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Storytelling Tip: Use Scenes to Make Your Story Cinematic

Storytelling Tip: Use Scenes to Make Your Story Cinematic

One of the most powerful things you can do throughout your story—but especially at the beginning—is to use language that allows your listener to visualize what’s happening. When your listener is able to visualize the story, it becomes more experiential to them, it’s easier to follow, it feels more tangible and authentic in its specificity and it’s easier to remember.

When we’re coaching someone to do this, we encourage them to find the scenes, to avoid generalizations, to go beyond the plot and uncover the cinematic potential within their story. Think SHOW, not TELL.

ArticleStephanie JuddAugust 22, 2022storytelling, scenes, cinematic, visualizeComment

Three Product Manager Storytelling Myths

Three Product Manager Storytelling Myths

The product management field can be a cutthroat one, and Product Managers know that becoming a more compelling communicator is a great way to differentiate themselves from the pack. But many of these PMs have misconceptions about storytelling. Here are three common storytelling myths held by PMs and why you shouldn’t believe them.

Stephanie Judd authored this article as a Forbes Council contribution.

Media Mentions, ArticleStephanie JuddAugust 17, 2022Forbes, StorytellingComment

A Simple Meeting Hack... the Parking Lot

A Simple Meeting Hack... the Parking Lot

A Parking Lot is a productivity and facilitation meeting tool that captures off-agenda conversation topics and ideas so as to prevent a meeting from veering off course. Items can be added to the Parking Lot and assigned to folks or noted for discussion at a later date.

ArticleKara DavidsonAugust 8, 2022parking lot, meeting design, facilitationComment

Dress for the Power Inside You

Dress for the Power Inside You

We’ve all heard the expressions “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” or “look good, feel good” but Stephanie didn’t really believe them. She was conflicted about wanting to look good and feeling guilty about wasting time focusing on “vain” things like clothes and makeup. But, it turns out that research indicates that what we wear affects our brain. It impacts our behavior, mood, personality, confidence, and how we interact with others. Getting dressed is less about what it signals to other people, and more about how it affects yourself.

ArticleStephanie JuddJuly 25, 2022leadershipComment

Turning a Fail into a Win: Navigating Conflict with a Client

Turning a Fail into a Win: Navigating Conflict with a Client

One of our recent Story Hours focused on the topic of Navigating Conflict: Working through an interpersonal challenge. The imminence of the event inspired Kara to brainstorm story ideas that could fit that subject. Navigating conflict is a guaranteed component of leadership. It comes up all the time in our coaching conversations as our clients navigate conflict with their managers, colleagues and/or direct reports. There’s almost no limit to where it can show up at work and, when it does, it creates a spiraling ball of distraction that saps mental energy, inhibits communication and causes negative feelings all around.

ArticleKara DavidsonJuly 11, 2022leadership, conflict, conflict resolution, navigating conflictComment

The Storytelling Mistake to Rule them All: Generalizing

The Storytelling Mistake to Rule them All: Generalizing

When brevity is the most important thing, stories may not be the best tool of choice. But when coming across as a compelling and memorable communicator, consider stories—especially ones that lean on specificity—to carry your message.

In our work as storytelling coaches, one of the most common challenges our clients face is bringing their stories down to specifics. Recently, Stephanie had a client, let’s call her Jane, come to her for support in preparing for an interview. Jane knew that she was going to be asked about her origin story. In her case, the question was going to be something along the lines of, “What inspired you to get into the field of Mathematics?” Here’s a rough approximation of the story she started with, and the final version that she landed on. Read on to compare the two to eachother.

ArticleStephanie JuddJune 27, 2022storytellingComment

How to Help Your Sales Team Personalize The Pitch Deck With Stories

How to Help Your Sales Team Personalize The Pitch Deck With Stories

One of the most common challenges of sales leaders is enabling their teams to take the demo deck and make it their own—uniquely, authentically and personally theirs. Read this article for some ways you can empower your salespeople to adapt the deck for a more relatable and engaging presentation.

Stephanie Judd authored this article as a Forbes Council contribution.

Media Mentions, ArticleStephanie JuddJune 16, 2022Forbes, StorytellingComment

Three Common Mistakes when Designing for Engagement

Three Common Mistakes when Designing for Engagement

“Employee engagement” has been a hot-button issue for more than a decade, and remains central to organizational strategy. But engagement is even more important now as companies experiment with hybrid work, or a permanent virtual workforce, and the Great Resignation exists as an ever-present backdrop. And yet, “engagement” remains a big-picture, intangible, and somewhat esoteric idea that has lots of impact on the people within an organization without anyone really understanding what to do about it.

The truth of the matter is that truly engaging your team happens long before the actual moment of reckoning. It’s thinking through details, and finding ways to activate interest and ownership with your employees in every interaction. Here are three common myths about employee engagement and what you can do instead.

ArticleStephanie JuddJune 13, 2022leadership, Meetings, facilitation, engagementComment

Leveraging Coaching Skills as a Leader: Making a Request

Leveraging Coaching Skills as a Leader: Making a Request

A request is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as ‘the act or an instance of asking for something’. From a coaching perspective, this definition falls short. A request, in our opinion, is made when we see untapped potential or an opportunity not being fully leveraged within a person. At its core, a request is a gift of possibility available to the person who chooses to receive, unwrap and appreciate the request you have made.

ArticleKara DavidsonMay 31, 2022coaching, leadershipComment

Top Watch-Outs When Building a Hybrid Conference

Top Watch-Outs When Building a Hybrid Conference

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it was that we can engage with each other even if we’re all in different places. As the world re-opens and in-person conferences are restarting, there is an expectation that they will remain accessible to folks who are unable to participate on site. And yet, early attempts to build meaningful hybrid conference experiences have shown us that we’re playing in a whole new league now. Hybrid experiences aren’t in-person or virtual experiences. They’re something altogether different. We still have a lot to learn, and it’s easy to execute hybrid conferences poorly.

ArticleKara DavidsonMay 16, 2022conference, Meetings, hybrid, hybrid conferenceComment

Adapting Your Influential Story For Different Audiences And Cultures

Adapting Your Influential Story For Different Audiences And Cultures

Because storytelling is universal, the foundational principles of what makes a story influential remain constant even as the use case or audience changes. What shifts from context to context is how those principles are implemented or applied.

Stephanie Judd authored this article as a Forbes Council contribution.

Media Mentions, ArticleStephanie JuddMay 6, 2022Forbes, StorytellingComment

The Sales Demo Slide Deck: How to Make it Your Own

The Sales Demo Slide Deck: How to Make it Your Own

It’s not all that uncommon for salespeople to be armed with a presentation or demo slide deck that was put together by the marketing department. The purpose of a “single source of truth” like the corporate-approved slide deck is to ensure that all salespeople have the same talking points and are communicating a consistent narrative in the marketplace. This is a noble goal, but one of the unintended consequences of a company-wide narrative in the form of a slide deck is that it can become stale and devoid of any kind of personal, authentic touch.

ArticleKara DavidsonMay 2, 2022sales, slide deck, make it your own, presentations, storytelling, stories, authenticityComment

3 Ways to Handle the Dominant Voice in Your Meeting

3 Ways to Handle the Dominant Voice in Your Meeting

A common question we hear from folks preparing for a “big” meeting is, “How do I handle the person who always dominates the conversation?” There are several strategies you can use to make sure the dominant voice is productive, and doesn’t prevent other voices from being heard, derail your meeting flow, or interfere with your goals. Here are three…

ArticleStephanie JuddApril 18, 2022MeetingsComment

How to Improve Your Storytelling For Tech Sales Success

How to Improve Your Storytelling For Tech Sales Success

Not all stories are created equal, and by focusing on what makes a story influential, tech salespeople can dramatically shift their conversations. Here’s a look at the common mistakes and what to do differently.

Stephanie Judd authored this article as a Forbes Council contribution.

Media Mentions, ArticleStephanie JuddApril 8, 2022Forbes, StorytellingComment

Learning Design Best Practices for a Global Workforce

Learning Design Best Practices for a Global Workforce

With an increasingly distributed and global workforce, organizations need to become more sophisticated about how to support their employees' growth and development. There are many variables to consider from time zone, to language barriers, cultural differences, remote vs in-person vs hybrid, folks who are co-located but virtual, etc. Meanwhile, L&D teams are still being asked to deliver high-quality training and great experiences that engage employees and inspire them to do the hard work required to develop new skills. Here are a few tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way as we develop impactful learning experiences to a variety of global teams and organizations.

ArticleStephanie JuddApril 4, 2022hybrid, L&DComment

Best Practices for Leading in a Hybrid Work Environment

Best Practices for Leading in a Hybrid Work Environment

We recently hosted a roundtable discussion on Building Authentic Sales Relationships in a Hybrid Virtual/In-Person Tech Industry. Additionally, we continue to do a great deal of executive coaching for leaders in public health, tech and other fields. There are several unique challenges leaders are facing in supporting their people right now due to the hybrid nature of work and offer these best practices for consideration.

ArticleKara DavidsonMarch 21, 2022coaching, leadership, leading, hybrid, hybrid workComment

5 Common Questions About Telling Influential Stories

5 Common Questions About Telling Influential Stories

In the 5+ years that we’ve been operating as Wolf & Heron, we’ve had the privilege of delivering our Influential Storytelling program to 1000s of folks and provided one-on-one story coaching to hundreds of professionals. In our experience, there are several questions that have been posed to us with regularity about storytelling and influence, so we thought we’d take some time to share our perspective publicly.

ArticleStephanie JuddMarch 7, 2022storytelling, influenceComment

The Case for Leading with Powerful Questions

The Case for Leading with Powerful Questions

Questions have a powerful role in conversation and they’re underutilized at work. As experience designers and facilitators, we rely on questions to carry our participants through a process of discovery and learning. As leadership coaches, we rely on questions as the driving force for our conversations. Meanwhile, we see how often questions are underused by leaders, meeting facilitators and organizations in general.

ArticleKara DavidsonFebruary 23, 2022leadership, coaching, powerful questionsComment

Common Coaching Questions that Leaders Should Use More Often

Common Coaching Questions that Leaders Should Use More Often

When we coach leaders as part of an enterprise leadership development program, we often also provide mini training sessions to these same leaders on the basic skills of coaching. What always surprises us is how difficult it is for leaders to see the parallels between coaching and leading, and even understand why learning coaching skills is relevant to their growth as leaders.

In Stephanie’s personal experience, the process of getting certified as a coach was one of the most transformative things she did in her leadership journey. She discovered through her coaching practice a set of questions that are so simple and powerful that we use them in all sorts of contexts beyond coaching conversations. Here are a few.

ArticleStephanie JuddFebruary 7, 2022coaching, leadershipComment

Storytelling Strategies for Sales Success

Storytelling Strategies for Sales Success

If your job is to sell your company’s products or services, you need to know how to communicate their value in a compelling way. When we work with salespeople, they already understand that storytelling can be a powerful tool for them, but they struggle with how to leverage stories appropriately. Sometimes they can come up with a story, but it’s too literal and leads them down a rabbit hole of demo-ing their product rather than actually telling a story. Other times they drone on and on, losing their audience along the way. Sometimes they just can’t come up with a story idea, even if they know they should be telling stories! Here are some tips and tricks to get you started if you’re having the same challenges.

ArticleStephanie JuddJanuary 24, 2022Storytelling, salesComment