Hi there, welcome to the Biz Communication Show. I’m your host, Bill Lampton, the Biz Communication Guy, bringing you tips and strategies about communication that will boost your business. And I don’t do this alone. It’s not just my communication tips and strategies, but you get much more through my conversation with a highly qualified guest.

And today our guest is indeed highly qualified, coming to us from the Atlanta metropolitan area, Domenica Davis. Domenica Davis is an experienced broadcast meteorologist, reporter, host, and on-camera coach. She has worked nationally for NBC, Fox, News Channel, MSNBC, and the Weather Channel. And by now, I’ll bet you, Domenica Davis’ name and image rings a bell with you because like me, you probably have watched her for more than two decades.

Currently, Domenica freelances as a meteorologist for 11 Live in Atlanta, and she runs On Cam with Domenica, a coaching business dedicated to helping on-air talent elevate their performance, build confidence, and develop the skills needed to succeed in both traditional and digital media. So I know that you join me in welcoming Domenica Davis.

Hello, Domenica.

Hello. How are you?

I’m just doing very well now that I’m going to have a delightful conversation with you that informs, educates, and knowing you, entertains as well.

Well, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you.

It’s an honor to host you. At the outset, I’m sure there are many people who wonder, those of us who have watched meteorologists for years, we wonder, how did you get there? I mean, some of us are thinking, oh, this is a nice-looking person. I guess they won a talent contest somewhere with their speaking. A talent scout from TV saw them, hired them, and the next thing you know, we’re seeing them pointing at maps.

That’s not exactly how it happens, is it, Domenica?

No. Not for me, no. I’ve never won any contest. So the way I got into it many moons ago was I went to college knowing that I wanted to be a reporter. So I knew I wanted to be in broadcast news. I thought I wanted to be an anchor and a reporter, and that’s really why I graduated from Boston University. So that’s really what I went to college for.

After I graduated college, my very first job was in traffic. I did live traffic, and it included weather, but it was like a rip-and-read weather. You didn’t really do weather. So I got my first agent at the time, and he said, hey, did you ever think of going into meteorology? I said, no, never. And so he said, I think you’d be great.

Reporters, anchors are a dime a dozen. Meteorologists, it’s a degree thing. You’d have to go back to school, but they really need women in this field. I think you’d be great at it. And if you have an interest, I mean, I think this is something you should pursue.

So I was never caught in a tornado. I don’t have any of those stories. I was kind of introduced to it really in a strategic manner career-wise. Lucky for me, I actually really liked it. So I got into it in a really weird, backwards way that most people don’t. But it really worked out for me, and I went to Mississippi State to get my degree, and I worked while I was doing that.

So I’ve always been a reporter and a meteorologist for many years before I just strictly did meteorology on TV. And that’s really how I got in. It’s not that entertaining atall, but it’s my story, and it’s true.

I mentioned to you as we were getting acquainted before the program that I’m a Mississippian native. I realized just a few years ago how many people that I see who are meteorologists are graduates of the program at Mississippi State. Something I would like to just throw in here is that there are many of us who’ve been on this earth a while, who lived here before weather forecasting got so scientific and for the most part excellent in accuracy and in forecasting.

And at that time, Domenica, I was on the University of Georgia faculty. The only warning we would get about any bad weather coming was probably just somebody interrupting a local radio program. So I remember so well that living in Athens, Georgia, the place you don’t think of necessarily for violent storms, you think of it for the university and football. But this one day my wife was coming home from work. She walked into the house, we looked out back and a tree was swaying in the wind and we said that’s nothing. Next thing we knew the house was shaking. Our neighbor’s roof came off. We had all of this with no warning. And my daughters, I guess it’s one of the few times I ever lied to them. They said, Daddy, are we going to die? And I said, No. It seemed like we would. Amazingly, there were six homes in our subdivision that were destroyed and also in one other subdivision in Athens. And ironically, exactly 60 days later, again without warning, two tornadoes hit those same neighborhoods.

So having been around on this earth before we got all the warnings that we get now and the advice on what to do, I have an appreciation for weather forecasters, meteorologists that some people who are more recent on this earth would not have.

Now you’re into coaching broadcasters, meteorologists now. How did you happen to get into that? What was your purpose? And what do you want to accomplish in doing that?

Well, I coach not just meteorologists, but anybody, digital content creators, anchors. So not just meteorologists. But the purpose that I wanted to get into that was it was the next logical step in my career. It’s something that I was doing kind of here and there with people that would reach out to me and ask, like, hey, can you take a look at my tape or can you help me with this or just starting out in the business? So mentoring is really how it started. And I loved it. And I was giving a lot of time to it because I wanted to. It was one of those things that I was just spending a lot of time, you know, with certain people that would reach out to me, reviewing their staff, sending them notes, talking to them.

And I thought, you know, this is just really something that is such a good fit for me. It makes me feel like I’m doing something. I’m giving back. And I’ve had help along the way. I’ve had coaches. Not, you know, I’ve had coaches like, you know, that stage is higher that a lot of times I felt like did more discouraging than they did lifting you up and teaching you and pushing you forward. And I just I just saw I just I just felt I don’t know. It just it was just the greatest fit for me. And I thought I can make such a difference in people that actually need somebody who supports them, not there to criticize them or make them feel bad for being new at something and learning it.

And it’s just something that as the years went on, I decided I wanted to devote more and more time to. And I feel now it’s it’s it’s so fulfilling. It’s so fulfilling. And it’s really what gets me up in the morning. I love being I loveTV. I love broadcasting. I love broadcasting. But this is the next logical thing for me to do. It’s just a great way to give back and encourage people that are coming up. behind me to keep pushing. Everybody’s so great, especially in this day and age where we live in a playback era, right? So everybody can review their tapes. Everybody can practice on camera. You don’t need to be in a studio anymore to develop your skills. Do it with your camera, yes. But what people do need is encouragement. That’s what they do need. They need encouragement. They need practical skills. They need all those things. They need to be told that being you is okay. That’s actually what you need to do is be you. So that’s what they need. They don’t need the technical things anymore. They need the encouragement to be them. And that’s what makes great.

One of the things I noticed among the items that you help broadcasters with, many who have wanted to be on the big screen, believe that when they go on there, they have to develop instantly a, quote, broadcast voice. And so the guys try to boom away and it does not become the winning voice because it’s not their voice. How do you convince someone you’re working with on that? And what training do you give them to say, hey, your natural voice is what everybody wants?

Well, we all cringe at our own voice, right? We’ve all heard our voice. I still do it. I’ll watch this podcast back. Oh, my God, my voice. We all cringe at our natural voice, and that’s normal. The more you hear it, you get over it, right? It’s just my voice. Now, it’s hard sometimes to convince people not to do that, especially college kids, kids that are, you know, working at their college television station and they’re getting ready to go into to look for their first job. They’re going into the real world, so to speak. That’s always my hardest to convince them to be them because they are, you know, when you’re young, you’re insecure, and it’s much easier for me to pretend I’m you than to pretend I’m me. And they’re also very impressive, not just impressive stories. Yes, right. So they think they have to make up for that by they’re sort of just playing the role. They’re not being the role. They’re just playing it. So they’re developing some character and then going with that. So I find it the hardest with the kids that are the students are just graduating and going into the business.

But what we work on, you know, it’s we work on talking normal. We work on using our voice and being comfortable and recording it and all the reasons of how that sounds better. We do a lot of playback. We do a lot of comparison. And it’s almost like I have to prove to them that their voice, when we hear it, we do a lot of, okay, listen to this. Now listen to this. Now just read it to me like you were reading it to a friend. Totally informal. You don’t even have to read it. Just paraphrase it. But just now talk like you were going to talk to a friend. And we go back and forth and they always go, oh, yeah, that does sound better. I’m like, right? Didn’t you pay attention more? Like it was so much more engaging. So we do a lot of that. And it’s, you know, it’s really a coach. And I have a lot of skills and we go over a lot of techniques and we do a lot of exercise. We cover a lot of ground in our hour that we meet together with my clients. But a lot of it is getting them to trust themselves and be comfortable. And that’s really a lot of the work. But, yeah, I mean, we do it and it’s great and it’s so rewarding. Oh, I love it. It never gets old to me.

One of the great, I’m in many ways our careers parallel, even though I’m not on television because I’m a professional speech coach. And that’s one of the points also that I work with clients to getacross. And there’s an instance that I usually share with my clients and they may not even remember the name Charles Kuralt, but there was an evening when I was working on the staff of an organization where we brought in Charles Kuralt as a keynote speaker. I spent probably a very enjoyable one hour getting acquainted with him. He had to go out and smoke a couple of times, and I’d walk out with him.

What I’ve used often in talking about using your own natural voice is that when Charles Kuralt, one of the most renowned broadcasters in television history, stepped to the microphone, he sounded exactly the same. No change at all in the tone, the enunciation, the animation, exactly the same as he did before he stepped behind the camera. And that is what you and I like to achieve with clients, isn’t it?

Yeah, and you know what? We’re talking about not… But I just want to point this out because voice is probably the number one thing that I work on. It’s the common thread pretty much with everybody. At some point in our sessions, we’re going to tap into the voice and how to make it richer. Now, everybody can make their voice richer, right?

And really when we do voice work, voice work goes to pacing, it goes to pausing. A lot of people, they are running out of breath while they’re talking. And that’s because they’re not pacing themselves. They’re not breathing. Basically, they just stop breathing. So then they’re talking and then they have to gasp, right? Or they take a big, deep swallow. That’s another sign that they’ve just lost their breath. So that goes into voice.

But I always have to tell people, we’re not changing your voice, we’re controlling your voice. Two different things. When you learn to play with your voice, you can do anything in broadcasting. It’s actually a really great trick and it’s really fun. Now, if I can control my voice, I can go up, I can go down, I can emphasize, I can pause for effect. I can make you pay attention to what I’m saying without you looking at the camera, right? My voice is controlling how you’re listening to me.

And so we do a lot of that. So it’s, you know, what we do with a lot of my clients is we all tend to talk through our throat. I’m talking through my throat right now. Right? It’s our everyday conversation. We just kind of talk through here. But if I talk through my diaphragm and I connect it, didn’t you notice how I’m slowing down? I’m automatically talking slower. It’s forcing me to pause.

And I’m a really fast talker and now I’m going back to my throat. So it’s like engaging your stomach and that’s really where you want to draw from when you’re in front of the camera or doing a presentation or in real life too. You can do it in real life all the time if you want. And some people are really good at, they talk strictly from their diaphragm. I don’t. But I know how to and I know why I need to because it automatically makes me slow down. It makes my brain, my brain’s ahead of my mouth when I do it that way. It makes my voice richer. All those things and I’m not just sitting here talking through my throat.

So these are all the things that we develop and why it’s important is not because I want your voice to sound different. It’s because I want your voice to be in control. And therein lies the difference.

There’s a comparison I think you probably have used sometime. And when I’m working with a speech coaching client, I ask them, have you ever heard somebody play chopsticks? And they said, well, yes, maybe I played it myself as a kid. Okay, how many keys are in chopsticks? And I believe I remember it’s 11 keys it takes to play it. How many keys are there on the piano? There are 88. Well, wouldn’t you be bored if somebody just played chopsticks the entire time that they were with you? Yes, they’ve just stuck on those notes. Well, if somebody’s speaking to you or you’re speakingto somebody, you’ve got 88 notes that you can use. And that comparison often clicks with them that we’ve got a wide range and as you said, volume, pitch, pauses, and so many of our novice presenters are afraid to pause. They want to rush ahead. We’re going to come back in just a few seconds. We’re going to talk about another specialty of yours in your coaching of broadcasters and that’s ad-libbing. We’ll be back in just a few seconds.

Do you wish you felt confident about giving speeches? Do you want to deal with difficult people constructively? And what about becoming more persuasive in sales? Then keep listening now to Dr. Bill Lampton. He spent 20 years in management so he knows the communication skills you need for success. I urge you to call the Biz Communication Guy today for a no-cost but very valuable 30-minute discussion about your communication challenges. Call now 678-316-4300. Again, that’s 678-316-4300.

Domenico, when I watch weather forecasters, reporters, meteorologists, sometimes if we’re in the time when a big weather front is approaching, the forecaster meteorologist might stay on the air consecutively. I’ve seen it go for 20 or 30 minutes in a crisis situation. Now, those of us who are viewers, can we think this is something they just memorized and they’re regurgitating that or they have a script over here someplace? No, none of those. You’ve got to be in the moment.

How do you work with your clients to teach them to ad-lib, to get away from a script, to put yourself into it in your own interpretations? Well, the weather is never a script. Never. So even when you’re just doing a regular forecast, it’s never. There’s never a script. Your script are your graphics behind you, right? So we start there. So for meteorologists, but even for anchors, reporters, reporters ad-lib. So when you see a reporter, especially a live reporter, and they come to you at the beginning and introduce what they’re about to, and then you go to a package, what is called a package, it’s a taped piece that they’ve recorded, but those ins and outs where they say hello and goodbye, those are ad-lib. And usually it intros a story and outros it. So there’s some sort of anchoring. There’s some sort of fact on each end that they’re going to give you. And that’s ad-lib. That’s not scripted because they don’t have the means to script it. There’s no prompter there. So there’s a lot of aspects of news and broadcasting these days where you’re just using ad-lib.

And it goes back to being prepared. People think ad-lib is just you speak off the cuff. No. It’s a terrible way to get into it. Nothing should ever just be a stream of consciousness. We should always be prepared. So you can, just because you’re not writing something down or you’re not reading it, doesn’t mean it’s not prepared in your head. So you have to get organized. You have to know what you want to say. And the more you do it, the quicker you can get at putting those pieces together in your head. But you’re always having some sort of outline. So you’re never just going into something blind, right, without thinking about what you want to say.

And I always tell people with ad-libbing, it’s not the words. A lot of people, they’ll make a mistake of, they’ll memorize a little script, right? So they’ll say, okay, so I want to, this is going to be my intro to this story. There were three men, you know, that were accused of robbing. They’re now at the county courthouse and whatever, all those facts. They’ll memorize it and then they memorize it in their head and then they regurgitate it and speed through it. Well, that’s just memorization and then regurgitating it. So often they’re going too fast. They’re saying it with no sort of meaning behind it because they’re just trying to get through it.

So the trick with ad-libbing is being prepared and being prepared on the idea and what’s the point of what you’re saying. And when you get to what the point of what you’re saying is and what the takeaway is, you don’t have to worry about the words. The words will come. You’ve been speakingyour whole life. The words will come. You don’t have to train your brain to give the words. You have to train your brain to figure out what is the point. So that’s when you go into weather, when you’re anything. What is the point of what I’m saying? The words will come. So you’re kind of it’s a very intentional. It’s very intentional. You’re just you’re not just babbling on like I am right now. Right. I’m just kind of rambling on. But when you’re so that that’s really we work on a lot of that and pausing.

It all goes back to the same things. Pausing is huge when you’re ad libbing because you have to stop and think of what you’re saying. So you’re not rambling. So that pause becomes even more effective. You have to take a minute. So your brain is ahead of your mouth. If your mouth is ahead of your brain, you’re just stumbling all over the place. And I can always tell when somebody’s mouth is ahead of their brain or when my mouth is ahead of my brain, because I’ll just start stumbling. And then, you know, that’s your cue. Stop and pause. Let your brain catch up. Your brain needs to go before. But it’s that feeling, especially when people are ad libbing or they’re nervous. It becomes so hard to take a break because you’re just trying to get through it, which is normal and natural. And we all have moments where we’re doing that, right? We’re just trying to get through something. I don’t care how much of a pro you are. Everybody still has moments where you’re uncomfortable with something, a topic or whatever, and you’re just trying to get through it. So those things will happen. But it’s recognizing when it’s happening to you, how to stop it and control it. And nine times out of ten, stop talking and breathe. Just take a pause. It’s not going to be offensive.

Let’s take a pause right now. A couple of things I would. Right, because it was a two second pause. It wasn’t weird. Nobody noticed. Yes. One of the things I’d say about pausing is that you and I work with clients and convince them that a pause is never as long to the audience as it feels to you. To you, it might seem like 30 seconds. It’s really two to three seconds. I go back to my speech instructor in college who had a saying that he repeated quite often, leave out everything but the pauses. And that gets the point across.

Domenica, being with you on the Biz Communication Show has been so enlightening. I’m just hoping that this is the first time and not the only time. We will certainly want your expertise again. And those who are your broadcast coaching clients, they are going to excel. There’s no doubt about it. They are. And it’s, oh, I just I love every bit of it. I love meeting people and the relationships that I get. I get so lucky. I get to meet all these talented people. It’s just the best thing ever. Well, that’s the way I feel about today. I’m lucky enough to get a highly talented person indeed.

I know that there are viewers and listeners to the Biz Communication Show who would like your contact information. So what would you like to share with us on that, please? Well, if you want to find out a little bit more about my services, you can go to oncamwithdominica.com or you can email me and I’m at Domenica, D-O-M-E-N-I-C-A at oncamwithdominica.com and email me. And just if you want to. I love chatting with people. You don’t have to just meet with me because you have to have my services. If you want to chat, you need some advice, you need some direction, anything like that. You just sometimes people just need to talk things through, right? You just need somebody else to talk things through with. If you’re batting around a couple of ideas, reach out. I love connecting with people. I love meeting people in this business and beyond. Everything intersects these days. So yeah, reach out, say hello. Let’s expand our networks, right? The more we know people, the better we all are.

That is a wonderful invitation. And now that you have given your contact information, which we all appreciate, I’ll give mine. My YouTube channel, Bill Lampton, PhD, youwill find all of the previous versions and this one soon on my YouTube channel. I’ve been recording on YouTube since 2007. Don’t look at any of those earlier ones, please, as Domenica might feel herself. But in recent years, I’ve been able to host outstanding communication professionals. While you’re there, I invite you to subscribe.

Also, my website, biz, since my moniker is the Biz Communication Guy, my website is bizcommunicationguy.com. Give me a phone call. No obligation, no financial investment, initial call. Like Domenica, I would like to hear your communication challenges and problems, and we can talk about what directions you might take to assist you with those. My phone, 678-316-4300.

I want to give credit to the co-producer of the program, that’s Mike Stewart. Mike I met in 1997 when I was just entering the professional speaking business. Mike has been my tech and marketing genius ever since, and his website, localinternetpresence.com. Currently, Mike is a multi-talented guy. Currently, he is touring with a group playing the Beatles songs. He’s one of those guys who got some of the talents that I didn’t, but that’s life.

Domenica, I would like to give you an opportunity, we’ve had such an enlightening conversation. In what few words, 30 seconds or a minute, would you like to pull together the message you want to leave with our audience?

Be yourself. It is good enough. I promise you. It’s something I always have to remind myself.

Be yourself. Nobody wants, you’re a better you than anyone else, and I promise you, it’s enough. It’s good enough, and that’s how you thrive.

The second you lean in to who you are, the world’s your oyster. And I say that to myself too, by the way. I’m saying that to you. I’m saying that to me. I’m saying it to everybody. I have to remind myself that too. Sometimes you just feel we’re not enough, and you are.

And there’s that word going around, we feel like an imposter. Don’t feel like an imposter. You belong there. No, it’s your life. You’ve lived it. All your stories are your stories.

Reminds me of Oscar Wilde who said, be yourself. Everybody else is already taken. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, thank you again to highly professional and highly personable Domenica Davis for being our guest on today’s Biz Communication Show. Thank you to those of you who were with us on the YouTube version and also those who are with us on the podcast. Be with us next week for another program that helps you excel in your business communication. I’m Bill Lampton, the Biz Communication Guy. Thank you.