Dear friends and colleagues,
The world feels a bit upside down now. To everyone who is experiencing illness or economic upheaval, our hearts are with you.
If you are like us, you’re trying to juggle new challenges– from home schooling to finding out where toilet paper is in stock, while keeping yourself and your loved ones safe. We’re also learning to work in this new normal. Not just to serve our clients, but to keep momentum (and our sanity).
There are four things what we want you to know.
We are training.
We have migrated our core classes to virtual. We had already begun this process last year, and while a few experiences will always be better in person, the learning opportunities are there for you and your teams.
Our website has the details on each class, but we’re offering them virtually in three hours or less over zoom for groups of 6-12 at a time.
- Presentation Style and Delivery
- Message Method
- Influential Storytelling
- Hot Seat Training
- Pitch Preparation (virtual pitches too)
Contact us to schedule a virtual session for yourself or your team.
We are coaching speakers.
Several of our clients with live events agreed to keep have us keep coaching their speakers to a final talk, even though their events had to be canceled. The speakers will capture it on a recording (see below) and be distributed just as the final talk would have been from the event– through YouTube and social channels. Just because they couldn’t gather, didn’t mean they still didn’t have important messages to share to their constituencies.
We are consulting.
We’ve spent more time in the last week consulting on how to record a talk at home. We are also working on a playbook for clients who want to transition longer leadership events (1-2 days) to virtual (follow this conversation for details). Sure, we know how to move individual components like an hour meeting, a 20-minute presentation, or a networking meet up to a virtual session. But we are digging one more level. How do you do that successfully over the course of a whole day or two with team of maybe 25 or 100 executives? We’re excited to be collaborating with this broad (virtual) team to explore what is possible. Stay tuned.
We are recording from home, and so can you.
We have published a basic shopping list of equipment we use when recording our tip videos, with the assumption you already have a smart phone or tablet. Add that to the abundance of software and apps available to anyone for teleprompter support, closed captioning, power point, music sourcing and basic editing, it’s a very possible learning curve how to make a decent video at home.
As we stated in our last email to you, don’t stop communicating. Just take the resources and creativity you have to get your messages out during this undeniably unusual and challenging time.
Let us know how we can help.
Be safe and well.
Ruth Milligan is the Founder, Managing Director and an Executive Coach and Trainer with Articulation. She is perhaps best known as one of the original curators for any TEDx event (the license program for TED). Since 2009, Ruth has selected and coached over 200 speakers who have taken the TEDxColumbus stage. She is often tapped as an expert in the TED-style of speaking and has authored a class on how to be a TEDx speaker coach. Connect with Ruth.