25:25 Lucia: Like, hello, taking 20 seconds to just rub your jaw because when you speak, you can't speak without using your jaw. Okay? Give yourself more space. Take those peace fingers, bend them and get underneath. This is actually did you know that the root of your tongue goes all the way under? Well, it sounds kind of like [] Try and say something now while you're doing this.

00:25:52 Cindy: Hello. For everyone who's not watching a video, we're doing this, so do it with us, okay?

00:25:59 Lucia: Do it with us. Now take the peace fingers again and actually move your larynx. Did you know that your tongue went all the way down there.

00:26:10 Cindy: Oh my gosh, I feel so weird.

00:26:12 Lucia: I know it's crunchy. It's okay. It's just cartilage. Just crunchy. Why do we do this? To bring awareness, slow down our heart rate, start to understand there's more space. This and this are the primary delivery systems for our voice. Finding your voice is a big part of executive presence right and part of finding your voice is having the presence of mind, mindfulness and body awareness right? it's both you cannot find your voice

00:26:49 Lucia: Metaphorically or literally, unless you find it in your body, right? And waking up and bringing awareness to how we use the delivery systems is the baseline. Okay. Nice. You want a couple more? We do a couple vocal warmups, okay?

00:27:06 Cindy: Yeah, we do.

00:27:08 Lucia: So these are the ones where it's like, just take a second and let's stretch up in the, get in the rib cage. This can be done. I really encourage my clients to do this even just like in between, take your left opposite hand and like get in your rib cage. Can you see my hand? Like get under your ribs. Oh, it's usually pretty crunchy because we've been sitting and then do the other side, stretch up and just like get in under there. Poke around a little bit. "Oh, it feels good." Why? Because our lungs go all the way down there. Right?

00:27:41 Lucia: That's so important. Take one hand, rub between your shoulder blades, and then rub your tummy, so like your diaphragm, which is right where your diaphragm, another huge delivery system for our voices. And as we stand taller and take up more space, we are activating and opening both our lungs and our diaphragm, right? You can't take a deep breath without engaging these areas. And if you can't take a deep breath, you cannot slow your heart rate, And if you cannot slow your heart rate, you cannot engage the calming system, right?

00:28:17 Lucia: So, did you know that you breathe into your lungs back here, back where your shoulder blades are? Try and take one breath and breathe into your back hand. Make your back hand move. Only your back hand. Move it around a little bit. Play. Explore. Like, what's going on back there? Anything? Right? It takes a few tries to reroute the coordination. Find it for yourself. Play with yourself. Because also, this is another really, I just said play with yourself. Now that's amazing because that's a first. I have never said that in my workshops and now I have to try and work it in on purpose.

00:29:09 Cindy: Oh, you said that I felt like a child.

00:29:11 Lucia: Hi, I'm 12 years old. Play with yourself. Anyway, this is all good. It's all part of it. Why? Because in doing these exercises, and now we're going to do the really silly ones, in doing these exercises, you have to play an experiment and take tiny, tiny little bite-sized risks. And part of developing confidence skills is in front of your peers, especially if they're executives, they struggle with it the most, right? To take risks and explore their bodies and see what's going on in real time in front of people. People are not comfortable doing this. And women especially, right? We need the space because traditionally the corporate space has not been our space, right? To take up physically that space.

00:30:04 Lucia: So, okay, speaking of playing with ourselves, we're going to do a couple of vocal warm ups. Why? If you are not aware of the volume pitch, range, right, dynamics, tempo, at which you could speak, and you don't find and play within those parameters, you are not accessing your charisma. So we can get you really focused and calm, but if you don't also play and do some of these vocal warmups, you also won't know what your voice is capable of, right? If I really want to persuade, if you watch a really persuasive person, they are using a great number of skills and tools and a toolkit and a palette, right?

00:30:52 Lucia: They have a very wide range vocally in terms of how fast or how slow they speak, how high, how low, et cetera. The first one is called, I mean, I call it a raspberry. I mean, technically it's called a lip trill, okay? So we'll do a lip trill and then a tongue trill. So the lip trill, Cindy and I have done together before. It looks like this. I'll demonstrate and then we can all do it together and feel stupid together, okay? So again, opening up, finding the space, remembering we exist in 360 degrees and we've just awoken all of this infrastructure, okay? We take a nice deep inhale. That is a real opera singer warm up.

00:31:42 Cindy: So the funny thing is Zoom doesn't like these sounds, so it's only picking up half. So let's see how it does.

00:31:49 Lucia: Actually, you can edit this bit if it helps you. Turn on, I forgot to do it, your original sound. This is specifically at the top of the screen. There's a thing that says original sound for musicians on.

00:32:04 Cindy: What? Or on my preferences.

00:32:07 Cindy: Let me see. No, I'm not seeing that. Hold on. I'm going to do that in my output. Oh, original sound for musicians. Yeah, it's in the preferences under audio. Okay, so here we go. It's on. I have no idea where you're looking, but that's okay. Cool. You'll just hear me, everyone.

00:32:29 Lucia: Yeah, so I have it on, so hopefully it'll record. Okay, so I'll do it again, and we'll see. So again, this is about finding, connecting breath now with sound. So this is an actual opera singer warmup. I will demonstrate, and then we'll do it together, okay? So it looks like this. Rolling open our shoulders. Nice, deep inhale through the nose.

00:32:56 Jess: Okay, I can't watch Cindy.

00:33:00 Jess: I can't watch Cindy.

00:33:03 Cindy: No, I can do it. I swear.

00:33:05 Lucia: How about we do one at a time?

00:33:06 Jess: No.

00:33:08 Lucia: Yes. You go, Jess. Yes.

00:33:10 Jess: Well, I was on my way, and then your face made me look.

00:33:14 Lucia: I single people out all the time, and it's so uncomfortable, and it's so great. I love it. Okay.

00:33:21 Jess: This is what we're here for. This is what we're here for.

00:33:24 Lucia: We're going to do it together, Jess. Okay, so if it helps you, just first do this for me. Go inhale and go like a horse. Like, you know what I mean? We can't hear you, Jess.

00:33:36 Cindy: Can't hear you.

00:33:36 Jess: Oh, no, because my musician is on. You looked like I saw. I mean, there was spit flying, so it was success. You're good. Okay, can you hear me?

00:33:48 Lucia: Yeah. Okay, so first do this, and then I want you to try and take another breath.

00:33:53 Jess: I heard you. I heard you.

00:33:57 Jess: Okay, and then another breath.

00:33:58 Lucia: Now you're gonna do the sirens one, so try and.

00:34:01 Jess: Wait, I didn't hear your sirens, so do it again for me.

00:34:04 Lucia: And here we go, ready?

00:34:13 Lucia: That is so impressive.

00:34:15 Jess: Oh my goodness, I can, all right.

00:34:17 Lucia: All right, we'll do it together. Okay, ready? Okay. No, no, no. If you do it together, it'll cancel out.

00:34:24 Jess: Oh my gosh, the perfectionist in Cindy is clicking in.

00:34:26 Cindy: Wait, isn't it the same, but just a higher range? Like, is it a slightly different?

00:34:34 Lucia: Like a siren, or to be honest, I just want you to connect. The key for this exercise is connecting sound to the breath. So however that iterates, sometimes sirens are easy because they're like a motion and it's easier to find the airflow, right? That's the pedagogy behind that exercise. Just try it. Don't overthink it.

00:35:00 Cindy: Do you want me to go first or do you want me to go?

00:35:03 Jess: Well, no, I was going to go with together, but then I realized that when I clicked, yeah, I clicked it off. Original sound for echo canceling.

00:35:15 Lucia: One at a time? Yeah. Okay.

00:35:17 Cindy: One at a time.

00:35:17 Lucia: One at a time. Because then the sound won't cancel out. Zoom.

00:35:22 Jess: Okay.

00:35:23 Cindy: Okay. Ready? You go first. Oh. Yeah. Okay.

00:35:26 Lucia: One, two, three.

00:35:29 Cindy: I can't.

00:35:30 Lucia: Yeah, right? So. So. Yes. This time, start with no sound. Start with no sound. But, try to elongate how long you exhale. The sound, okay. Right? No, not the sound, just the breath. Just that, okay. Go.

00:35:55 Cindy: Right. Okay.

00:35:56 Lucia: Now, close your eyes for one second and just assimilate that. So what was happening? There was air passing through your lips. Your body was engaged. Your diaphragm was engaged, right? Now, open your eyes. Now this time you're going to add sound. I don't care what kind of sound it is. I want you to exhale on some kind of sound so your vocal cords come together. Inhale.

00:36:22 Cindy: Why?

00:36:25 Jess: Okay. This is going to make my homework.

00:36:30 Lucia: Twice as long in one try. Twice as long. Why? Because you brought mindfulness to it. You stopped for a second and thought about, okay, what actually was that action? And you connected that so your brain can start building new pathways, right? That is a scientific practice. You just practiced like an opera singer. Well done. Okay, Jess.

00:36:53 Jess: All right.

00:36:54 Lucia: Okay, ready? Nice, girl.

00:37:05 Cindy: We still can't hear that well, but we saw, for anyone on the video, we can see that it was successful.

00:37:10 Jess: I had this going on. I don't know why my sound is off. Oh, now it's on. Let me do it one more time. So you can try it again. Okay. I have to just say, like, I think all of this is so important and interesting and. I'm grateful that I don't have the perfectionist bone like I don't care about getting it wrong on any time as everyone probably witnesses. All the time, but I want you to talk up like for me, I don't think that having no fear is ever going to be a reality. And I also want you to speak into using fear as a strength. Like for me, it gives me a super boost where I know other people find fear super paralyzing. And I'm curious if you have any advice for folks like leaning into the fear, because I just don't think it's realistic that it's going to go away, even with all these tools and practice and examples.

00:38:25 Lucia: So it's a great question. It's kind of the crux. I get asked this kind of stuff more than anything else. It is a lie that we can get rid of the fear by enough meditation. It is the evolutionary truth of fight, flight, freeze. That is not going away. The slogans that we hear about, whatever, Nike, no fear, whatever, it's bullshit. And it isn't actually serving us because you hit on something profound. It is not the absence of fear. It's how we assimilate and get beyond and don't identify with the fear that is the key to the success. These exercises are fundamental to that process because when you feel the performance anxiety, when your cortisol levels raise, right? And your adrenaline levels raise in a higher pressure situation, even if you've done all the meditation in the world, what happens is your body remembers.

00:39:32 Lucia: Your body remembers the muscle coordination. So the more you can practice breathing exercises, body awareness exercises, and just a couple of vocal warmups, the vocal warmups are to be done, especially on your own. So that again, you're building the pathways so that in the moment you do maybe one for like 30 seconds, it's just so that you have something an opera singer has to do half an hour of a warmup. Okay. Someone who's speaking doesn't need that, right? The idea though, is that you create the… your personalized toolkit and ritual before the fear kicks in, right? So you are already in the flow of non-identification and muscle memory.

00:40:21 Lucia: That is the key because your body will remember and do the same coordination, fear or not. And with your question in terms of leveraging, using the fear, leaning in and owning the fear, I think it depends. It's a case to case thing. Some people need to, in my experience, in terms of performance at high levels, some people like sort of own that animal. Okay, like I have the tiger and I'm just going to go for it. My motto is be afraid and do it anyway. I use this a lot. I think there's something that relaxes deep in our psychology when we acknowledge you can't get rid of the fear. So stop trying, develop your own ritual and routine in order that you're ready. No matter what, you are solid.

00:41:12 Lucia: And like I said, so much of the time when it comes to fear based high pressure situations, we spend all the time on the material on the, what the information and none on everything else. The how, right? The how we present is directly tied to how present we are. We can never be our most passionate, communicative, vulnerable, inspiring selves if we are in our own heads and doubting ourselves the whole time, right? The other thing I would say, the more we practice actually taking small risks, like that, there's bite sized fear all the time all day, like doing these stupid exercises and feeling silly for like, and feeling like the sweaty palms for two minutes, right on camera live, is teaching your body and your brain that, hey, man, that one, okay, okay, next time.

00:42:10 Lucia: You know, and it builds from there. But you have to, as you said, you have to do it. You have to practice it. You cannot just simulate that feeling. You have to put yourself in the uncomfortable position. Right. And then play and then be brave. Because the other thing I tell people all the time is like, oh, my God, who cares? Like, who cares? It's just the stakes are like never that high. Even if you're presenting to a board, even if in your context, this matters, still zooming out and recognizing like, actually, I'm not going into war. No matter what my brain and my body are telling me, I'm actually not in any bodily danger, right? It's okay. It's okay.

00:42:55 Cindy: I love that. And I always tell my kids bravery is not never being scared. It's being scared and doing things anyways. And I love that you're giving us the tools to be able to move through that and also be more effective when we overcome that fear and we have the ability to engage people and to actually capture their attention. And we love being silly and fun.

00:43:24 Lucia: And I can, I mean, there are a couple more really simple ones for specifically if you do your pre-performance ritual and you're still feeling kind of like unfold, right? A lot of people talk about racing thoughts, difficult to focus, forgetting the material because they're, they can't focus. Here are two really, really effective tools, really, really short. They're both from other traditions. So mindfulness tradition, it's called the see here, feel meditation. And the other one is called box breathing, which is actually developed by Navy seals. Are you familiar with this? Okay. So number one, I actually use as I'm walking to the theater. Part of my pre-performance ritual is if at all possible. I walk from my, wherever I'm staying accommodation to the theater and I do this meditation. And the reason I like this meditation and it's really great for executives in a corporate setting, right? Is because it can be done anywhere with your eyes open and you don't look like, you know, weirdo meditating in public, right? No one even has to know you're meditating. Right. Standing outside the boardroom.

00:44:27 Lucia: So all it is. Is taking some deep breaths and then observing and labeling everything in your sensory experience as either see, hear, or feel. And what this does is purposefully externalizes all of your thoughts. So you can, there is no room for your own bullshit, right? you are only focusing on external stimuli for a minute or two. So silently, it looks like, feel my heartbeat, hear the hum of the air, see the sunlight on the window, see that painting, feel my feet in the floor, etc. Right? So that's it. And you can do with your eyes open as you're walking around, very, very effective. Do you want to try it here? I mean, on a podcast, it's not the best medium because it's just silence. Yeah. I highly recommend this as a very effective actionable tool in the moment. If other things haven't worked. Second thing. The box breathing, I'll run you through, I'll run your audience through it. It's extremely effective.

00:45:51 Lucia: And I always say, look, if it's good enough for Navy SEALS in battle, I think it's good enough for us, right? It certainly works for opera singers. So all it is, is it has to do the science behind it, right? Is about rapid eye movement. And moving the eyes side to side versus deer in the headlights just actually again reroutes the brain away from the fight flight freeze. That's where it comes from. Also, when you're breathing in a rhythm, again, it's engaging the parasympathetic nervous system. So it looks like this. I take my finger. I focus only on the point of my finger and I draw a box and it looks like this. I inhale. for a count of three and I hold across for a count of three. I exhale for a count of three and I hold under for a count of three. That's it. It takes just enough concentration that again, you are rerouted to external stimuli and it absolutely immediately stops racing thoughts and slows your heart rate. Last thing, dry mouth. A lot of people ask me about dry mouth, right? Okay. Very simple. Did you know that if you just bite your cheeks, you stimulate your saliva glands?

00:47:11 Cindy: A little bit of pain.

00:47:14 Lucia: It's like, just like, you know, gentle little love bite for yourself. Oh my God. I'm full of them today. Play with yourself and love bites. But you know, you feel your mouth, especially near the back, is fills up with just a little bit of saliva, which is all you need to take a good swallow. Right. And that brings me to my last point, swallowing, closing your eyes and mindfully swallowing two, three times lowers the action of swallowing lowers our larynx. When we lower our larynx, it is another trigger behind the larynx exists. One of the connectors for the parasympathetic nervous system. That is why many people talk about their voice going hoarse or strained or really nasal or high pitched or out of, generally speaking, out of their control when their nerves kick in. So swallowing and biting your cheeks for saliva is a very effective in the moment tool to chill the body out. If you don't chill out the body, you can't chill out the brain.

00:48:20 Cindy: Oh my goodness. Okay. So much great stuff here. And yeah, we, you know, we have to ask our confessions question before we wrap up. So yeah,give us a confession, something that you might be reluctant to share about your business or work.

00:48:40 Lucia: Yeah, well, I was thinking about this and I think it's important to be honest, how often I'm not happy with how a performance goes. I think people don't realize I have the tools to make it look like it went great no matter what. But I think it is important for everybody to acknowledge to yourself, yeah, no, that was not my best, but that's not actually what matters. I confess it because. We are coming from, again, all of these contexts with all of our lives and all of the overlapping factors that are influencing our day. And we can't predict how we're going to show up for whatever your flavor of performance is. And so a lot of the times, it's not going to go exactly how you want it.

00:49:37 Lucia: And you're going to be kind of disappointed to some degree and maybe be self-critical. And I think it's important to say, yeah, that happens to us at a high performing level. The difference, though, is I confess a lot of the time it doesn't go exactly as I wanted, but I also have the skills. so that no one knows, so that to be a generous performer is to not make it about me, right? So I take this like confession, I'll tell you now, because I'm not actually in the performance, right? It's like, yeah, a lot of time in audition, a performance, I'm like, "Oh, I whiffed that high note or whatever, you know, like come off stage and just be honestly sometimes so wearing. It happens in, where was I?" Victoria.

00:50:27 Lucia: This is one note, one note in a whole aria, the whole scene, it was like six minutes. And I was so happy with the rest of it. And the final high note, one night I was like, I came off stage swearing blue murder because I knew I could do it better. And I just didn't execute in that moment, you know, but the audience would not have known, you know, that's the takeaway. I think that like, no matter how you have to show up in excellence, in leadership, in business. Don't make it about you ultimately, like even if you know it wasn't your best.

00:51:04 Lucia: Go forward with that confidence, that self-knowledge and self-awareness and self-compassion, actually, right? Because it's just, that's what life is. It's every call, you're not going to ace everything. And I think when we are honest about that, maybe not in the moment. Afterwards, in sort of assimilating, digesting, making sense of, is the time to confess, like. You know? And like, ultimately, who cares? Like, it doesn't matter. Like that high note now, months ago, it doesn't matter. Nobody remembers that. So, yeah. I confess. Am I absolved?

00:51:46 Cindy: You're absolved.

00:51:47 Lucia: An Italian Catholic girl, am I absolved of my sins?

00:51:52 Cindy: Always? Never? I don't know the answer to that.

00:51:54 Lucia: Yeah, no, it doesn't matter. From a Jew to a Catholic, who knows?

00:52:01 Jess: Okay. Where can our listeners get in touch, follow you online, and learn more about what you do?

00:52:07 Lucia So my website, Cesaroni Consulting, I just relaunched a whole branding, which I'm really stoked about, really excited about, and new series of workshops. Actually, one of the most popular ones so far has been imposter syndrome, right? So dealing with all these confidence skills was a really timely question, Jess.

00:52:26 Lucia: My website, I'm very active on Instagram, LinkedIn also, super active. So please check me out. If you want to hear me sing, go to, I have a YouTube channel. You can hear me scream some high notes and in like giant wigs and corsets or whatever floats your boat. But yeah, it's cesaroniconsulting.com. Google me, Lucia Cesaroni as a singer. And thank you so much for having me. You know, I love playing and poking people. Thank you. Thank you. That was a fun one.

00:52:57 Cindy: Thank you for joining us.

00:52:59 Jess: Appreciate it.

00:53:00 Lucia My pleasure, ladies.

00:53:03 Cindy: Thank you again for listening to the Confessions Podcast for nonprofit coaches and consultants. If you enjoyed today's episode, which I sure hope you did, you can show your support in one of three ways.

00:53:14 Jess: Number one, post a screenshot of this episode to your Instagram stories or LinkedIn profile and tag Cindy and I so we can repost you.

00:53:23 Cindy: Number two, share this podcast with a fellow nonprofit coach or consultant.

00:53:27 Jess: And number three, leave a positive review on Apple Podcasts so we can continue to grow and reach new listeners.

00:53:33 Cindy: And of course, make sure you subscribe so you can get the latest and greatest interviews as they drop every Thursday.

00:53:40 Jess: And to our fellow nonprofit coaching and consulting friends, remember we're an open book and here to answer your burning biz questions.

00:53:48 Cindy: See you next time.