When her long-term relationship unexpectedly failed, Jackie Huba found herself at the lowest point in her life. She was on her own, bored with her work in the corporate world, felt stifled creatively, and knew she wasn’t living up to her potential. Something drastic needed to happen but at forty-seven, she wasn’t sure that she had the confidence to reinvent herself and do something completely different. She was stuck.
Jackie reveals how stumbling upon an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the wonderful world of drag queens helped her to find liberation by re-discovering her inner fabulousness through the wonderful world of drag.
Most of us think of drag as performance art for the stage. Jackie came to realize that all people create and perform personas in their everyday life. Whether we know it or not, we are doing drag right now. We do it every day. Drag is not just what we wear, but how we act, what we say, how we say it, and how we carry ourselves. And just as we did when we were kids on Halloween, we can transform into any persona we want.
To illustrate her point, Jackie became a drag queen! Yes, women can do drag.
Drawing on her experiences as her drag alter ego Lady Trinity and on interviews with the world’s top drag performers (many of whom competed on RuPaul’s Drag Race), Jackie and coauthor Shelly Stewart Kronbergs show readers how they, too, can become supremely self-assured, utterly fearless, and unabashedly and completely themselves – just like drag queens.
As she did in her unforgettable TEDx talk, “Unleash the Power of Your Inner Drag Queen” − where she made history as the first ever TED talk to be done by a female drag queen – Jackie lays out the Keys to Fierce in her new book Fiercely You: Be Fabulous and Confident by Thinking Like a Drag Queen. She explains how to create the person you’ve always wanted to be by performing simple acts such as dressing for power, striking a commanding pose, ignoring naysayers and taking risks. Meanwhile, coauthor and licensed therapist Shelly Stewart Kronbergs breaks down the psychological research into layman’s terms, proving why the Keys really work.
The truth is, too many of us are controlled by our bosses, significant others, friends, children, and parents. We succumb to perceptions that we aren’t smart enough, pretty enough, strong enough, or capable enough and we fail to live up to our true potential. Fiercely You teaches readers to apply the lessons of bold drag queens into our everyday lives. No wigs or stilettos required.
Now, Jackie and Shelly are leading corporate and public workshops to help people create and explore their own confident and courageous drag characters and channel this fierceness when they need it in everyday situations.
In Jackie’s previous work, she challenged marketers to raise the bar on customer relations in her three books on customer loyalty, including the most recent, Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers into Fanatics.
In her fifteen years as a professional keynote speaker, she has addressed audiences around the world from the United States to New Zealand, and in Amsterdam, London, Milan, Berlin, and Tokyo. She speaks to thousands of attendees at corporate events for companies such as Disney, Marriott, American Express, Frito-Lay, and American Airlines, as well as at large association conferences. rough her consulting, Jackie has helped leading companies such as Discovery Communications, Whirlpool, Dell, and Kra to create more loyalty in their customer base. Jackie is a Forbes.com contributor, and her work has frequently been featured in the media, such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Fast Company. She is an eleven-year veteran of IBM and a Pennsylvania State University graduate. Jackie lives in Austin, Texas, where she is president of the Pittsburgh Steelers Fan Club of Austin.
Watch Jackie's TEDx talk below.
