Clear, compelling and authentic communication is a key component of every leader’s tool kit.

You have a vision and a passion for your business, but your audience can only share that vision once they can feel it, imagine it, and understand it. Effective communication is part of effective leadership. This package is designed to unlock your natural storytelling skills, and give you coaching and practical tools that will help to grab the attention of your audience, keep them listening and inspire a response.

It takes thought and planning to tell the right story to a specific audience, but it becomes a lot easier when you start to use your instinctive storytelling skills. A story is perfectly designed to engage an audience and you can use the model as a ‘map’ to plan any type of communication successfully.

Once you know what you going to say, the next step is to plan how you are going to say it. You will be most compelling when you speak with conviction and confidence, and this starts with being clear about your own professional story and therefore using a ‘voice’ that is true to you.

This coaching package gives you the chance to collaborate with a skilled story coach to: –

• reflect and build on your business storytelling skills
• define your own professional story
• work on a key communication within your business

The Benefits

In short, ‘buy in’.
Internally, you will help your employees/team understand what they belong to, what they are working towards and why they are a valuable part of that.

Externally, you can express clearly to partners, investors, clients and even competitors, your values and your value.

You will also save hours of time. The story tools that you will learn in this package provide a methodical way to plan communications and interactions because you can identify the key building blocks of your story very quickly.

The opportunity to develop your message, working with a skilled coach, who already knows your business story and personal professional story.

The Practicals.

Sessions to be planned at your convenience and with your objectives in mind, but there will be eight hours in total and they could look something like this:-

You can then choose to book a quarterly refresh session following this initial package.

Understand and articulate your story to launch your next chapter.

Our professional story is made up of many threads; the route we have travelled, the unique skills and achievements that route has given us, our values, our value and the qualities we bring to our work. It is often the most unique things about us that we fail to recognise and forget to communicate, because we are so close to our own story.

This story-coaching session is a structured programme to help you find the threads of your story, and to develop a strategy for communicating it effectively. Even once we are clear on our own professional story it is quite a challenge to communicate it within someone’s attention span!

During the session we will work together to break out your story into its key story elements, unpacking each element to get the maximum information to work with. These key elements are central to every story ever told and by framing our investigation around them, we will start to see the story rather than the CV. Amongst other things what tends to emerge is your key qualities, the thread that runs through your career and your unique learning from that career.

Once we have all the content and themes in front us, we will start to distil down what an audience actually needs to know about you, in order to understand your value and remember you, and then how you could quickly and clearly communicate that.

The sessions not only give you a fresh insight into your professional journey, they also help you visualise your future, because by tracing the thread through your career so far, you are likely to have a much better vision of where you would like your path to take you next.

Whether you are preparing for an interview, looking to increase your impact in your current role or considering your future path after the interruption the Pandemic has brought to all our careers, this process will bring coherence and clarity to your understanding of your professional story, which in turn will build your confidence in your own value.

Course Outcomes

• a written report of the insights from your session
• a first draft of your professional story
• presentation practise – we will finish by filming a short recording of your ‘introduction’ or elevator pitch, depending on your preference, which will be sent to you, to enable you to capture your learning from the day

The Practicals

Who are we, what do we stand for
and what do we actually do?

There was a time when a business could hide behind its logo but in the digital age, customers, clients, employees and investors are more demanding. Whether it is sofas or software, insights or education, every business needs to be able to tell its story clearly and consistently in a way that engages their target audience.

However, we are so close to the story that we often can’t see what is most important to our audience. There will be parts that are known by the ‘old hands’ but never articulated, there will be parts your customer has struggled with but never told you and there will be parts that are incredibly cool but you have never thought to mention. Every group I have worked with has overlooked some of the most interesting and relevant aspects of their story, and this process helps you identify them.

Grab the audience’s attention and get a response.

This session is about shaping a particular communication for a particular audience. It usually includes an element of business story because we cannot communicate effectively without being clear on who we are first.

The session can be run as a one-to-one for senior leaders or in a group setting where there are more stakeholders. I ran this session for a media agency, Propellernet, who wanted to refresh their pitch. At their next three pitches, the clients all signed up on the spot. While I can’t promise that hit rate every time, this session will help you structure your content and plan your delivery to get the best possible reaction from your audience.

It is my clients who have helped me get ambitious with this session – together we have planned a book which tells the story of a children’s imprint, a recruitment video, a roll out of a new salary structure, and a campaign to reshape the story of a leading public school. I’ve used it to help CEOs prepare their end of year results presentation (where the story is often what is coming next), with the head of the Art Department at a large publishers who wanted to pitch for a decent design budget for a book (keeping the author with the publishing house by delivering their high-end values was the story here), and for a talent manager planning their first call to a new Head of Channel at the BBC (the story? – “business as usual, I have what you need”).

I can also offer support developing the project after the session.

Who are we talking to
and what do they actually want to know?

Creating or refreshing a website can be a time-consuming and expensive experience if you are not fully prepared. I know, I have just done mine!

Before a single page is written you need to translate the values, voice and benefits of your business into one coherent story, then convert this in turn into visuals and text that will connect with your audience.This session is so useful because it enables you to do all of this before you sit down with your designer. It will save you hours of misunderstanding and wasted effort – and of course money – once the website build actually begins.

I can help with developing and writing text for the site following this session.