Why I choose speaking topics that challenge my comfort zone

I have stood on stages in Britain and a Sydney harbourside ballroom, and I can tell within thirty seconds whether an audience has come to be entertained or moved. Neither matters much unless something inside me is also at stake. Every keynote I deliver carries a question I have not fully answered, and that is the point. I am not in the business of recycling comfortable wisdom. I am in the business of dragging honest material onto the stage and trusting that what shakes me will also shake the room. The talks that land hardest are the ones where my voice wobbles, where I push through the part of the story that feels too raw or too unresolved.

It took me years of live television to learn that polished delivery is not the same as meaningful delivery. Viewers in Perth are not asking me to be perfect. They are asking me to be useful, and useful often looks uncomfortable. There is a particular hush that falls over an audience when a speaker admits they do not have it all figured out, and that hush is worth more than a thousand rehearsed jokes. Comfort is the enemy of growth, both for the people listening and for the person at the microphone. When I design a new keynote, I deliberately pick the angle that makes me swallow first. The aim is not to perform bravery but to model it.

Australian audiences have a particular appetite for honest work. Over the past few years I have spoken at corporate retreats outside Melbourne, at women's leadership lunches in Barangaroo, and at industry gatherings where the mood is friendly but the agenda is serious. The Workplace Gender Equality Act has pushed Australian employers to think harder about what a balanced, healthy workplace actually looks like, and that conversation often lands on my plate. People want to know how to lead when they are tired, how to ask for help without losing authority, how to survive a public breakup and still turn up for the 6am news. Those are not comfortable questions, and they are exactly the ones I want to spend my working life exploring.

The most useful thing I have learned is that the discomfort is the message. If a brief arrives asking me to inspire a sales team or open a conference on resilience, I treat it as a prompt rather than a script. I pull the thread that frightens me and follow it into the room. Sometimes that means describing a quiet morning before a big day, the small rituals that steady a nervous body. Sometimes it means describing the wreckage of a difficult year, the kind I wrote about while launching a book in the middle of personal crisis. Either way, my job is not to protect myself. It is to share what I have learned the hard way.

The honesty behind a difficult keynote

A difficult keynote begins long before I write a single slide. It begins with the question I am avoiding in my own life. When a client books me for a women's wellbeing event in Adelaide or a leadership summit in Parramatta, the conversation usually starts with logistics. What is the room layout? How long do I have? What is the demographic? The real work happens in the gap between what they have asked for and what they actually need. Often they need permission to talk about things their own organisations will not. Menopause in the workplace. Mental load. The slow erosion of confidence after redundancy. I have come to see my role as someone who brings those topics into the room first.

The honest keynote is rarely the slickest. I have learned to resist over-polishing. Australian audiences can smell a rehearsed platitude within seconds. They would rather hear a sentence that stumbles than one that glides past the difficult bit. So I write my talks the way I write my newspaper column, with a clear point of view, a confession in the middle, and a closing thought that asks more than it resolves.

When vulnerability becomes professional currency

For a long time I treated vulnerability as a private matter. I thought professionalism meant leaving the cracked parts of myself in the car park. Live broadcasting in Britain rewards composure. The autocue breaks, the camera light burns, and your face is the broadcast. Showing nothing was the job. Years of doing that job meant I forgot that the cracks were also where the light got in. Once I started speaking on stage, I realised audiences were not interested in my composure. They were interested in my candor.

That is why vulnerability has become professional currency for me. I do not weaponise it or perform it on demand. I simply stop hiding the parts that cost me something. When I talk about the breakdown of my marriage, I am not asking for pity. I am showing a group of senior women that survival is possible without pretending. When I talk about anxiety before a big broadcast, I am giving a junior team leader permission to admit that promotion frightens her. The discomfort is shared, which means the relief is shared. That exchange is the entire point.

From the studio to the stage in Australia

Australia is not a market I take lightly. The live events industry here is sophisticated, the audiences are sharp, and the corporate sector has its own culture of expectation. I have spoken at a Sydney breakfast briefing where half the room had flown in overnight, and at a regional Queensland community hall where the chairs were borrowed from the church next door. Both rooms deserved my best work. Both rooms pushed me to prepare more thoroughly than I might have done for a familiar British audience.

Australian corporate life has its own weight. The pace is fast, the distances are enormous, and people often work far from family. That loneliness shows up in the questions I am asked after events. People want to know how to keep going when they are tired. They want to know how to speak up in meetings without burning bridges. They want to know whether it is possible to be a kind leader and still hit the numbers their board demands. They are the questions of people who fly between Perth and Melbourne every week and miss their children's bath time. My job is to answer them honestly, even when the honest answer is uncomfortable.

The topics that keep me up at night

I have a private list of subjects I find almost too difficult to talk about in public. Menopause in the workplace is on it. So is the long tail of grief after a public loss. So is the reality of rebuilding a career in your fifties while everyone around you assumes your best years are behind you. None of these are comfortable topics. All of them are topics I have chosen, eventually, to put on stage.

The reason is simple. The audience is already thinking about them. Someone in the room has just had a hot flush during a board meeting. Someone else has just been made redundant and is pretending to be fine. Someone else is wondering whether to leave a marriage that has quietly stopped working. When I name those realities out loud, I am giving voice to something the room already knows. The discomfort I feel in saying it is a fair exchange for the relief other people feel in hearing it.

Choosing stories that make me wince

Every speaker has stories they tell and stories they keep in reserve. I used to think the reserved ones were off limits because they were too personal. I now think they are exactly the ones the audience needs. The story about a marriage ending in a hospital waiting room. The story about a panic attack before a live show. The story about walking onto the set pretending nothing had happened the night before. None of these are easy to retell. All of them have shaped the way I work.

I choose them because flinching in private does not help anyone. I would rather flinch on stage, where the flinching has a purpose. Australian audiences in particular have taught me that. They respond to specificity. They want the room number, the time of day, the weather, the look on someone's face. They do not want generalisations. They want a story that could only have happened to me, told in a way that could only belong to me. That level of detail requires courage, which is what I am in the business of practising out loud.

What changes when you lean into the discomfort

When a keynote is built around something that genuinely unsettled me, the room shifts. People lean forward. They put their phones down. They look at each other. That shift is what I am working for, the moment when strangers become a community for forty minutes and the topic can do its real work.

The change is in the audience, and it is in me too. Every time I deliver a talk on a subject that scared me, the fear shrinks a little. I am not brave by nature. I have simply decided to keep stepping into the rooms that frighten me, because the alternative is a smaller, quieter, less useful life. Australian stages have given me plenty of those rooms, and I am grateful for every one of them. The next one is already booked, and I am already nervous about it.

Comparing two ways of stepping on stage

Building your own discomfort practice

• Pick the story that makes you swallow. If it does not cost you something to tell, it will probably not move the room.
• Write the talk you wish someone had given you at the worst moment of your career, not the one that flatters your existing audience.
• Rehearse the difficult sentence until you can deliver it without your voice wobbling, then deliver it anyway with the wobble kept in.
• Tell the client what you actually plan to say, even the bits that scare you, so the brief is honest from the start.
• Build in a quiet moment before you go on stage. A short ritual, a familiar walk, a few minutes away from the green room will steady you better than another run-through.
• Treat the nerves as data. They are pointing at the part of the talk that matters most. Lean into that section rather than away from it.
• After every event, write down the moment you most wanted to flee, then design your next keynote around that exact feeling.