‘I’ve Learned to Believe in Myself’ : Seminar Leader Leaves Her Stammers Behind

The local chapter of Winners’ Circle International was braced and ready. Guest speaker Anne Boe would be up momentarily, getting them motivated--at the grueling hour of 7 a.m. on a weekday. But first, the Winners’ Circle song (words and music by Joe Labert):

I’ve got that winning attitude

I know there’s nothing I can’t do

Each day the world is so brand new

I’m free

free to be

I’m free to be a winner

Boe took the stage. She’s a slim, well-dressed woman (executive attire) with close-cropped red hair, a necklace that says “NETWORK” and a Mickey Mouse watch. She has a rapid-fire, morning-DJ way of speaking. How can anyone be so supercharged at 7 a.m., over eggs and hard biscuits?

“You have to set priorities, set goals,” she said earnestly. The audience paid attention. “Every single day, you have to ask yourself: What’s most important to me today, professionally and personally? Don’t waste time. This is your life .”

Big applause. Moments later, Boe told them what a “networking expert” once told her: “Eighty percent of all millionaires are networkers.” A hush seized the crowd of about 50, equal numbers men and women. You could almost hear them thinking, “I’ve got to be a networker. This sounds good .”

And what is networking? “The process of developing and nurturing professional contacts,” she said, “a way to order and obtain information, advice, support, resources and referrals.”

Scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours?

To be one, you have to take risks, she said. You have to put yourself on the line. You can’t be afraid of fear. But you should be aware you have fears.

“I have great fear,” she said, “that when my ship comes in, I’ll be at the airport.”

Big laughter. Uh-oh, once again now, serious : Don’t be afraid to be yourself, she said. One time she quit wearing her Mickey Mouse watch and bought one of those expensive gold jobs. She hated it. She felt self-conscious, silly. She took it back and started wearing Mickey again.

Big laughter. She’s feeling good , she said. She just won an award as the top public speaker in America. She won a big trophy she calls “My America’s Cup, my Oscar. I’m like Meryl Streep,” she said. “I, too, have an uncommon ability to make an audience identify with me.”

And now it’s time for more singing with the Winners’ Circle:

I’m free to be a winner

I’ve set my sights on mastery

I’m free to be a winner

And celebrate prosperity

To close, she offered a few lines of a networking prayer by Robert Muller, assistant secretary general of the United Nations:

Networking is the new freedom

the new democracy

a new form of happiness

It is also a ticket for Boe. This is a woman who five years ago had trouble saying her name in front of a group of more than three. She would stammer and blush and generally “look petrified.” Well, that’s changed.

Only recently she was honored as the best public speaker among 60 who competed for the prize in Ron Fellow’s Speaker Showcase in Hollywood, Fla. She’s president of the local chapter of the National Speakers Assn.

Her friends say it’s all nothing short of a miracle.

Anne Boe is a complicated woman. She can now deliver a rousing hourlong speech on the value of networking in American business but hesitates to say how old she is.

“OK,” she said with a grimace. “I’m in my 30s.”

She has complete confidence and command in front of hundreds, even thousands, but says she “gets all squirmy inside” at having to be “one on one.” And she doesn’t mean basketball.

“You’re not sharing 100% in front of a group,” she said. “One on one, it’s me that’s being exposed, me being talked about. There’s less risk in front of a group. Some would say there’s more. I say there’s less. Much of me remains shy and quiet, and I feel more shy, and quieter, in front of one than in front of hundreds.”

Boe grew up in Seattle, as the younger daughter of a printing salesman and his secretary wife. Despite being extremely shy, she graduated from college with honors and was married in her 20s. She didn’t get over her fear of groups and speaking in front of them, though, until she was tutored by Lee Shapiro, a retired judge and professional speaker who lives in Del Mar.

Boe, too, is now a professional speaker and seminar leader. Her topic is “Networking: Business’ Newest Contact Sport,” one she couldn’t deliver, she said, without coach Shapiro having called some of the plays.

“About five years ago,” said Shapiro, known affectionately as The Hugging Judge, “I was hosting a training seminar, a human potential group of, say, 20 to 25 people. When asked to stand and introduce herself, Anne almost turned to stone. A few days later, she came up and said, ‘I want to be a professional speaker, and I want you to help me.’ My stomach lurched.

“I thought, ‘You poor kid, you’ll never make it.’ But I had some feeling about her, some gleam in her eye. I decided I’d assist her any way I could. She didn’t dress right, didn’t look right, and still, to this day, I marvel at the transformation she made.

“She said someday she wanted to stand in front of 1,000 people and get a standing ovation--that was her dream, her ambition. Believe me, no one was more unqualified for the task. Well, she’s realized the dream many times since.”

Shapiro, 55, said he helped Boe by giving her “love, support and advice--by being there for her. I got as much as I gave,” he said.

Shapiro describes Boe as a “warm, personable, loving, caring human being. She has a great sense of humor. She’s one of the finer people I know.”

It’s hard to imagine Boe being depressed, “torn apart, self-esteem shattered.” She was all of those things, she said, after her divorce five years ago.

She describes her life as a slow uphill climb since, one culminating with a ski jump toward a magical prize--her own “Oscar” in fulfilling a Meryl Streep-like ambition.

“Through others, like Lee, believing in me, I learned to believe in myself,” she said.

She learned to take the stage and captivate an audience within three minutes--if you don’t do it by then, she said, you won’t. Like a Richard Pryor or a Robin Williams, she learned to handle the beery hecklers who sometimes frequent banquets or conventions. She recently hushed a man who told a gruesomely dirty joke. She stared him down.

She learned that to be a speaker, you have to risk failure rather than continue fearing it. Like any good quarterback, you have to risk being sacked--and chance throwing a few interceptions. She has thrown her share, and, she said, has picked herself off the ground a few times.

Now, she has the kind of schedule that maybe only politicians or professional basketball players would understand--her frequent flier card almost flies by itself. She lives in Solana Beach, on the beach, as a member of an elite tennis club. But much of the time, she’s away from home.

Her clients include various telephone companies around the country, the Institute of Financial Education in Chicago and IBM--”They have their own culture,” she said of the last group. “They’re tough, the roughest crowd I deal with. They’re so sharp. They remember what I say word for word and quote it back to me. Weird.”

At the moment, motivational speakers are all over the place. They’re being jammed into car stereos on freeways, listened to through portable units on airplanes, on jogs around the block. Speakers are flapping their tongues, and their philosophies, all the way to the bank. Why are they such hot property? Why the need to be preached-to, philosophized-to and inspired?

“To give people hope,” said Boe, who also has a line of motivational tapes. “To show them a way out. People feel like they’re in a box. Only there’s no directions on the box. People don’t know how to get out, and they’re scared.”

In other words, society has become impersonal. Technology has taken the place of face-to-face communication, handshakes, eye contact, compliments on the elevator. In many offices nowadays, Boe said, sending messages by computer has all but replaced walking over to a co-worker’s desk or ringing them on the phone.

“Through technology,” she said, “people learn not to trust themselves. I think people are reassessing themselves. I think we’re going to get back to people. That’s why motivational speakers and motivational tapes are booming right now. For a while there--and the period still isn’t over--we were just kind of forgetting people. We were saying they weren’t important.”

At times, Boe seems an odd choice to carry the message that people are important. She admits, “Intimacy scares me a little.” She admits she’s private. But she’s also “immensely proud” of having overcome a lot to get “where I am today.”

After growing up in the Pacific Northwest and learning to loathe the ceaseless rain, Boe moved to the Dakotas and Minnesota, where she attended a couple of colleges and learned to loathe the snow and cold. After receiving two master’s degrees in guidance and counseling and career development, she and her then husband moved to San Diego for the weather. It was a ticket out of Purgatory. Now, she says, she would never move, that this is her home “forever and ever.”

Boe talks in those kinds of sentences, using those kinds of expressions. She is nothing if not bouncy, cheerful, good-hearted and kind. Her conversational style is, almost by itself, a bearlike embrace. The Hugging Speaker and Seminar Leader? She is hardly a mouse, which is how she once saw herself. She’s more like a blue norther. It’s no accident she came here from Minnesota.

When asked if she fears a setback, after so many years of grinding it out emotionally, then finding herself, she shook her head no.

“I’ve been down long enough. I’ve paid my dues,” she said, not without anger. “Before this, I was down . . . my whole life. I deserve what I’m getting now. I just fear keeping up with the pace. I mean, at times, it’s crazy.

“Anybody who’s been down like I have has to relearn trust. That’s been the hardest part--learning to trust again, learning to put myself out there, especially one on one. I’m not saying all that’s happened to me lately is too good to be true. I like to think it’s just good enough to be true.”

It was with that kind of spirit that Boe closed her talk to the Winners’ Circle with more lines from Muller:

You are the center of a network

You are the center of the world

You are a free, immensely powerful source

of life and goodness

Affirm it

Spread it

Radiate it

“I hope I can,” she said with a sigh. “Forever and ever.”