With the release of her career, life, and confidence-shifting podcast, ‘Speaking With Influence And Power,’ Maria Pellicano empowers listeners to explore the influential power to be accessed through discovering their voice and message.
With a deep passion for helping people discover and share their most authentic selves, Maria Pellicano has spent a lifetime exploring voice, message, and mindset, through her singing and vocal coaching and working with business professionals. Maria has neatly packaged together valuable lessons, taken directly from live sessions with clients, to create useful and applicable strategies that can help her clients, listeners, and readers to move forward with their careers and lives, free of charge.
“Nobody really knows the sound of their voice, and most are unable to control the sound of their voices.”
– Maria Pellicano
With a lifelong vision for sharing her empowering message, Maria Pellicano is the author of the book ‘The Art of Powerful Communication,’ Creator of the Speak With Power & Influence Program course, and facilitates private voice coaching sessions for professionals.
Maria Pellicano has also been featured on Samantha Riley’s Thought Leaders podcast, Podcast My Business podcast, Talking With The Experts podcast, The 2 Minute Mentor podcast, The Savvy Dentist podcast, and Industry Thought Leader podcast. Maria has also worked as a voice coach with businesses such as VCAT, Trivago, AGL Energy, and has been a speaker at events such as A Woman of Influence Conference and the Notonos Gender Equity Makers Program.
Maria Pellicano is an Australian author, voice coach, public speaker, teacher, and singer. With more than 20 years of experience, she has helped over 5,000 people find their voice, presence, and confidence and communicate with influence and impact.
Through her experience, she has learned first-hand the impact experienced by people who have not been able to access the power within their voices. There is often an overall feeling of speakers not getting the best out of themselves, feeling stifled and held back.
With a career that began with her passion for working with singers, Maria works with individuals, leaders, influencers, and businesses through communication and voice coaching, training, mentoring and coaching, and corporate development programs, utilizing her three-step model of Mindset, Message, and Voice.
Maria regularly works with mentoring executives, managers, CEO, and leaders from Fortune 100 organizations, with the focus on improving tonality and moving towards effective and confident public speaking,
Maria works with clients to develop a strong voice, a mindset that empowers them to be passionate and committed to their calling, and a message that is appropriately designed to address the needs of the specific audience, clients, and relationships.
If you are looking to improve the way that you communicate with an audience, your staff, team, or managers, be more effective within difficult and high stake conversations, to create an authentic presence when sharing with your team or within professional or personal conversations, Maria can assist you in achieving your goals.
We had the pleasure of interviewing Maria Pellicano. Here are the excerpts from the interview.
Hi Maria, Great to have you with us today! What’s the name of your business?
I am an entrepreneur that builds my business surrounding my own name, Maria Pellicano. From there, I have my singing school, SingOut Singing and Performance School; I coach and mentor business people, influencers, and speakers through my coaching business under my own name.
I am an author of a book, ‘The Art of Powerful Communication‘ and the founder of a podcast, ‘Speak With Influence and Power.’
Where is your business located?
I am based in Melbourne, Australia, and have the opportunity of working with people from all over the world.
Please share about your current business. What are you doing exactly?
My main source of income currently is working with government agencies, individuals, leaders, influencers, and fortune 100 businesses, both nationally and globally, providing services for public speaking and voice coaching, training, mentoring and coaching, and corporate development programs.
I use mindset, voice coaching, and message delivery strategies to help empower effective communication for high stake conversations and confident speaking.
I am very entrepreneurial. I love to multiply what I already have working.. .building, and stacking on more to what is already functional. This keeps me interested and makes my work less repetitive, exciting, and meaningful. So I look for opportunities to leverage what I already have, and then I build on that.
I never pull apart what I already have. I just add more strings to my bow. I’m always looking at enhancing what I’ve already done and bringing more meaning to what I’ve always done.
So, my first business was teaching singing. From there, I added in coaching because I was always into human potential and expanding people. I was really interested in how people think and how we succeed.
I’ve always made money by helping people, empowering them, and giving them confidence. My tool was “the voice” and what it could, how it would make you feel, and what it wanted to say.
When did you start the business?
I began my business journey about 23 years ago, in 1998.
I used to be very against having my own private business. I used to see it as egotistic in the old days. I used to believe that having your own business meant that you had a selfish intention.
I didn’t understand that having your own business allows you more control over your time and value and gives you more power to choose how you want to use your life, and you also have more responsibility to make the choices that don’t just suit you but suit your work and the people you serve.
I never knew that when I was very young. I started in 1998 when I was 30 years old. It was a long time ago.
As I reflect, I realize that I did have side businesses when I was a teenager. I must have been really geared up for business without knowing it because I was dressmaking when I was 14, and I was teaching guitar. I wasn’t charging for teaching guitar but was teaching as a teenager, and I taught four girls in the church at the time and would take them out busking.
Between 14 and 18, I was dressmaking. Took lessons twice a week and made patterns for people. I was making and selling clothes; people would come, and I would take measurements and make their clothes.
I was also into Bessemer high-quality pots and pans, and I was selling pots and pans and accumulating points to get my own set without paying anything for them. I actually still have them today.
So, as I reflect, I was in business, without knowing it, when I was a teenager and in my 20s. I had a couple of part jobs after school, too; I worked in a boutique dress shop and in a supermarket.
Later, I spent some time working a normal day job in the commonwealth bank, then at Vic Roads, as a leader in the demerit points division, at a local council, and then at Telstra.
As I reflect, I am grateful that to this day, I have never been unemployed, never not one day weekday without earning a salary.
Driving to and from work, catching public transport, I was finding that it was taking me a long time to get to work, and so I officially began my business in 1998 in the form of my singing school.
It really took off, and I was making triple the money I was making compared to when I was in corporate. To me, it was like sitting at a banquet every night. I loved what I was doing because I felt like I was in control, and I just loved it. I felt like it was an incredible gift to me. I was putting my ad in the local paper, and people were just booking in.
What advice would you give to somebody who wants to start a similar business?
The advice that I would give someone who wants to start a similar business is to really get to know yourself. You really need to know who you are as a person and face up to it. More specifically, your strengths and your weaknesses.
I think so often that people enter businesses, copying somebody else, but they may not have the attributes for it, meaning the natural capacity. This comes from a lack of self-awareness.
I have spent a long time discovering myself. I then was able to know what was and was not right for me. You get better at identifying these aspects, and you modify your plans as you go. You get older, your body changes, and circumstances change, which require you to keep modifying your plans.
Ultimately, if you would like to start a similar business, you need to align what you do with who you are, your values, and your overall message, the mandate of your life.
I believe that I have always continued to do what I’ve always done but added more strings to my bow and deepened the call. It’s something that I continue to do. I never take my eyes off what I’ve already done. I’m just adding more to it.
In a similar business, the key would be not to copy someone but to model and get ideas and then to take it back to themselves and do a real inner reflection about how it aligns with who they are as people. Where does it work for them? It can’t just be a good idea. It has to line up with what they bring to it. Their unique intelligence, unique experience, or their journey.
Even though we like similar businesses, we like to copy, and we like to see things in other people’s lives, we have to bring it back to ours and say, ‘how is it right for me, and how does it really line up for me?’.
Look at people’s ideas, ask the questions and then look at your resourcing and your capacity and bring it back there. Then you can create a list, i.e., these parts are in my capability right now; these parts are things I need to develop. It’s about really knowing what is here right now, in my capacity. It takes courage sometimes to identify these aspects and take action.
Then look at the areas that you need to develop. It’s in these areas that I seek learning through courses, coaching, or mentoring, and it allows me to become what I want to become.
How did you come up with your business idea?
I looked at what I was already doing. I then took it to a ‘thought leadership group’ with Matt Church and did some coaching, focusing on my thoughts. How to develop and lead from your thoughts.
It was where I was able to build a practitioner business – A business based on my own name, with me as my business.
With this model, I began with ‘Harness Your Voice’ as my professional voice coaching trade business. This was then re-branded after about two years to become Maria Pellicano, with the coaching as a product of my personal business brand rather than a business in itself.
I also have a singing school, which is a business in itself, under the name SingOut.
How has your experience in running the business been different from what you expected?
It’s gone well beyond my expectations, and it has surprised me. Overall, my business has been so much more than what I ever would have expected and allowed me to become so much more than I thought.
During Covid-19, I was surprised by how quickly the effects of the pandemic changed the way my singing school operated. It hasn’t been a disadvantage to my overall business, but it was a big surprise.
I think in so many ways, running a business requires so much body energy. I could do so much more, but I’ve realized how much support I will need to move forward and the need to delegate. Sometimes in your mind’s eye, you think that you can do so much more than what your energy allows. Often you push yourself so much, and then you suddenly realize that you don’t sleep at night or that you have overdone it. There’s questioning that comes up because you know you love what you are doing, but your body doesn’t always like you overdoing it. Your mind always wants to do more, more, more, but often our nervous systems don’t allow for it. That’s what I am realizing a lot more as I get older.
It’s about constantly checking in and ensuring that you have the balance and that you’re doing other things outside of your business. I love my work, but I am not my work. There is so much more to me as a person, and sometimes in business, we can forget that.
Is there anything you wish you had done differently?
Sometimes for me, working alone hasn’t always been great. Efficiency-wise, it’s great, and I don’t waste time. I probably lack the team and being able to bounce ideas off people.
I have been pretty much solo, having to ask the questions to get the information that I need, but I’m not in a team, so I often miss being with other people, and it can be quite lonely doing my work.
I work with lots of people as clients, but I’m not going out for coffees and lunches with people daily and coming into a team. I simply come to my desk. To do things differently, I would have considered maybe working within a team a couple of days a week.
One other thing is that what I could have done differently is to empower someone else to create a business from my business; this is something I want to give back now. How can I use my business to help someone else create their business and perhaps even work together, where the business of another is fed through my business.
As I expand my roots and see beyond what I am doing, moving from solo practitioner to, even more, I am excited to see what the future may hold and how this or even more will eventuate.
Any message for readers.
You don’t need to know everything and get everything right. It still works out, even if you get it wrong. Your higher purpose is even bigger than if you get it right or wrong, and that’s a powerful point.
You don’t have to tick all your boxes and get everything right because your purpose is even bigger than that. It’s a higher level than getting everything right or wrong.
Fantastic! So tell us, how can people find out more about you?
You can visit my website or follow me on Instagram at @mariapellicano.
Thank you so much, Maria, for giving us your precious time! We wish you all the best for your journey ahead!
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