Spotlight your talents
to create stories with impact
Speak your
strengths
Do you want to
be yourself, without
being self-conscious?
Wouldn’t it be great to leave your inner critic in the wings as soon as you take the stage: whether it is to present your ideas, introduce a new strategy, give a sales presentation or deliver a keynote speech? Or in any other – literal or figurative – spotlight moment when all eyes are on you?
It is a vital condition for authentic and impactful communication: staying true to yourself while devoting your full attention to your audience. After all: it’s THEM who you wish to impact. And for that YOU have to be willing to use all that you’ve got as a ‘communicator’.
Gaining insight into what that is exactly: ‘all that you’ve got’, is the first step. This is exactly where I come in! You can consider me a ‘human spotlight’: highlighting YOU, the main character! Or your team. And you choose whether we speak English, French, (Brazilian) Portuguese or Dutch during our sessions.
Together, we will turn the spotlight on your:
Stories
Talents
Drive
Audience
Your time to shine
At Spot on your unique strengths and the principles of storytelling collide… in a good way. We will focus on the things you naturally do best and on the moments that your eyes start sparkling. What can you learn from those moments of successful communication? Yes you read that right: you can learn just as much from your successes as from the times you failed… because what did you do exactly that made your audience fully take in your message?
Don’t expect to then rest on your laurels though, because from there on I will challenge you to try out and experience many different techniques as a communicator. For many of these experiments, a literal stage setting will be the scene of the crime (uhm, training). There are various good reasons for this, one of which is that the stage is the ultimate place for public speaking exposure therapy. Also when you’re ‘only’ looking to increase your impact during meetings.
The outcome of such a string of experiments is often surprising, and always valuable. During each assignment you will experience what the effect is on you as a speaker, on your story AND on your audience. Each time, it’s like you highlight a different facet of a diamond: because just like those precious stones, you are far from being one-dimensional.
For whom?
Training or coaching sessions can be booked 1:1 or for your team.
My endless curiosity, quick thinking and ability to rapidly get up to speed on the most diverse topics, allow me to confidently deep dive into your reality and content. So whether you are a scientist, CFO, startup founder, medical professional, spokesperson, account manager, university professor, or government director – to name a few that I’ve worked with in the past – I’m your woman!
Your story deserves a stage… and your audience deserves a story!
For what?
- Speaker’s coaching: preparation for specific stage moments such as public orations, keynote speeches, shareholders’ meetings, annual figures presentations
- Leadership communication programs: increase your impact making the most of your powerful and responsible position
- Pitching courses: strike the right cord in all your sales and investor meetings
- Presentation skills: get fundamentally better as a speaker
Which outcomes can you expect?
- Insight into and appreciation for your own talents and strengths
- A great story: style and content are always connected!
- Experiencing and feeling when you stand firm as a communicator, also when the stakes – and stress levels – are high
- Fun: who said the useful can’t be combined with the pleasant?
- And discipline
… To truly dedicate time and energy to prepare for that important speaking moment
… To invest in your personal development: communication skills are just like muscles, they demand training!
* And sometimes coaching sessions also lead to: a career change, you rushing home to tell your significant other how much they mean to you, taking on new hobbies, having that honest conversation with the colleague you don’t gel with, an overflowing inbox because prospects are lining up to meet you or realizing that you too are worthy of ‘occupying space’.
* Past performances ARE a guarantee of future results…
Spot on your team
Are you leading a team? And do you want to fully turn the spotlight on the qualities of your team members? So that they don’t just know how valuable everyone’s contributions are, but actually start experiencing and feeling that too?
Pick me! I love working with teams and I do so often. With teams, just like with individuals, I also combine storytelling and talent development. As the client, you decide where the main focus lies. This roughly translates into two types of trajectories.
Uncover your team’s DNA
Would you like for your people to know what their unique contribution to the team is? So that they have more fun, are more engaged and fulfilled at work? In order to improve teamwork and team collaboration and ultimately reach the team goals? That is exactly what I’m going to help you with! The focus in this team trajectory is talent development.
The world-famous CliftonStrengths® assessment is the main ingredient, served with a Spot on dressing. All team members complete the online assessment to map their own talents: how are you productively ‘wired’ and what gets your energy flowing? Individual strength-based coaching calls help you to understand and embrace your talents and they provide tools to turn them into strengths that you can use in your daily tasks. Subsequently the whole team comes together in plenary sessions where you learn to recognize, appreciate and aim all those talents in order to reach the team’s goals.
Which outcomes can you expect?
- Insight into your own drives and motivation and those of your colleagues
- More appreciation and respect for each other’s talents and way of working
- Tools that allow you to optimally use the talents present in your team
- Reinforced team spirit
Your story + my story = our story
Would you like to give all your team members the chance to create their own version of your organization’s story? They might need it because they have to explain your company’s purpose to stakeholders, because they hold sales meetings, because you adopted a new corporate strategy or because you’re in the middle of a merger.
In all of these cases it is crucial that your people incorporate that corporate story. However, that usually takes more than a memo from top management with some beautiful but hollow core values that everyone will interpret differently. You’ve guessed it already: the focus in this team trajectory is on storytelling skills. As a bonus though, everybody also walks away with insight into their own personal – and sometimes hidden – communication skills.
Which outcomes can you expect?
- Communicating the same core message… through different stories created by each team member
- Insight into each person’s unique storytelling qualities
- Tools that help you captivate, touch and activate your audience
- Reinforced team spirit through insight into each other’s drive and motivation
Why me?
If there’s anything that makes my heart wrench, it’s when people with great ideas can’t get these across to those who need to hear them. There are so many different sliding buttons you can master when it comes to increasing the impact of your words. I’d love to help you discover your personal sound panel and fine-tune the way you operate it. So that it enhances your natural communication skills.
Why is it that I find this so important? In my own life and career, I’ve started anew a few times: for example because of emigrating across continents, switching careers and going through postnatal depression… As a result, I’ve went from – among others – graduating in science A-levels to completing a humanities university course, from the role of money maker to being an expat wife, from me, myself and I to being a mother of 3, from working as a civil servant to earning a living as a private sector business trainer and from being healthy to being ill and back again. All these changes of perspective forced me to rewrite my own story again and again. It required to constantly switch the focus of the spotlight.
Today, the beauty of my job is that I can invite and guide you to change perspective on your story. Or that of your team. In a way I act as a professional spotlight, which is the reason why I named my business Spot on. Not because I have a monopoly on wisdom, but because I know the value of ‘appropriate’ lighting so well. Appropriate for YOU that is. If we highlight this aspect of your story, what effect does that have? When does your whole being ‘switch on’ and how can we reinforce and recreate that? All with the purpose to have you leave the training room with more confidence in your story and in your own communication power!
Marle Smit
COE (Chief of Everything)
marle@spotontrainingandcoaching.com
+31 6 18 20 95 82
Want to know more?
I believe in professional love (or connection, if you prefer not to rush into things ;)), at first conversation. So don’t hesitate to reach out to me.
And as mentioned before, I can coach and lead team sessions in English, French, (Brazilian) Portuguese or Dutch!