Iné nutshell, I make expertise land in the room.

Speaker, MC and communication trainer. TEDx speaker, 23 years teaching, working with teams and events across Europe, 200k+ followers across social media.

Hi, I’m Iné and I love a good plot twist- so much so that I've written a few into my own life: studied English, then Marketing, then co-founded a startup, then quit that, moved on to brand, then content leadership- all while teaching non-native English speakers.

For someone who likes plot twists that much, the one constant in my life has always been communication and messaging. They show up wearing different hats every time (Literature and character analysis, Marketing and positioning/ messaging, and so on)- I’ve always surrounded myself with words, phrases, tone of voice, and semiotics. I think it all started growing up in my half Cretan and half Pontian family.

As a kid, I’d hear all these different words and phrases that my parents’ families were using; slowly but surely, these words, the stories that each family was telling, the rhythm of each dialect, the tone… they were coloring my delivery and my understanding of what each culture stands for.

And then came the English language; my parents didn’t speak a word of it, but I was so excited to learn it. It became my realm of independence; I was learning the language, becoming more fluent, and soon enough, patterns within the language or across languages and dialects started to become evident to me over the years.

Meanwhile, for someone so adept at communicating and connecting with different backgrounds, I was feeling invisible at work. I was a rockstar at what I did, but no one was singing my praises, and I wasn't “allowed” to toot my own horn, so I had come to terms with it. I guessed it was just a personality trait: “It’s probably because I’m an introvert”.

Turns out it wasn’t a personality trait. And it wasn’t because English wasn’t my mother tongue; it was because Greek was.

I started noticing that as fluent as I was in English, I only accessed words and phrases that Greek had previously “allotted” me. You see, every language hands out parts before anyone speaks. Imagine writing a script: would you give a man and a woman the same lines? Would the room hear them the same way? Greek had cast me in the part that suggests, softens and waits its turn. A version of “do not speak unless you’re spoken to”. English let me audition for a different role, one that I got to choose, that came with no past and no rules for me.

The more fully I showed up in English, the more fully I showed up in Greek.

I started applying this to my work with non-native professionals; conversing with them would point me at the phrases they avoided using. I noticed this when I started doing workshops abroad too: non-native English speakers would avoid showing up more fully, either because it was their home culture, or their family culture.

And as I kept going, workshopping with mixed teams, I realized that even native English speakers had varying access to words and phrases that signal confidence.

See, confidence has a behavioral component but a verbal one, too. And figuring out the underlying structures for the limited access is key to guiding someone back to who they are or who they are supposed to be, before conditioning and gender stereotypes got to them. So yes, every team has overlooked rockstars: the expert who hedges, or gets interrupted mid-point, the “quiet power” people who miss out on promotions and end up leaving their teams bitter, only to repeat the same pattern somewhere else.

This brings us to the near past. On the first day of lockdown in 2020, I pointed a camera at myself, and seventy days later ten thousand people were listening. Within a couple of years, I was at 100k+ followers and today at 200k+. Although I don’t post as extensively and regularly as I’d love to because of my schedule today; working with international clients and their teams, designing workshops for their needs, presenting EU programs to crowds, speaking gigs, and working conference floors across Europe with a microphone in hand.

Whether I'm leading a presentation workshop or hosting a panel, I work the same way: I close the gap between the stage and the seats. The room stops being a presenter and an audience and becomes one shared experience, where people get to be a little more of who they already are. Not someone else. Just a truer, more authentic version of who they are.

I keep the work practical: what changes in the room, and on Monday.

"Uplevel when you want to - not when you need to."