Episode 18: Shola Kaye

Where to start with Shola Kaye? There’s been quite the journey from a graduate of Natural Sciences at Cambridge and a Master of Science (Analytical Chemistry) at Emory University, to the trifecta of an arts career - speaking, singing, and writing books. Megan Thomas does her best to babble about the lot.

Shola is a multi award-winning speaker, specialising in communication, leadership and D.E.I (diversity, equity and inclusion). She not only inspires through her powerful talks and presentations, but has written two books about how to find that power within yourself. It’s all quite ironic, too, given the starting point for this part of her career was losing her corporate job as a result of not speaking up enough. 

Her first book, How to be a DIVA at Public Speaking: The step-by-step system to engage your audience and present with confidence, goes hand-in-hand with Shola’s extremely successful YouTube series, Speak Up Like a DIVA. Its focus is empowering its readers to speak with authority and confidence in all aspects of their lives, but especially in the workplace. Her latest book, Big Talk, Small Talk (and Everything in Between) teaches the art of effective communication with skill-building strategies. 

She’s also enjoyed a career as a singer, which she speaks about on different levels, from where she’s performed to her experience of writing music to a brief. Though she’s no longer writing original music, she can identify the similarities to the confidence required for musical performance and that of motivational speaking.