Nervous networker or conference presenter? Just care less, says voice coach Susie Ashfield

Email Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Whatsapp X You have full access to this article via your institution. Learning to care less about how you come across in a conference talk, funding pitch or networking event frees you to communicate more naturally and confidently, says Susie Ashfield. In the second episode of a podcast series focused on six books about the scientific workplace, Ashfield, whose 2025 book, Just F**king Say It , includes real-life case studies of both good and bad communication, says scientist interviewees are often burdened by the “curse of knowledge.” This means they include too much detail instead of focusing on telling a simple story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Ashfield, an actor-turned-communications coach based in London, tells Holly Newson that presenters often fail to rehearse a science conference talk sufficiently. They also default to listing their academic achievements rather than focusing on the messages that their audience needs to hear. In the case of an investor pitch, this could mean focusing on a technology’s potential to save lives, not a detailed description of the underlying science, she argues. She also offers advice on how to approach networking, including tips on how to introduce yourself, keep conversations flowing, and how to politely move on to speak with other attendees. Finally, she offers advice on how to say no, handle difficult supervisors and pay negotiations. Explaining why she named her book Just F**king Say It, and why people should care less about how they come across, she tells Newson: “We are all desperately, concerned about what other people think of us. When we overthink how we walk into a room, we put levels of pressure on ourselves that just shouldn’t be there. The ethos is to just care less. Let it go. See what happens. Enjoy it.” Listen to Susie Ashfield in conversation with Holly Newson. Your browser does not support the audio element. Download MP3 See transcript doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00547-3 Transcript Listen to Susie Ashfield in conversation with Holly Newson. Holly Newson 00:00 Welcome to Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. I’m Holly Newson, and in this series, you ’ll hear from authors who can help you in your career. In this episode, I’m joined by Susie Ashfield, a speech and communication coach, and the author of Just F**king Say It , a book that helps you use your voice in the best possible way, whether that be for public speaking, a networking event, or asking for a pay rise. So Susie, thank you for joining me. (Thank you for having me). So, to kick off with... This book, you have almost a mantra right at the start. To care less. And when it comes to communication, and, you know, interacting with other people, I feel like that’s against most of our instincts. We all care so much. So why is that your approach? Susie Ashfield 00:46 It’s exactly because of that. We are all desperately, desperately concerned about what other people think of us. Now, ultimately, that’s a really good thing. We should (a little bit) care about how other people perceive us. But when we get obsessed, when we really overthink how we walk into a room, what we’re saying, how we say it, we get in our own heads. And we put levels of pressure on ourselves when we’re communicating that just shouldn’t be there. And the output of that is that we overthink it. And we deliver something that’s garbled. All because we are trying to meet this super high expectation that we’ve set in our own heads. And it just doesn’t really exist. So that’s why the ethos is to just care less. Let it go. See what happens. Enjoy it. Holly Newson 01:35 And easy to say, probably hard to do. (Absolutely). What are the foundations that you have to have in order to be able to get to that point where you care less? Susie Ashfield 01:45 You have to know you know your stuff. The example I can give you of that is: if you’ve ever been in that horrendous situation where people go, ‘Hello. We ’re sat around a room. Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves.’ For some reason, for even the most experienced of speakers, this is the thing that strikes fear. Holly Newson 02:03 So bad. (I’m really bad at that.) Me too. Susie Ashfield 02:04 (Don ’t know why). No one likes it. And for whatever reason in our heads, we suddenly go, ‘what is my name?’ You know your name. I know my name, but that’s an exact example of the overthinking creeping going: do I know my name? I’m sure I know my name, but now I don ’t think I know my name anymore, and we have to sort of push back on that and go, it’s not just that I know my name. I know I know my name. So it’s knowing you know your stuff. Second of all, you have to try. So you have to put yourself out there a little bit. The ethos of care less doesn’t mean I’m going to live a life of anarchy. It means I’m going to take this huge amount of pressure off myself, but I ’m going to put myself out there. I am going to potentially make my