The Voice Elizabeth Koraca Had to Build for Herself

The remark was six words long and built to linger: “Don’t quit your day job.” Elizabeth Koraca heard it after giving a presentation in high school. She was shy, already wary of speaking, and the teacher’s verdict supplied authority to every doubt in the room. A smaller life might have organized itself around avoiding that feeling again. Koraca went in the opposite direction. She chose the bright lights, the live microphone and the question that must be asked before a clock runs out.

That choice did not come dressed as destiny. In 2006, Koraca left Canada, where she had worked as a policy adviser to a cabinet minister in the Ontario government, and moved to New York to become an on-air reporter. It was a clean ambition followed by a messy reception. She was told she lacked the right experience, the right look and even the right nationality for the job. Another familiar instruction arrived: go somewhere smaller first.

Her first opening was smaller in every sense except weight. She took a low-paid camera-operator job and hauled about 70 pounds of equipment to shoots. There is something agreeably comic about a future communication coach beginning beneath the machinery, but the job mattered. It put her inside the craft. Television is an industrial process that happens to produce a human moment. Someone must know where to stand, when to speak, how to listen and what can be cut without losing the point.

The person behind the camera reaches the desk

An on-air break came in the Bronx. Reuters followed. Koraca became a financial television journalist and reported from the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, where certainty is traded as eagerly as shares. She interviewed hundreds of executives and investors, among them Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, Jim Rogers and Wilbur Ross. Her work also took her around the world to cover unsettled markets.

Live business television gave her a useful contradiction to study. The guests could manage companies, move capital and arrive with grand titles, yet some were frightened by the camera. Expertise had not inoculated them against a dry mouth or a wandering answer. Koraca’s job was to ask a critical question while making it possible for the person opposite her to answer. Pressure and reassurance had to occupy the same small patch of studio floor.

Then came Singapore. Koraca launched the Reuters and China Central Television business bureau there, managed a team and coached print reporters to deliver daily live reports on Asian markets. The assignment made explicit what had been developing quietly: she was not only presenting news. She was teaching other people how to convert knowledge into a performance that remained accurate, lucid and recognizably human.

A state of fear is not sustainable.Elizabeth Koraca

Nearly seven years after joining Reuters, she moved into consulting work with corporate professionals at Thomson Reuters. The bridge from journalism to coaching was short because she had been building it during interviews and training sessions. She knew what a camera does to the nervous system of a perfectly competent person. She knew the value of rehearsal. She also knew that the point of speaking well is not to resemble an anchor. It is to make the message survive the moment.

Confidence, certainty, clarity - in that practical order

Koraca launched her own coaching practice, working with executives, entrepreneurs and professionals on presentations, interviews, career decisions and personal branding. Her clients have included people at Morgan Stanley, Thomson Reuters, Pfizer, JLL, Google, Square, Harman and Activision. She became a Founding Guide at Chief in 2020, bringing the same work into a network built for senior women leaders.

The language of her coaching is refreshingly plain. Prepare. Pause. Remove the self-deprecating aside that shrinks the speaker before anybody else can. Decide what the audience should understand. Make the ask. She describes her work as direct and tactical, and the public record of her advice bears that out. Even large career changes are broken into small actions that can fit on paper and acquire a date.

This is not the vocabulary of a grand reinvention. It is closer to blocking a television segment. Where will you begin? What is the single idea? Where will you breathe? What can go wrong, and what will you do when it does? Koraca’s own career lends the advice some ballast. She did not wait for fear to leave before she took the camera job, crossed into reporting or moved across an ocean. Action came first often enough for confidence to collect the evidence later.

She also keeps empathy in the method. In her recent writing on leadership, she argues that seeing another person’s perspective makes feedback easier to receive and keeps small tensions from becoming larger conflicts. The idea echoes her interviewing days. A demanding question need not be a hostile one. Firmness and regard are capable of sharing a sentence.

Give yourself permission to pause. Your audience can wait.Elizabeth Koraca

A podcast turns the private lesson public

In 2021, Koraca announced a project whose title condensed her biography: The Speaking Up Podcast. The show offers compact lessons on career strategy, boundaries, rejection, presentation and confidence. Its archive has passed 200 episodes. The official show page says it has reached number one on Goodpods listener charts and the top two percent of podcasts globally. Those rankings are milestones, but the more revealing measure may be the format itself. Many episodes are brief enough to hear between one difficult meeting and the next.

The podcast also lets Koraca do something broadcast news rarely permits: stay with the preparation. A financial segment prizes the finished answer. Coaching is interested in the notes scratched out beforehand, the practice question, the planned pause and the five minutes spent deciding what one actually wants. Her advice on overwhelm is characteristic: put every task and worry on paper, choose what matters, give it a timeline, break it into steps, then attend to the next one.

Her public work has widened without losing that theme. Koraca has appeared as a career contributor on television and radio, led camera-readiness training for the Newswomen’s Club of New York, judged work for the Overseas Press Club, and served as executive producer of the Front Page Awards. In 2014, she received the Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business Award. More recently, she joined the Forbes Coaches Council and has written about empathy, annual planning and preparation for networking.

The geography changed too. Koraca is now based in Los Angeles, while retaining strong professional ties to New York. She has said she values Los Angeles for its community, its beaches and its looser rhythm. The move offers a neat visual correction to the old picture of ambition: not every serious career must remain pressed against a Manhattan clock.

A bad sentence does not get the last word

There is a temptation to make the teacher’s insult do too much work. No single remark creates a Reuters anchor or a coaching business. Koraca had family support, sought mentors, built connections, studied the craft and kept applying after rejection. Her route required repeated choices, many of them unphotogenic. The camera gear had to be carried before the camera turned around.

Still, the insult remains useful because Koraca refuses to airbrush it. She brings it into interviews and the opening description of her podcast. It helps explain why her aspirations are outward-facing: she wants to offer the practical encouragement she once lacked, especially to people whose good ideas arrive with a tremor. The wound is not presented as magic. It is treated as material.

One of Koraca’s recurring observations is that small acts create evidence. Send the email. Ask the question. Apply for the role. Speak once in the meeting. Confidence, in this account, is less a mood than a case file. Each action adds an exhibit. Eventually the shy student can look back and see an anchor, a bureau builder, a coach and a host, all of them produced by decisions made before certainty was available.

A clear line runs through her work. Speaking up is not volume, and it is not performance for its own sake. It is the disciplined act of making yourself understood without editing yourself out. Koraca learned it beneath studio lights and now teaches it in rooms where the stakes are promotions, pitches, interviews and leadership. The audience can wait through the pause. The sentence is worth getting right.