In this episode of Sixty Plus Uncensored, host Seb Frey talks with Vicki Noethling, a speaker, trainer, and coach who spent nearly three decades building leadership and communication skills inside a major corporation before turning that experience into a second career helping others find their voice. Vicki is 69, a longtime Toastmasters leader who now runs multiple clubs, trains at-risk youth alongside adults, and has built a side business around health and appearance that she says directly supports her ability to perform on stage. Together, Seb and Vicki talk about what actually makes someone a compelling speaker, why storytelling matters more than slides, how to run a meeting so people tell you the truth instead of what you want to hear, and why she believes looking and feeling good isn’t vanity but a genuine leadership tool.
From Corporate Career to Communication Coach
Vicki’s professional path started at an accounting firm, moved through five years at Arby’s corporate office as a construction coordinator, and then settled into a 28-year run at UPS, most of it spent as a project manager. It was at UPS that she was introduced to Toastmasters, and she ended up spending much of her career there starting and leading Toastmasters groups to help colleagues become stronger communicators and leaders.
She retired in 2018, intending to take a couple of years to simply enjoy herself. That window happened to overlap with the beginning of COVID, and during that time she noticed a real need for mentors who could pass along the communication and leadership skills she had spent decades building. She swapped what she calls her “retirement t-shirt” for an “entrepreneur t-shirt” and has been building her coaching and speaking business ever since. She’s also become a vocal advocate for young people to consider entrepreneurship early, rather than defaulting to conventional entry-level jobs, arguing that understanding business and leadership fundamentals early gives people a stronger foundation no matter what path they ultimately choose. In 2011, she began deliberately extending her work to students, having noticed how often the adults she coached were carrying long-standing fear around public speaking and leadership that traced back to unresolved experiences from childhood. Her hope was that reaching people earlier could prevent some of that fear from taking root in the first place.
Toastmasters: Small Rooms, Real Practice
Seb shares his own limited experience with Toastmasters; he attended a single meeting of a small local club with around ten people and has meant to go back ever since. Vicki explains that this is actually by design. While a club needs twenty members to officially form, a typical meeting only draws six to ten attendees, and that’s a feature, not a limitation, because effective public speaking practice depends on everyone actually getting a turn to speak. Too large a group defeats the purpose.
Vicki herself is active in five different clubs, including one that meets late at night for her because it’s based in California while she’s in Georgia, and another that meets in Europe, requiring her to join calls as early as 6:30 in the morning. She describes some of these groups as functioning almost like a mastermind for professional speakers, with membership as large as 45 to 48 people, even if only 18 to 20 typically attend a given session.
She’s also watched Toastmasters evolve significantly over the years, from physical training manuals carried to every meeting to a fully digital learning system that allows members to prepare from anywhere in the world. Many clubs now meet online or in a hybrid format, which she sees as valuable for accessibility, but she’s careful to point out a tradeoff: speakers who only ever practice on video calls tend to struggle with eye contact and physical gesture when they finally step onto an in-person stage, while speakers who only practice in person often don’t know how to engage an audience through a screen. That’s part of why she teaches both formats deliberately, rather than favoring one. One of her clubs, called Epic Speakers, meets specifically for entrepreneurs and trainers, giving members a chance to practice not just general speaking but specific things like sales pitches, alongside people who understand the entrepreneurial context they’re operating in.
Altogether, she estimates she spends roughly three hours a week on Toastmasters activities, a manageable commitment given how central it’s been to her own development and how much mentoring she now does for newer members.
Why Communication Is the Foundation of Leadership
Asked how important speaking skill actually is for entrepreneurial or professional success, Vicki doesn’t hedge: she considers it essential, whether someone is in a corporate role, a nonprofit, or running their own business. She references a program built by entrepreneur Darren Hardy called Riveting, which pairs AI-generated messaging with training on delivery, precisely because even perfectly crafted words fall flat without tone, gesture, eye contact, and genuine connection behind them.
For Vicki, real communication is only half about talking. The other half is listening, reading what a potential client or audience member actually needs, even when they haven’t said it directly, and adjusting your message so it genuinely lands rather than simply being broadcast at them. She connects this directly to leadership, arguing that leading with empathy and emotional intelligence is impossible without strong communication skills underneath it, and that this matters more, not less, as more people are displaced from stable corporate roles and forced to figure out what’s next for themselves.
The willingness to keep developing communication and leadership skills also reflects the principles in Why a Growth Mindset Matters at Any Age, which explores how remaining open to learning can create opportunities throughout life.
Reading a Room, and Reading a Screen
When Seb raises how difficult it is to gauge audience reaction in the middle of a talk, especially virtually, Vicki offers a practical window into how she does it. She arrives early to events when she can, listening to conversations in the room before she ever gets on stage, because she’s had real experiences where the message she’d prepared wasn’t the one the audience actually needed, prompting a last-minute pivot. Once she’s speaking, she treats listening as something that goes well beyond the ears: body language, eye contact, attentiveness, and subtle shifts in energy all tell her whether she’s genuinely connecting or losing the room, and whether she needs to add more stories, change direction, or start asking the audience direct questions to re-engage them.
Video calls make this dramatically harder, since a speaker often can’t see the audience at all. Vicki draws on a memory from early in her project management career, well before Zoom was common, when video conferencing was rare and expensive. She recalls holding important calls with a global team where colleagues based in Asia would repeatedly say “yes, yes, yes” to a plan, only for it to become clear weeks later that they’d done the opposite of what was discussed. The disconnect wasn’t dishonesty; it was cultural politeness overriding clear communication, and without visible body language, there was no way to catch it in the moment.
Once video conferencing became standard, she built specific ground rules into her meetings to prevent this: cameras have to be on, no exceptions for appearance or eating. She also builds in a few minutes of informal conversation at the start of meetings, especially ones she expects to be stressful, so people feel comfortable enough to react honestly rather than performing agreement. She frames this as the real difference between managing and leading: a leader who’s willing to be visibly imperfect, to say “I just messed that up, let me start over”, signals to the team that honesty matters more than the appearance of having everything under control. Her expectation isn’t perfection; it’s integrity and authentic reaction, even when that reaction is “the ship is on fire, we need to deal with this now.”
The Power of a Well-Told Story
Vicki is clear that people don’t remember bullet points, no matter how polished the slides look. What sticks with an audience is story. She encourages anyone who feels they don’t have good stories to start capturing them as they happen, jotting down or recording a quick note whenever something meaningful occurs, building a personal archive to draw from later.
She illustrates this with a story from her own UPS training days about a young supervisor who’d just been promoted a second time to management. To graduate from the required training program, he needed to give a short talk in front of the group, and repeatedly failed to do it, citing illness or excuses each time the moment came. Vicki had noticed something telling: the same young man who froze up during formal presentations came alive, animated and funny, while casually talking about a football game the night before. She flagged this to the instructor, who the next morning simply asked him about the game in front of the group, and got exactly the energized, natural talk that had been missing all along. Watching that shift happen in real time, and watching the visible confidence it gave the young man, was formative for Vicki; it’s part of what convinced her she wanted to become a mentor herself.
She also references her own mentor at UPS, a skilled storyteller who helped her understand the company’s history not through manuals or slides, but through the stories of its founders. That experience shaped how she now approaches persuasion and motivation in her own work: rather than simply presenting information, she looks for the story that will make an audience feel like part of what’s being described, rather than passive listeners being talked at.
Words as Weapons
One of Vicki’s recurring keynote themes is the idea that words can function almost like weapons, particularly within families. Much of the trauma people carry into adulthood, she argues, comes from the way parents and close family members spoke to them growing up, offhand comments, frustrated reactions to a messy room, or blanket rules like “don’t speak unless spoken to” that quietly shape how confident someone feels raising their hand in a meeting decades later.
She shares this idea through her work with at-risk youth, where she’s seen a consistent and frustrating pattern: kids make real progress in a training session, only to return the following week having slipped back into old patterns because the environment they went home to hadn’t changed. That observation led her nonprofit to begin working directly with parents alongside the kids, rather than treating the young person’s mindset as something that could be addressed in isolation.
She describes a particularly striking exercise used by a psychologist she works with. A father was asked to place a dot on a paper plate every time he heard something negative or demeaning in his daughter’s story about growing up, as she recounted being told by teachers to stay quiet and by her parents that she didn’t need an education, only marriage. After roughly ten minutes, the plate was covered in dots. The psychologist then asked the father to put the dots back onto the tube of toothpaste they’d come from. When he protested that it wasn’t possible, she made her point directly: words, once spoken, can’t be taken back, and the person on the receiving end carries them permanently. It’s a lesson Vicki tries to pass along in her own keynote on this theme, tying directly into the same territory Seb had recently explored in a separate conversation about childhood emotional neglect.
The lasting impact of words is especially important when supporting older family members, and How to Recognize Early Signs of Dementia In Your Parents offers another perspective on approaching changes in a loved one with patience, awareness, and empathy.
Finding Speaking Opportunities
Vicki hasn’t joined a formal speakers’ association, but opportunities have come to her steadily through podcasting appearances, LinkedIn, word of mouth, and her long-standing involvement in Toastmasters leadership, including a stint in district and regional leadership roles. She spent three years active in her local chamber of commerce, which she found useful for local speaking opportunities, though she eventually stepped back once her schedule became too full to attend regularly. She also contributes chapters to anthology books, which she sees as another way to build credibility and visibility, alongside publishing articles now that she has more available time.
Her speaking topics generally fall into about five recurring areas, ranging from her core public speaking keynote, built around the idea that any presentation is fundamentally just a conversation, to a keynote on leading with heart, head, and hands, which centers on the argument that 21st-century leadership, especially in an age increasingly shaped by AI, needs to be rooted in empathy and emotional intelligence rather than authority alone.
Looking and Feeling the Part
Seb raises an observation from a recent networking event, where he met a 72-year-old man who had trained from scratch to complete an Ironman triathlon at 60 and who, more than a decade later, still carried himself with striking energy and presence. Seb connects this to a broader pattern he’s noticed at professional conferences: the people commanding a stage tend to also be physically fit and visibly healthy, and he asks Vicki what she’s learned about the relationship between physical health and effective speaking over her career.
Vicki agrees strongly. Holding an audience’s attention for an hour, or for a full-day summit, takes real physical energy, and she argues that a speaker who comes across as tired or low-energy will pull the audience down with them, particularly when persuasion is the goal. She connects this to a second business she runs alongside her speaking and coaching work, built around a holistic health and skincare company she got involved with in 2016, partly to address her own energy levels and partly because it aligned naturally with helping people feel more confident and engaging on any stage.
She describes losing 30 pounds using a weight-management system from the company, and the confidence that came with no longer wearing clothes four sizes larger. She’s candid that appearance is only the visible part of the story; she frames it as connected to less visible markers like blood pressure and metabolic health that matter regardless of whether anyone can see them. She also uses a brain-health supplement, motivated in part by watching both of her grandparents experience Alzheimer’s, and pays close attention to sleep, using a product she describes as helping her fall asleep without the grogginess she associates with typical sleep aids, something that matters to her especially on days when early international calls leave her running on limited rest.
At 69, expecting a new grandchild in October, Vicki says she doesn’t feel close to 70 and attributes much of that to prioritizing these habits deliberately, having watched relatives experience a much lower quality of life in their later years and deciding early that she didn’t want the same outcome. She sums up her approach to this side of her work with a simple phrase: look better, feel better, live better.
Maintaining physical strength and energy can support confidence well beyond the stage, and Easy Home Workouts to Improve Balance and Flexibility offers practical ways older adults can keep moving and stay active.
Sleep, Caffeine, and the Realities of a Busy Schedule
The conversation turns briefly to sleep, a topic Seb describes as an ongoing struggle for him personally. Vicki shares her own experience managing sleep during a demanding stretch as a closing manager at a retail store, a role that sometimes kept her out until 1 a.m. before early morning calls the next day. Rather than relying heavily on caffeine, to which she’s actually allergic, she leans on the energy and sleep products from her company to get through occasional short-sleep stretches without the crash she associates with typical stimulants. She’s clear that this isn’t meant as a permanent workaround. With her retail hours ending as she prepares for her grandchild’s arrival, she expects to return to a more consistent seven-to-nine hours of sleep going forward. Her broader point is a practical one: life inevitably creates stretches where ideal sleep isn’t possible, and having a plan for managing those stretches without falling into unhealthy dependence matters more than expecting perfect conditions at all times.
Great Communication Starts With How You Show Up
What comes through clearly across this conversation is how tightly connected communication, leadership, and personal health are in Vicki Noethling’s view of a well-lived later career. None of it is treated as separate: the discipline that makes someone a compelling public speaker, genuine presence, honest reaction, the willingness to read a room and adjust draw from the same well as the discipline that keeps her physically and mentally sharp heading toward 70. Her path from a corporate project management career into speaking, coaching, and health advocacy wasn’t part of some early master plan; it grew directly out of decades spent noticing what actually worked when trying to reach people, whether that meant a Toastmasters lectern, a global conference call, or a teenager who just needed someone to ask about the football game. The throughline is simple: how you show up, physically and verbally, is not incidental to leadership. It is leadership.