Joanna Denton - Leadership & Speaking Coach

Joanna Denton - Leadership & Speaking Coach I work with senior leaders and technical experts who are brilliant at what they do but grip the lectern for dear life when they speak in public.

I help them get out of their own way and actually enjoy it. I am an Executive coach, and I help busy professionals like you get your life back. I help you get back more time for yourself, and for the people and things you love, while also taking account of the fact that real life keeps on happening all around you.

Your CV is not the full story of what you're capable of.Not even close.Some of the moments that tell me the most about a...
28/08/2026

Your CV is not the full story of what you're capable of.

Not even close.

Some of the moments that tell me the most about a person would never make it onto one.

The conversation you were terrified to have, but had anyway.
The time everything went sideways and somehow you found a way through.
The moment you backed yourself when nobody else quite understood yet.
The person you supported because you remembered what it felt like to be where they were.
The toxic relationship you left.

We don't tend to count these things.

We move on. Deal with the next thing. Focus on what still needs doing.

And then someone asks whether we're ready to lead or mentor and suddenly we're looking for evidence.

It's there.

It just might not be where you've been taught to look for it.

That's a big part of what we'll be doing together at Women in Renewables 2026.

Jo x

How much more evidence do you need before you decide you're ready?Ask a brilliant, experienced woman whether she's ready...
26/08/2026

How much more evidence do you need before you decide you're ready?

Ask a brilliant, experienced woman whether she's ready to mentor or lead or stand up on stage and represent the firm and there's a decent chance she'll start mentally checking the list of evidence.

Have I done enough?

Do I know enough?

Am I senior enough?

Should I wait another year?

And all the while she's been making difficult decisions, solving problems, supporting other people, speaking up when it mattered and finding her way through things she probably didn't feel remotely ready for at the time.

Funny how those things don't seem to make the list.

Maybe readiness isn't about finally reaching the point where there's nothing left to learn.

Maybe some of us need to look again at the evidence we've been standing on all along.

That's a conversation I'm very much looking forward to having when I speak at the Women in Renewables conference in September (details in the comments).

Jo x

You've Already Done the Hard Thing - Now is the Time to RememberI'm key note speaker at the Women in Renewables 2026 con...
24/08/2026

You've Already Done the Hard Thing - Now is the Time to Remember

I'm key note speaker at the Women in Renewables 2026 conference in Belfast next month, and this topic is coming up a lot with my clients recently.

This is the title of my keynote:

“You’ve already done the hard thing – now is the time to remember”

Or as I would more usually say to my clients :

“Have you frigging met yourself recently??”

I am working with a number of clients who are stepping on stages to become the face of their business, walking into client pitches to win work, or stepping up at work to take on more and more responsibility.

Ask most women whether they're ready to lead or mentor someone or stand up on stage to represent their business and there's often a pause.

Not because they don't have the experience. Or the wisdom. Or the instinct for it.

But because they are busy trying to work out the answer to the question – “Am I ready?”, “Who am I to?”, “What if I mess this up?”

Somewhere along the way, they got very good at looking at what this think is still missing: “I really need another qualification. Or another year of experience. Or somebody to tell me that yes I am ready”.

Instead of remembering what is already there: an entire history of times where she has already done the hard thing, gone way outside what was easy, and succeeded.

The conversation she didn't want to have, but had any way. The decision nobody else could make for her, a decision that would change her life. The moment she backed herself when it would have been so much easier not to. Having a child, or walking away from a toxic relationship, or getting out of bed when she was mid burnout.

These are the things that don’t make it on to the CV. Many times, she was also too busy getting through them to realise what they said about her. Her point of reference shifted – but surely everyone does this, why would it be special?

And so she forgot.

That is what I am going to focus on during my key note and workshop at the conference.

The remembering.

Not who you need to become next.

But who already are.

Have a super week,

Jo x

Do you know what performing all the time is costing you? It's knackering in a very specific way - not the satisfying ti...
07/08/2026

Do you know what performing all the time is costing you?

It's knackering in a very specific way - not the satisfying tired you get after a hard day of good work, but the hollow kind where you were on all day and you have nothing left.

Go figure: the people who are brilliant at performing, the ones who've been doing it so long it's become automatic, they're often the most tired because they're never off.

The capable one doesn't get to not be capable, the one who holds it together doesn't get to not hold it together, even at home, even at the weekend, even in the conversations where they'd most expect to just be themselves.

(How do I know? - two burnouts in five years anyone??)

I lived it for years before I understood what was happening, and I see it constantly in the rooms I work in.

Stoppng the performance doesn't make you more vulnerable or more exposed. It actually does the opposite.

When you're not managing how you're landing, you've got nothing to protect and nothing to get wrong.

The thing that felt like the risk turns out to have been the cost.

I can tell when someone's doing the authentic thing rather than just being themselves. There's a very specific texture t...
05/08/2026

I can tell when someone's doing the authentic thing rather than just being themselves.

There's a very specific texture to it: the pause before the "vulnerable" share that's just a beat too considered, the eye contact that's slightly too sustained (the kind you'd use if you were thinking about eye contact rather than just looking at someone), the story that's clearly been told before, not because they're lying, but because somewhere it became the story they tell to show that they're the kind of person who tells that story.

None of it is cynical. Most of it is genuinely well-intentioned. People learned that showing up matters and they started practising showing up, and at some point the practice became the performance.

What I find interesting is that the people doing it usually know something is slightly off. Not always, but often there's a background sense of effort and monitoring that shouldn't be there if you were just actually there.

The real thing has a different quality entirely because it's almost boring in how effortless it is, with nothing to manage and no gap between what's happening inside and what's showing up on the outside. The room feels it immediately, even if they couldn't tell you why.

That's what I work on with people: not the technique of showing up, but the thing that's getting in the way of just being there.

I've spent years studying how to show up better. Read the books, done the work, travelled the world to see the people wh...
03/08/2026

I've spent years studying how to show up better. Read the books, done the work, travelled the world to see the people whose ideas cracked something open in me.
And at some point I noticed that even that, the studying and the practising and the showing up, had become a thing I was doing rather than a thing I was being.

The irony isn't lost on me.

What I've come to believe, after all of it, is that the thing we're actually after doesn't come from doing more or doing it better. It comes from something quieting. The voice that's telling you to get it right loosens its grip for a moment, and something shifts, not because you prepared correctly or followed the framework, but because you stopped needing it to go a particular way.

And when that happens, the room changes. Because presence is contagious in exactly the same way performance is. When you stop monitoring yourself, the people in front of you get quiet permission to stop monitoring too.

It's not a technique. It's more like a remembering, a return to something that was always there underneath the learned behaviour and the frameworks and the daily effort of managing how you're landing.

I've written more about this in my latest Geeks Who Speak piece, if something here landed. Link in bio.

Jo x

Here's something most speakers never consider: the audience mirrors you.Not consciously. They couldn't tell you they're ...
31/07/2026

Here's something most speakers never consider: the audience mirrors you.

Not consciously. They couldn't tell you they're doing it. But when you're performing, they feel the gap between you and the thing you're saying. When you're actually in it, they're in it with you.

I've watched this happen in rooms. The shift is palpable. It's not about polish or technique or where you stand on the stage. It's about whether you're actually talking to the people in front of you or managing your way through a version of yourself you've rehearsed.

The most powerful thing you can do for an audience isn't to become more compelling. It's to stop performing and let them come with you instead.

That's when the room changes.

If you want to understand what that actually looks and feels like, I wrote about it this week. Link below

Jo x

There's a tell that almost nobody talks about in presentation skills.Watch a speaker who has rehearsed their physicality...
29/07/2026

There's a tell that almost nobody talks about in presentation skills.

Watch a speaker who has rehearsed their physicality, where to put their hands, when to pause, when to move across the stage, and you'll see it.

A microsecond gap between the thought and the gesture. A tiny décalage, a lag, where you can almost see them thinking "now I move here" before they move.

It's imperceptible if you're not looking for it. But you feel it. The whole room feels it, even if nobody could name why the speaker seems somehow slightly off, slightly managed, slightly not quite there.

The most compelling speakers I've ever watched share one thing: they've forgotten to think about where to put their hands because they're so completely in what they're saying. The physicality just follows. The pauses arrive naturally because they're actually thinking, not performing thinking.

You can't rehearse your way to that. You can only get out of your own way enough to let it happen.

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Nobody tells you that "make it more accessible" is going to feel like a betrayal.But it does. You sand off the edges of ...
27/07/2026

Nobody tells you that "make it more accessible" is going to feel like a betrayal.

But it does. You sand off the edges of the thing you actually know and care about. You translate yourself into a version you think the audience needs. And somewhere in that process something feels vaguely wrong, a bit out of sorts, like you're doing something you shouldn't be doing.

So you perform harder to compensate. You rehearse the accessible version. You manage your delivery. You put the pauses in the right places and say the thing you're supposed to say rather than the thing you actually know.

The resentment is information. It's telling you that you've confused two completely different jobs. Making your work accessible to a non-expert audience isn't about removing things until it's simple enough. It's about building a bridge from their world to yours, with all the depth intact.

That's a different job entirely. And it doesn't feel like a betrayal.

We all have stories that we tell ourselves about how life is meant to be. We learn them from family, school, work, soci...
23/02/2026

We all have stories that we tell ourselves about how life is meant to be. We learn them from family, school, work, society. And they become so engrained in our psyche that we start to believe it is the truth.

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