Oct. 6, 2024

From Shy to Stage Miroslav's Journey to Authentic Speaking

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Join us in this enlightening episode of the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, where host Curveball interviews TEDx speaker and founder of the Enlivened Speaking Institute, Miroslav Petrovic. Discover the art of authentic communication and learn how to convey your message with impact. Miroslav shares his personal journey from introversion to becoming a sought-after speaker and coach, emphasizing the power of connection over perfection. If you're looking to enhance your speaking skills and build meaningful relationships, this episode is a must-listen.
Want to be a guest on Living the Dream with Curveball? Send Curtis Jackson a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1628631536976x919760049303001600

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00:00:00.560 --> 00:00:29.309
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome, um, to the living the Dream podcast with curveball. Um, if you believe you can achieve chi chi, welcome to the living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Today we're going to be talking about helping people bring their message to the world in a, uh, unique and inspirational way as I am joined by TEDx speaker, facilitator and teacher, Miroslav Potovich. Miroslav is the founder of the enlivened speaking institute. He's worked with over 5000 people to help them bring their message to the world in a better way. So, Mirislav, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Thank you for having me today.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Kaylas, why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Miroslav Potovich>So in a nutshell, I guess this was a very unlikely career choice for me. People say to me, when did you decide you want to do this? And I'm like, well, I didn't really. I grew up very heavily introverted, shy, I had selective mutism, came to Australia as a refugee.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Uh, my reports were always like, miroslav is great, but why doesn't he talk in class? So, yeah, it was very unlikely that I was ever going to pursue a career like this, but the more I connected with myself, my, you could call my authentic truth what my heart really wanted. This is a doorway that just kept opening up. First it just started with teaching and speaking and facilitating. And then as I kept doing it, people started saying to me, whatever you're doing is different than what I'm usually seeing people do on stage. Can you teach me how to do what you do? And, you know, it gave me goosebumps and I was like, okay, this is what I need to do next. So then I started, um, teaching my own method and relationship to the stage for people that wanted to learn.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Yeah. So what, what do you feel makes your method different than other people as, uh, far as speaking?

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> Miroslav Potovich>Uh, a lot of the old school method or approach to speaking is about wearing a mask and appearing professional in inverted commas.

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> Miroslav Potovich>So it's like, this is the correct way to do it. This is how long you should pause for, this is how long you should stand.

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> Miroslav Potovich>And you know, Curtis, if we did hanging out with friends the way we did with speaking, our friends would think we're crazy. Like it would be completely wrote and scripted and every single moment would be performed. Yet somehow we've taken to thinking that's the way we should be on stage. And my approach is almost a, uh, complete opposite to that. It's like, what do we need to do for you to be yourself on stage? And essentially, what it takes is feeling safe. When people are safe, they're going to be themselves. And in that old school, traditional kind of approach to the stage, we develop safety by having a script and by memorizing that script and then, uh, reciting that script on stage. And most people, unless they are professional speakers, they don't get through the reciting stage. So they're not on stage speaking. They're on stage reciting, which is okay if you want to go to a recitation, but it's a very different feeling for the audience when someone can deliver the message in the moment, and you can feel it in your bones that it's alive. So there's two options here. One of them is to allow your script to become so deeply embodied that you don't have to think about it and that you can pick it up at any word and know what word comes next. So it's a bit like when you're driving a car, you don't think about driving a car or any other kind of action, really. But when you're first starting, you're like, I have to feel the weight of the foot pedal, I have to feel the steering wheel, you know?

00:04:12.719 --> 00:04:46.685
> Miroslav Potovich>And then after a while, it becomes second nature. And playing any sport is a similar thing as is speaking. Now, unless you're a professional speaker, you don't have the time to learn your speech that deeply because you're probably only going to be giving it once or twice. A and my approach, instead of using memorization to create safety, I looked at how can we create connection, and how can the safety come from that connection? And if we feel safe in any connection, we're going to open up, we're going to be authentic.

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> Miroslav Potovich>We're going to say and speak and have it really land and touch people.

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> Miroslav Potovich>So from this approach of what I call authenticity, it's more rooted in connection and less rooted in perfection. And, you know, I haven't talked about this too much, but I think as time goes on, we have AI and tech that can give us perfection. What we long for is humanness. What we long for is real connection. So does that give you a bit of an overview?

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>It sure does. So tell us about the enlivened speaking institute. First of all, how did you come up with that name? And, you know, if I wanted to deliver a message and bring my message to the world in a better way, and I contacted your company, what could you do for me?

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> Miroslav Potovich>So the way it came about is, as I mentioned, people started saying to me, like, hey, can you teach me to do what you're doing? Like, I want to connect with the audience the way you connect with the audience. And I was like, okay, um, I'm listening to this call, and I'm responding to it. And I started training people how to do what I do, which has been ever evolving since then.

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> Miroslav Potovich>And basically what I would say to you is, this is one of the catch 22s.

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> Miroslav Potovich>When I start working with someone, usually the desire to work with me comes from them having seen me do work with someone else, or they've been to one of my talks, and I've had them on stage, and they've seen the fundamental difference.

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> Miroslav Potovich>People rarely come to me going, uh, I, um, just want to learn. Like, there's two stages of speaking.

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> Miroslav Potovich>One is the very, very early stage where people are like, okay, I'm not confident on stage, and I want to be confident, which is a very easy, easy, obvious point where you want to hire someone that can support you to learn that skill in less time.

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> Miroslav Potovich>And then the second one I find is, after people get to a certain level of proficiency, they don't really look to keep improving. It's like, we get to this mindset of like, oh, no, I can already do that.

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> Miroslav Potovich>And I've been on the stage for probably approaching two decades now, and I found that the deeper I go, the deeper it's possible to go, and that the learning never really stops. And the highest value asset I can have is someone that's gone before me. And that can point out the things to me that I can't see in my own practice. And a lot of the time when I work with people, what they are, ah, saying to me is like, oh, wow, I didn't even know that that was in there. Like, that they could connect to their message that much more powerfully. So one of the distinctions is we go from talking about your message to having the audience feel your message in their bones, which is very different. Anyone can talk about a message, almost transmitting the essence of that message.

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> Miroslav Potovich>So your audience, your students, whatever, can feel its essence is a different level of communication. And I think thats what some of the great orators before us, um, held inside of themselves and the great teachers as well, to not just know something mentally, but to transmit to the wisdom that lives underneath it. And my belief is that I think anyone can do this, but it's a process of how deeply open and vulnerable are we willing to be with what we're sharing from um, an internal place, which is hard to explain or just words.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So, if someone is a coach, how can they use speaking to help them increase their profile or their reach?

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> Miroslav Potovich>Yeah. I mean, when I first started, I knew nothing about business. All I knew was, my intuition was like, Marisola, we need to get on stages. And then I found every time I got on stage, I would get more clients. And I think this is true not just for coaches, but for anyone in any kind of business. Uh, being on stage lets you develop a lot of rapport in a very short amount of time, which, if you're trying it to do with ads, let's say, almost traditional ways of building a business. Um, people are meeting you with a sense of, you know, can I trust this person?

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> Miroslav Potovich>There's doubt. There's. There's questions there. There's a word I'm looking for that's not coming to me. Um, they're suspicious because they don't know who you are. When you've spent an hour with them on the stage, they already know who you are. And it just opens up that whole process to happen a lot more quickly. And then the second layer inside of that is as well.

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> Miroslav Potovich>If you're going to run your own event and you want to put a couple of hundred people in there, that might cost you, I don't know, uh, anywhere between five and $10,000. If you're going to do that with ads, if you can go on a stage that's already running, like, a festival or a conference or something like that, you're getting access to five or $10,000 worth of marketing that someone else has already done, where you just get to bring your mission, your values, your gift to that stage and ideally, connect with people and have people want to reach out and continue the journey with you.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>And that is very important.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>And that was my next question, uh, to talk about why business is, you know, all about building relationships.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Yeah, 100%.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>You want to elaborate more on that?

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> Miroslav Potovich>Well, I'd say we banter about this a lot in collectively, how it's not about what you know, it's about who you know and, like, spot on. I remember when I was on one of these podcasts, uh, the man interviewing me, washington, saying to me, he's like, I've seen some TEDx talks that I have friends that could do a better topic of delivering that TEDx talk. And he's like, I looked at some of these speakers, and I'm like, they probably just know the organizer.

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> Miroslav Potovich>I'm like, yeah, it's a possibility and with a lot of. A lot of stages and a lot of business.

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> Miroslav Potovich>That's how it works. We go to people we know, uh, and we go to people we trust. And when you're in the ecosystem of it, people want to support each other. And at the same time, this is where I think being on stage is invaluable. Like, for me, as a networking skill, as I mentioned, I grew up fairly introverted. So to go up and introduce myself to people still can feel jarring and, um, nerve wracking and things like this. But I found if I've been on stage, people just come up to me, and I get to network with a room of, let's say, 100 or so people in far less time. Like, 100 people get to meet me, and then the ones that like me will come up to me and have a conversation with me, which allows these possibilities to open up. So I've just found it invaluable in, in all ways. It just lets you touch and connect and build trust with people far more rapidly than doing it, uh, one on one.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, tell us about any upcoming current projects that you and your company are working on that people need to be aware of.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Yes. At the moment, we're focusing on two things. One of them is trust building inside organizations. So, looking at high performance communication and how we can build trust rapidly.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Um, at the moment, I've got a marketing team that's reached out to me for this specific one where we're looking at building and into how, uh, they do storytelling, and how we build trust through storytelling, and also the ways we unconsciously avoid building trust, or we sabotage our trust by maybe hiding certain aspects.

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> Miroslav Potovich>So that's on the corporate side, that's what we're working on. And on the training side, we're building out the training for already existing high profile speakers.

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> Miroslav Potovich>So people have already been on stage for a long time, know all the basics, even know some of the advanced stuff.

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> Miroslav Potovich>They've done a lot of study in this area, and they really want to take it into the 2% that they haven't yet tapped. So that's. That's the people we're focusing on working with, um, at the moment.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, just in case there's somebody out there interested in working with you so people can keep up, uh, with everything that you're up to, throw out your contact info.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Yeah. Sean. So it's Miroslav Bardovich. You can find me on. On Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Um, that's the best place. The website is still my old website, which is miroslavp.com. but best way to connect is typically through social media. And you can just say that, you know, you listen to this podcast of Curtis Jackson, and, um, we can take it from there.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, that was my next question. I thought your website so close us out with some final thoughts, maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about, that you would like to touch on any final thoughts you have for the listeners?

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> Miroslav Potovich>Yeah, I'd say based on, well, no matter where you are in the journey, but especially if you're earlier on and you've got dreams and desires, uh, follow your inspiration, follow your desires. And where that desire is going to take you ten years from now, you might have no idea at all. So when I first started this journey, the desire was just to meditate. And, you know, almost two decades later, I'm still meditating. But that meditation practice, which, you know, I'm sure my parents looked at me early on and thought like, this is kind of worrying.

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> Miroslav Potovich>M, you know, you can't really make money off meditating.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Uh, it's led to a business I'm quite happy with now. And I could not have seen that back then, but there was something inside me that just said, keep going, keep going.

00:14:57.750 --> 00:15:57.745
> Miroslav Potovich>And even when I started speaking, and at first it was just running workshops and doing very small trainings, I didn't know that was going to become a business where I'm training six figure speakers and watching, like, ten years from now, I don't know where that journey is going to take me, but trying to figure it out and trying to be perfect before I begin. What's my perfect message? What's my perfect website? That was just fear. Uh, basically, it was fear getting in the way of me taking the first steps and what I say to anyone that's kind of sitting and feels the inspiration and maybe wants to bring or offer something more to life, more of themselves to life is just do the one next step, and it's going to give you real time data. Either it's working and you're going to keep going, or you're going to get data with what people say, how they respond, and then you're going to be able to pivot and take a second step in maybe a slightly different direction.

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> Miroslav Potovich>But really, for me, like, the art of following our desires and living a life that fulfills us is about letting our desire move from us, uh, into the world and having the world respond in real time, not trying to work it all out mentally. And that just opens doorways.

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> Miroslav Potovich>The more steps we take, the more that becomes like a dance or a conversation with life or the world and informs us how to take the next step with where we want to go.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>All right, ladies and gentlemen, be sure to check out Miroslav on Facebook, um, and LinkedIn.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Keep up with everything that he's up to.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>If you're interested in working with him or you know somebody that's interested in working with him, please follow share rate and review this episode. Send it to as many people as possible. Jump on your favorite podcast app. Leave us a review. Follow us share the show. If you have any guests or suggestion topics, Curtis Jackson 1978. Net is the place to send them. As always, thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Miroslav, thank you for all that you do, and thank you for joining us.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Thank you for having me, Kaylas for.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>More information on the living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurvefall.com.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>until next time, stay focused on living the dream.

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> Miroslav Potovich>Dream.