Your expertise deserves to be understood.

Bring a real message. Bring the opening you’ve drafted, the sales introduction you already use, or the part of a talk that feels hard to explain. We’ll start with who’s listening and what you want them to understand or do.

Try it aloud. Give it the way you’d say it to a real audience. I’ll tell you where I leaned in or lost the thread. Then we’ll make one change, like opening with a question your audience cares about or replacing a long explanation with one specific example, and try it again.

Leave with a practice plan. We’ll choose what to revise and what to rehearse first. That might mean recording your opening to hear where you rush or practicing your last line until the audience’s next step is clear.

Help clients make a decision. In a workshop with an IT consulting team, we looked at how to move from explaining a technical issue to helping a client decide what to do. One participant called it the Communication Bowtie. Start wide by asking questions about the client’s situation. Narrow the conversation by confirming the issue in plain language. Then widen it again to explore options and agree on a next step.

We used DiSC to consider what different clients need to hear before they’re ready to decide. We also discussed what to do when a client asks a question you can’t answer on the spot. Acknowledge it, clarify what they’re asking, and tell them what you’ll verify before you follow up.