A Blog with Tips & Tricks for Enlightened Presenters
Story is Our Meaning-Making Engine
A Scene from the Harris Household When my kids were little, movie night was a sacred ritual (still is). Popcorn in mismatched bowls, everyone in pajamas, the lights low, and a well-worn DVD spinning in the player. We had our rotation: The films they loved and the ones I was willing to watch 57 times…
Feeling Frozen?
THaW the Freeze: A Pocket Guide to Staying Human When Leadership Gets Icy It’s the moment every leader dreads. You step into a routine check-in, confident you can handle any curveball, and then, SLAM. Someone lobs a thorny question about layoffs, a system failure, or a headline you have yet to read. Your pulse spikes.…
The Bored Room
The presentation is Monday. You know your story. Inside and out. You’ve rehearsed your delivery. You’re like a jungle cat. Feeling unstoppable. You have a keen understanding of your audience and are prepared to deliver a powerful talk along the lines of empathy. Your idea will change the world. Easy, tiger. Where will this meeting…
The Case for a Culture of Storytelling
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by two staggering statistics: 1️⃣ 95% of employees don’t understand their company’s strategy (HBR)2️⃣ Employees are 30% less accepting of change than they were in 2016 (Gartner) Surprised by these? Probably not. If you’re a leader in business today, you’ve more than likely found yourself on the receiving…
Stop Guessing. Start Archetyping.
A Shortcut to Empathy One of the fastest ways to connect with your audience is to stop guessing what they care about and start seeing them for who they really are. Enter the archetype. First popularized by psychologist Carl Jung, archetypes are universal, recurring patterns of behavior that live in the collective unconscious. When used…
How a CMO Reclaimed her Team’s Trust with Storytelling
Sarah was a newly minted CMO at a national restaurant chain. She was sharp, ambitious, and upwardly mobile, but she was already in trouble. Her team was burning out. Every quarter, they were tasked with producing the board materials: an exhausting parade of slides, talk tracks, and pre-reads on top of their already demanding day…
One Hundred Twenty Two Percent
11th Hour Slide Design by Committee? Two weeks ago, Microsoft introduced us to the concept of the “Infinite Workday” in a jarring data dump on work-life balance (or the lack thereof). That concept alone is frightening enough, but buried in the report is an even more alarming statistic: 📈 PowerPoint edits spike 122% in the…
Be Like Freddie.
What Can We Learn from Queen’s Legendary Frontman? Freddie Mercury took the stage with a swagger that teased the revolution he knew was coming, even if few others did at the time. In the early 1970s, Queen had carved out a sound that blended hard rock with complex harmonies and theatrical arrangement, which no one…
Delete one slide today.
You already know the one. 🙏🏻 Maybe it’s the one that says “THANKS.”When did we start treating gratitude as an afterthought in presentations? It’s an alarming and ubiquitous trend to slap a “thank you” slide at the end of decks. Why would we wait until the end to thank our audiences? If they haven’t felt…
Six Tricks for Combatting Stage Fright
Leadership is communication. Sometimes that communication is one-to-one, and sometimes it’s one-to-many. Depending how many, “communication” can begin to feel a lot like “public speaking.” Wait a minute… Is leadership synonymous with public speaking?