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SpotifyScwair One presents Speaking of Success (SÖS) — episode 5 with voice artist and former BBC broadcaster Sara Starling, on finding your voice, public speaking nerves, and why voice notes are a communication tool most people are ignoring.
My guest for episode 5 once stood on a bridge in Prague with a sign that said “Conversation for Sale.” And people paid.
I’ve spent most of my life trying to get out of conversations. Mark Carolan sold them to strangers, by the topic, off a piece of cardboard.
Mark spent over twenty years in the corporate world. He was good at it. He knew it wasn’t right. His epiphany: if he never changed, that would be his future – all the way to retirement. That scared him as much as changing did. So he changed.
He’s now a personal, leadership and executive coach, certified by Kingstown College – and does a lot of work in public speaking and corporate wellbeing. Groups and one-to-one. The person companies bring in when their people have to stand up and say something that matters. He’s spent 20-odd years, all told, helping people get out of their own way.
That conversation-for-sale thing? An experiment in exactly that.
In this one we get into the mechanics. Why you stop focusing on the audience – and stop focusing on yourself – and focus on what you’re actually there to do. Why the outcome is the worst thing to think about. The power of the pause – Mark reckons it’s the single fastest way to get better at speaking, and he proves it, live, with about fifteen seconds of very deliberate silence. The idea that silence is its own sound. And the bit I needed to hear most: that after you speak, you’ve got a choice between criticism and critical analysis – and only one of them makes you better.
The line that stayed with me: ‘Silence is its own sound. And it’s a very powerful sound.’
I’ve always been good at the silences. It’s the words around them I struggle with. This conversation helped.
In this episode you’ll learn…
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Why you should stop focusing on the audience and stop focusing on yourself… and put everything into what you’re there to do. How one of Mark’s clients went from panic before a 200-person talk to ‘jelly’ afterwards, using exactly this shift.
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Why focusing on the outcome is the worst thing you can do under pressure, and what to focus on instead.
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The pause: why Mark considers it the single fastest way to get better at speaking – and how learning to pause hands you control of yourself, what you say, what people hear, and the whole room.
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Silence as a sound – the violinist who held an audience completely still without playing a note, and what it says about any speaker who knows how to hold a room.
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The ‘Conversation for Sale’ experiment – what standing on a bridge in Prague in 1999 taught Mark about curiosity, getting out of your own way, and how to make a stranger genuinely interested in what you have to say.
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The evidence exercise: when you think you can’t speak in public, where to look for proof that you already can — and why your brain is actively hiding that evidence from you.
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Why after a talk you’re probably putting on the boxing gloves – and how to switch from self-criticism to critical analysis so every time you speak becomes a stepping stone, not just a relief it’s over.
