My name is Yamini Naidu and I speak professionally for a living. I have been speaking for what, hmm 15O years? I’ve been speaking for over 15 years – but speaker years are like dog years! I am an economist by training – please don’t stop reading here.

When I started my professional speaking career, I was a very serious speaker. A serious economist – such a classic stereotype and I was living it! One day I was doing a keynote at IBM. I looked out at the audience and I saw a sea of Indian faces. I immediately thought I should tell them about my mother. I said ‘I am economist by training and I co-founded a company that does storytelling. I was so excited and raced home to tell my mum – Mum I am going to be doing storytelling’. And she replied ‘Is that a job - Why can’t you be a doctor or be in IT.’

The audience roared with laughter, The room lit up and in that moment my audience and I became one. We connected viscerally.

That day I stumbled onto something important. For me at that time my X factor was sharing funny stories. That’s what I called it, I didn’t use the words X factor. One of my clients even refers to me as ‘a funny story speaker’! It never occurred to me that what I was doing lived in a larger context, or was something that could be taught and learned.