A week or two ago, I had a memoir chapter submission due to my writing coaches. A threesome of writers, this particular configuration has been submitting to each other twice a month for about a year. You’d think it’d be old hat by now but when I attached the document to the e-mail I’d written, I felt incredibly anxious. I was reluctant to click send.

I grew up in Astoria, Queens; an Italian enclave, just outside New York City, my grandparents lived there too. My paternal grandmother’s brothers and sisters lived down the road apiece, in the once hardscrabble neighborhood of Ravenswood. Fireworks were legal in the mid 70’s, though tricky to get and dangerous to use, and the dark-alley Ravenswood streets seemed the perfect place for my great-uncle Pat–short for Pasquale–and the “old-enough” contingent of his nephews and sons to play with whatever fireworks he’d managed to score.

I should have suspected that starting a business would be the single-most important creative endeavor of my life to date—second only to gestating, birthing, nursing, and rearing children– but for the first two years, I didn’t.

For the first two years, I worried more than I worked.

Then I got un-stuck.

I was in The Film Practice with Dan Cordle at the Helm. I’d enrolled to get over the fears I had about being on camera. I saw it as the next right-business move.

Ron Tite, award winning writer, creativity, and branding expert, and author of the insightful new book Everyone’s an Artist, took the stage at last year’s Heroic Public Speaking Live admitting he had no preconceived notions about what to expect when power couple Amy and Michael Port, the hosts of the event, had invited him. He followed up his frank admission with an apt joke about all of the mothers in the audience who’d told their families they’d be at a “conference for work” –said in a way that communicated all the bore and dread generally deserving of such events—and ended up dancing in the aisles and hooting and hollering at the prospect of taking the stage in a big way while their partners filled the void at home.

When my then business mentor, New York Times bestselling author Michael Port, prompted me to explore this question, my answers led me to the single most important element of myself that I needed to change to get out of my own way and get my business moving in the direction I wanted it to go.

Killer confidence.   We all want it. On good days, it manifests itself as the feeling that we’re invincible. On more challenging days, we’d be thrilled with good enough. When we’re feeling confident, we perform. When we aren’t feeling confident, some of us perform anyway, getting confidence as we go (if we’re lucky). The rest of us hide.

“Be grateful.” It’s what every trending blog-post, business book, and bystander are telling us we need to do to get where we want to go.

Want to make more money? Be grateful.

Improve a relationship? Be grateful.

Get noticed at work? Be grateful.

October 14, 2015

Ms. Wenger, hello.

This August when you started the twitter campaign #Ilooklikeanengineer it kind of set my heart and mind on fire.

First, I wrote a blog post I hoped would help my clients (engineers) see what you’d done as an example of someone standing confident in their own self-expression for the benefit of their audience, their peers, and, of course, themselves.

If you read my last blog-post, you know I’m still processing my experience at the Heroic Public Speaking live event back in February where Dan Cordle, NYU Drama Teacher extraordinaire, and the shy star of my last post, asked us to improvise a scene between ourselves and someone—alive or dead—that we cared about deeply.

In February I attended a Heroic Public Speaking conference, hosted by Michael Port and Amy Meade, in Fort Lauderdale Florida. Along with an impressive lineup of some of the most highly paid and most consistently sought after talent in the public speaking industry, Michael invited his most beloved professor from NYU’s Graduate School of Acting…Dan Cordle.