What pitching taught me about fear, visibility and the power of local stories

A few months ago, I accidentally signed myself up to get on stage and cry in front of a room full of strangers.

Let me explain.

I thought I was saying yes to attending a Byford Co.Lab workshop where I would learn how to pitch an idea. I did not realise I was also agreeing to stand on a stage and deliver a three-minute pitch of my own.

That was a fairly significant detail to have missed.

I have a huge fear of public speaking. I can talk on my own podcast. I can be interviewed on someone else's podcast. I can speak one-on-one with a new client and ask deep questions about their life, their business and what matters to them.

Put me on a stage, though, even a virtual one, and historically I have fallen apart and become a blubbering mess.

So my private goal for the night was very simple: get through the pitch without crying.

I failed at that goal spectacularly.

But the story did not begin on the stage. Long before I stood up there shaking, I had already put an enormous amount of myself into discovering what I really wanted to say.

Chapter 01

The local magic is already here:

The idea at the heart ❤️ of my pitch was:

Our local area is already full of people worth knowing and businesses worth travelling for. Many of them are doing powerful, meaningful work, but they are not always being seen.

These are not faceless businesses created purely to sell more things. They are deeply personal businesses, built from lived experience, passion, wisdom, creativity and a genuine desire to make something better.

Some help people heal, reconnect with themselves or choose themselves again. Some create art and culture. Some care for the land, strengthen the community or work towards a more sustainable future. Each one carries a story that cannot be communicated properly through a logo and a few generic social media posts.

I wanted to explore what could happen if we used photography and storytelling to reveal the people behind these businesses. Not only what they sell, but what they care about, what shaped them and why their work matters.

When we elevate the people local to us, we give more people a reason to come here. (I travel far and wide for the right service!)

We also give local people more reasons to connect, collaborate and support one another. When they shine, we all shine.

Turning the pitch into a real community project

I did not want to stand on stage and present a nice idea that existed only in my head. I wanted to test it in the real world first.

So I wrote a post for local Facebook groups beginning with a question:

Are you a super passionate local business owner creating meaningful change through your work?

I called for a small number of heart-led business owners from within the Shire of Serpentine and Jarrahdale. I was especially interested in people working in spirituality and holistic wellbeing, the arts and culture, personal development, environmental care, regeneration, sustainability, community connection and social impact.

More than anything, I was looking for people whose businesses were built with passion, integrity and care. People with a meaningful story and a purpose that reached beyond simply selling more.

In exchange for their time and willingness to participate, I offered to take each person through my deep-dive discovery process, create a visual story with them through a professional photoshoot and provide at least five images they could use in their business free of charge.

The public call-out might have looked like one Facebook post, but the work behind the project went much deeper.

I spoke with the women who responded and learnt about their businesses, their values, their experiences and the bigger reasons behind what they do. I listened for the things they might overlook because they are too close to their own story. That is one of my favourite parts of this work. I often see qualities in people that they do not yet recognise as remarkable in themselves.

From there, I had to think about how each story could be translated visually.

What location would feel true to the person? What parts of their work needed to be shown? What details, tools, surroundings, expressions and interactions could help someone feel the heart of the business before reading a single word?

There were conversations to hold, ideas to research, locations and logistics to consider, visual directions to develop and individual photoshoots to plan.

Then there was the practical work of photographing each story, sorting through the images, editing them and choosing the photographs that best reflected what I had seen in each woman.

All of that had to happen within a short project window, while I was also trying to work out how to condense the meaning of it into a pitch that could last exactly three minutes.

Chapter 02

It became bigger than the pitch:

Something shifted once we began working together.

These women had trusted me to learn about them, hear their stories and photograph what I saw in them. In doing that, we moved beyond surface-level business networking. We formed deeper connections. We started learning about each other's knowledge, ideas and work. We found ways we wanted to collaborate and support one another.

Every woman involved was stepping outside her comfort zone in some way. Each was making herself more visible because she believed her work could improve somebody's life, her community or the world around her.

That became living proof of the point I wanted to make.

There is room for everyone because no two businesses carry the same magic. When people are given the space to tell the truth about who they are and why their work exists, visibility does not have to feel like a competition. It can become an invitation into connection.

When I think about the ripple effect one person can have, it feels infinite. One person supports another. That person reaches a family, a client or a community. An idea becomes a conversation. A conversation becomes a collaboration. Something small begins changing the little corner of the world it can reach.

If enough of us keep doing that, we do change the world.

These women inspired the shit out of me

It really is a privilege to witness individual people in their lives. I don’t think I will ever stop being fascinated by this. I cannot state enough how much I LOVE learning how people see the world, why they think what they think or what has transformed them within their life’s journey to be the person I meet them as today.

Chapter 03

The moment that stripped everything back:

While I was out in the community working on this project and speaking with local businesses, I came across a serious road accident. I stopped and tried to help however I could. Motorcycle passenger in critical condition after rider allegedly runs red light in East Rockingham - 97.3 Coast FM

An experience like that has a way of cutting through the noise. Business plans, nerves, deadlines and the pressure to say everything perfectly suddenly become very small. You are reminded how fragile life is, how quickly everything can change and how important it is to make time for what brings meaning, beauty and joy while we are here.

On the more personal side of that scene - I was left with flashbacks of the gruesome details I witnessed and heard for about 3 days and my whole nervous system needed another two weeks to reset itself back to what it was before that night.

From my life experience I have coined the phrase: Pain enables us to feel what beauty is. This really helps me when I am in the throws of something devastating as a reminder that this pain will be useful to me later, when I can feel even more depth of the beauty around me. I should really write a whole post on this phrase. It has a huge multilayered meaning behind it for me.

Witnessing that moment deepened the pitch for me. I was not only talking about marketing local businesses. I was talking about people choosing to use their lives to make something meaningful. I was talking about noticing them while they are here, valuing what they contribute and helping their work reach the people who may need it.

Photography can make somebody visible, but storytelling can help them be understood.

That is the work I care about.

Chapter 04

Trying to fit all of that into three minutes

The preparation for the pitch became an exercise in deciding what mattered most.

I had gathered stories, created images, built new relationships and watched the project become something much larger than its original purpose. Now I had to reduce all of that to exactly three minutes.

I wrote, cut, rearranged, practiced alone, practiced in front of my housemate mid fashion show while she helped me choose my outfit. I timed it, trimmed it again and again. I shaped it around the idea that the local magic is already here. I explained the problem of meaningful businesses being under-seen, showed how photography and storytelling could help and connected that visibility to a broader benefit for our local economy, tourism and community.

I also knew exactly what I wanted to do if I won.

I wanted to use the prize money to put one of these local businesses on a billboard. To take somebody whose work deserved to be seen and quite literally make them impossible to overlook. This was my big hairy audacious goal maybe too big - I tentatively changed it in the end after some external counselling from some business women I respect. I decided the money would go further if it contributed to me building my new website to fully embody the name Amanita Studios.

I still have this B-HAG goal of creating a billboard for a client, it needs to be incredibly aligned and purposeful for me to say yes.

Then came the small matter of actually getting on stage and saying it all out loud.

The pitch I cried my way through

I was so worried about crying, or whether I would follow through with the pitch at all, that I deliberately did not go out of my way to invite people to support me.

Apparently, my strategy was to face one of my biggest fears while also making sure there were as few familiar witnesses as possible.

Then a 16-year-old boy took the stage before me and put everything he had into his pitch. He had a heart of gold, the room felt it, and the waterworks began. It was not only me. There were definitely onions being cut throughout the room.

Then I realised, oh shit, I was next.

There was no time to regroup. No time to get my breathing under control or pretend I had not just been crying. I had to stand up and walk onto the stage exactly as I was.

So up I went.

And cried.

I projected my cry voice through that whole fucking pitch while my body shook. My voice was unsteady, breathing was difficult and I am fairly certain I blacked out for parts of it.

I defaulted to my self-deprecating humour, held on for dear life and did the best I could.

Most importantly, I finished.

People told me afterwards that they had understood what I was saying, which was an enormous relief. I had not managed to stop myself from crying, but I had managed to keep speaking while I cried.

That distinction matters to me now.

Courage did not look the way I thought it would

I used to think success would mean standing on stage calm, composed and completely in control. I thought courage would look like finally conquering the fear and delivering the pitch without anybody seeing what it cost me.

That is not what happened.

The fear came with me. So did the shaking, the tears and the part of me that wanted to escape. Courage was not the absence of any of those things. It was continuing to speak while they were happening.

I did not have to become a polished, fearless version of myself before I was allowed to share something I believed in.

That may be the most important thing I took from the entire experience, particularly as somebody building a business around helping other people become more visible. Fuck its terrifying, I also had never forgotten this when trying to get my clients to be more visible, but it was a great humbler for me, nevertheless.

Being seen is vulnerable. It asks something of us and that something is different for each of us. Sometimes visibility looks powerful and beautifully put together. Sometimes it looks like a woman on a stage, crying into a microphone like a hot mess and getting to say her final word she prepared.

Now I am determined to crack this whole crying-while-public-speaking thing because apparently running a business means continuously signing yourself up to do shit that makes you deeply uncomfortable.

I am also deeply grateful to the women who said yes to this project and trusted me with their stories. What began as preparation for a pitch became a genuine example of what can happen when people make space to see one another properly.

Thank you to the Byford Co.Lab team for helping me navigate the fear, pushing me far beyond my comfort zone and creating an event where all of us could stand up, share an idea and give it a go.

I may have cried. But I fucking did it.

And I am incredibly proud that I did.

Work with me at Amanita Studios

If you are building a business that is personal, purposeful and difficult to capture in a few generic sentences, I would love to help you make the real story visible.

Through deep-dive discovery, photography and visual storytelling, I look for the qualities you may not yet recognise as being anything all that significant in yourself, then help you share them with the people who need to see them.

Get in touch with Amanita Studios to start a conversation, it is my honour to serve you in this way.

Individual blog posts to come going into detail with each client that joined me for my Pitch project!