See what the team at The Successful Bookkeeper has on right now →
If presenting to clients, networking at BNI, or getting on a Zoom call still makes your heart race, this episode is worth your full attention. Speaking empowerment coach and author Linda Ugelow joins host Michael Palmer to walk through why the standard advice — breathe deeply, strike a power pose, push through it — never sticks, and what a real shift in communication confidence actually looks like from the inside out.
Linda's story is a striking one. She spent 35 years performing on stage with a women's world music group, touring internationally and clocking over 500 performances — yet she dreaded the moment she had to introduce a song. When she later moved into online coaching and committed to daily live streaming, she found herself spending 30 minutes on rituals just to get through 5 minutes on camera. "I realized I had the tools to get rid of it," she says. "I just didn't know I needed to get rid of it. I just thought, oh, I'll just manage the fear of speaking." That distinction — managing fear versus resolving it — became the foundation of her entire coaching approach.
Linda traces communication anxiety back to formative experiences most of us have never examined: being laughed at in a classroom, bullied by peers, praised for staying quiet and not taking up space. When she asked her own fear to speak, the memory that surfaced was her sisters attacking her whenever her mother held her up as an example. "Of course I'm not comfortable on camera or speaking from the stage," she realized, "because I learned it was dangerous to be put in the center of attention." For bookkeepers, those same old messages can show up in the most practical moments — hesitating to follow up with a prospect, softening a proposal, or rushing through a client call because you don't want to "bother" anyone.
Linda's three-part framework starts with clearing past experiences through tools like EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), journaling, and creative visualization. From there, she focuses on the inner dialogue — not quieting the inner critic but transforming it into what she calls the inner ally. "I don't think it's in our human nature to be mean to ourselves," she says. "It's a way that we've built a coping mechanism." The third piece is the physical and expressive layer: posture, pace, vocal delivery — all the habits that form around fear and need to be consciously rebuilt once the underlying trigger is gone.
After doing her own clearing work, Linda went on camera one afternoon and found herself saying she was relaxed — on a live stream. The next time she introduced a song on stage, she caught herself thinking, "Oh good, it's my turn to speak." That kind of shift, she explains, frees up the mental bandwidth that fear was consuming. "Once I could be more in the present because I didn't have these triggers pulling me into the past subconsciously, I was able to pay more attention to the people I was speaking to. I could listen better. I could express myself more easily." For any bookkeeper who has ever felt half-present in a client conversation because anxiety was running in the background, that description will resonate.
Linda is clear that there is no single required method. Journaling, hypnotherapy, songwriting, poetry — her clients have used all of them. The only real barrier, she says, is the reluctance to look: "The only thing that's in their way is their resistance to investigating it." Her book Delight in the Limelight and the first season of her podcast of the same name serve as accessible starting points for anyone ready to begin. For those who aren't ready yet, her advice is equally generous: "Be kind to yourself. It may not be your time. Honor and accept and enjoy where you are in your own personal journey."
Linda Ugelow is a speaking empowerment coach, author of Delight in the Limelight, and host of the podcast of the same name. Drawing on a master's degree in expressive arts therapy, decades of performance experience, and her own journey through communication anxiety, she helps entrepreneurs and professionals clear the deep-rooted fears that hold them back from speaking with confidence — whether that's one-on-one with a client or in front of a crowd.