As part of the preparation to become a TED speaker, I received coaching from an experienced TED speaker coach called Danielle Krage
If you ever need coaching, I can’t recommend her highly enough. Here are my top 5 tips based on my recent TED journey:
1. TED speakers talk without notes or autocues for between 8 and 15 minutes. I created a visual talk map to help me remember my talk. It is easier for our brains to remember images than words and the associations between the different images helped me to remember the flow of my talk. Even the process of choosing the photos and sticking them on a piece of paper helped to commit them to memory
2. Talk as though you are speaking to the one person who really needs to hear what you have got to say.
3. Imagine your talk as a conversation with the audience. Make a point and then imagine what they would ask. Then respond.
4. Practise and keep practising. I recorded my talk on my phone and talked along with it every time I was in the car, the shower, cooking tea…
5. Smile, breathe, allow your shoulders to relax. Trust it will be OK
I was reminded forcibly this month of why storytelling is such a powerful medium for business as I began editing an online happiness programme. It talked about our desire to “be approved of”.
Being part of a tribe was vital for our ancestors’ very survival. Our innate desire to fit in and be approved of harks back to our very earliest times when exclusion from the tribe might make us more vulnerable to attack or injury or illness. One of the ways earliest man communicated and formed bonds with others in the tribe was by storytelling. The very earliest evidence of human existence is in the form of cave paintings, depicting stories of everyday life.
These days, of course, our survival is rarely threatened but our instinct to tell stories persists. As businesses, if we fail to tell stories… relating to our work, our passion, what we do… we are missing a trick.
I recently wrote a piece in Business Matters about the importance of organisational storytelling, and how to do it. In case you missed it, click here to read it again.
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The Nursing Times is renowned for its authoritative double-blind peer-reviewed articles. This month, I co-authored a 3,500-word feature about a groundbreaking commissioning project with life-saving potential. The process of researching and writing the article was lengthy and exacting but the final piece does justice to the project’s significance as a pioneering initiative with global implications. Click here to read the article.
One of the things that makes my job as a writer particularly worthwhile is being able to make a difference through my writing and there can be no greater satisfaction than writing to save lives. Around 100,000 deaths in NHS hospitals annually are linked to Acute Kidney Injury and nearly a third (30%) of these deaths are believed to be preventable. AKI is a global healthcare challenge.
Think Kidneys is a national programme from the UK Renal Registry, set up to raise awareness of the condition and save lives. I was appointed to help capture best practice stories and articles. The Nursing Times article charts the journey of a pilot project in Southern Derbyshire that wanted to create new ways of commissioning services in order to cut the number of cases of preventable AKI. It sets out the context for the project, the improvement journey, the rationale for involving nurses in the project, the challenges and impacts of the work.
.If you have got a story to tell, whether it’s a major innovation project or a smaller news article, I’d be happy to help you tell it. Click here to get in touch.
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6 Essential Actions to Improve Unscheduled Care is a flagship programme from the Scottish Government, created to help NHS Scotland tackle problems associated with emergency care. I work with the Scottish Government as a case study writer, helping to capture some of this amazing improvement work, spread best practice and encourage NHS organisations to learn from one another.
I have spent years writing case studies for businesses large and small and the process always begins with a detailed telephone interview. I speak to the teams involved and ask them to tell me why they embarked on the improvement process; what challenges they faced and how they overcame them, what changes they made and the impact these changes have had. We talk about what they learned along the way, what they might do differently next time and what factors have contributed to their success. I interview frontline staff, improvement teams, Chief Operating Officers, consultants, nurses, patients and anyone else who contributed to the process or has been impacted by it.
Next, I bring all of this information together in the form of a lively, informative and inspirational case study. Each one tells a compelling improvement story and provides a blueprint for other organisations to learn from. They are packed with different insights, perspectives and approaches that can be scaled up across the NHS.
The benefit of using case studies
For the organisations themselves, there is something hugely rewarding in seeing their hard work recognised and presented in the form of a written case study, while for organisations facing similar challenges, it is inspiring to read how others have turned things around and achieved positive results. The Scottish Government benefits by being able to demonstrate that its improvement processes make a real difference to those on the frontline. And for the NHS as a whole, there are huge efficiencies to be gained in organisations learning from those who have been there and done it.
6 Essential Actions to Improve Unscheduled Care
Towards the end of May, I flew to Edinburgh from Devon for the 6 Essential Actions team’s twice-yearly Winter review and planning event. It was attended by the great and the good of NHS Scotland. Programme lead, Helen Maitland spoke about the importance of case studies in spreading good practice, while Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport, Shona Robison MSP announced a further £9 million of funding for the 6 Essential Actions programme
I am genuinely thrilled to be involved in such a worthwhile initiative and to be playing my part in encouraging system-wide spread of ideas that improve the experience of patients and staff. Click here to read one of the case studies.
If you would like me to help you to capture and share your own improvement stories, click here to contact me.
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As well as writing for large organisations, I write for pleasure, for my own personal interest and growth. Last summer I began writing a blog called Dress to Express. Over the months it attracted an enthusiastic following and less than a year on, in a quite extraordinary twist, it led to me becoming a TED speaker. The talk will soon be available on YouTube. In the meantime you can read more about it here…
I say this was an extraordinary twist because the blog was something I created entirely for myself to help me get through difficult times. There was no endgame, no plan to use it as a jumping off point into something else. The fact that a blog about private and personal struggles has catapulted me into a very public spotlight seems more than a little ironic.
It was a scary and strange thing to leave behind the solitary seclusion of the café and step onto a stage in front of a live and online audience. Despite appearances to the contrary, I am naturally quite shy and often have difficulty speaking out in front of people, even small groups of people. However, I have never been one to shy away from a challenge or give in to fear so I did the talk in spite of my fear… and I have been overawed by the response.
Dress to Express began as an exploration of my personal relationship with clothes, charting a particularly challenging period of my life. During this time, I noticed that I was using my clothes – somewhat quirky and self-expressive as they are – to support me and bolster my confidence. What began as a simple record of the clothes I was wearing grew into an exploration of my personal challenges and our complex relationship with clothes as humans.
The theme of TEDx Totnes 2017 was Change Drives us Forward. The organisers liked what I was saying because, although on the face of it, the talk was about clothes, of course it was about much more. It covered themes such as freedom, prejudice and self-expression.
If you know anything about TED, you will know that it is not easy to become a TED speaker. You have to be invited to speak and the selection process is a rigorous programme of meetings, conversations, writing and refining. It took approximately six months. There were around 50 hopefuls for 12 speaking slots. At the end of this, my talk was accepted and next began the process of transforming myself from someone who was too afraid to speak out at team meetings into a confident TED speaker, able to step out onto a stage without notes or autocues and give a 15-minute talk. I wrote a blog about this process, which you can read here.
Thanks to an unfailing belief in me by my friends and the TED organisers, some amazing coaching by TED speaker coach Danielle Krage and my own determination to say what I wanted to say and not to be beaten by fear, I did it. I stepped out onto the round red carpet at 2.20pm on Friday May 12 and delivered a talk called What Toddlers Teach Us About Style.
My TED talk will soon be available on YouTube. I will publish a link to it in my next newsletter. It was an extraordinary journey and I suspect it is just the start of another. Already I have been approached to speak again on the same topic.
If you are interested in hiring me as a speaker on the topics of personal freedom, self-expression and growth or if you would like me to write a speech for you, please get in touch.
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Once upon a time… stories were something that began with once upon a time. They were mostly for children. Or for entertainment.
But then a few years ago, businesses began to cotton on to the power of stories…
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All of which is fine if you’re someone with plenty of time on your hands but how many of us fit that description?!
Put simply, a social media strategy helps you to understand WHY you’re using social media. Once you’re really clear about this you can put together a plan which will set out WHAT you are going to do.
So, where to start…?
In creating your strategy, it can be helpful to ask yourself these questions:
- Who are we?
- What are we doing (and who for)?
- Why are we doing it – what are our short-term, medium-term and long-term aims?
- What are our values?
- What image do we want to put across?
- Why does the world need us?
The answers to these questions will give you a really clear jumping off point. They will determine what to say (content) and how to say it (tone of voice). Once you’ve got this straight, your social media content will be clear and consistent, whether it is created by one person or 10.
Neither your strategy nor your plan needs to be complicated, in fact the simpler the better. In our workshops we advocate summarising your plan on the back of a postcard. Taking the time to work out your strategy at the beginning and using this to devise your plan will mean you always know what to post… today, tomorrow, next week, next month.
If your destination was the South of France, you wouldn’t head North on the A1 and wonder why it was taking so long to get there! It’s the same with social media. Be clear about where you’re going and you’ll be surprised how much easier it is to get there.
Oh, and remember to have lots of fun along the way.
For more tips about social media, come along to our Writing for Social Media workshop. Click here for details.
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It was one of a collection of hundreds of sad, shocking and terrible images from Aleppo. It was a photograph of a child, probably about six or seven, lying dead on a street, his foot at a weird angle, his leg obviously broken. What struck me so powerfully about this photograph was the fact that the child was dressed up against the cold as you would expect any child to be at this time of year. He (she?) was wearing a coat and a hat and gloves. The poignancy of the fact that he was wrapped up warm against the cold, presumably by loving family, was in stark contrast to the fact that he was lying dead and alone on a street. I can only imagine the pain of loss and grief endured by his parents and the terror that drove them to run from his body. For me, this image alone encapsulates the agony of loss when the object of our love is gone from us. It was played out again a few days ago in the images from Berlin – the sickening contrast of families enjoying a Christmas market turned, within moments, into a scene of unimaginable pain and torment.
I feel particularly attuned to loss right now and, as we know, once one is attuned to something we see it everywhere around us. I met up with a friend this week whose wife is dying of cancer. She is in the final months of her life. He spoke of knowing that the love he has for her will transcend the loss of her physical being, that this love will still be there long beyond the time that her body has perished. I could feel this love flowing from him as I held his hand. I wanted to put my arms around him and make it alright and, of course, I can’t. This is the deal we make with the universe when we choose to love. In return for the exquisite joy and connection of love, we accept the unbearable pain and grief of loss. There really is no way around it unless we choose is to build a wall around our hearts and not really love anyone or anything. I’ve known one or two people like that, who opt out of the pain game but it seems to me they live shadow lives, grey and rather meaningless.
As you may or may not know, I am dealing with my own sense of loss right now. It is nothing on the scale of the examples above but, nevertheless, it is raw and it hurts. The man I loved chose to be with someone else rather than with me and is, in effect, gone from my life. He ended our relationship in a brutal way and now won’t see me or speak to me. The grief of this is as raw now as it was five months ago when he made his choice. To all intents and purposes, he is dead to me and I miss him being in my life. Coping with this loss is a day by day challenge and there seems to be no guidebook I can follow. Every day I am making it up afresh. Some friends have suggested that the best way of getting over the loss is to allow the love I still have for him to turn to hate. If I could detest this man and see him as a worthless individual, I would feel grateful that he is gone from my life. I can see the logic of that and sometimes I can access these feelings but mostly I can’t. In truth, I don’t really want to hate him. I would rather continue to feel the love even though it is now accompanied by pain and grief and a knowing that it is not reciprocated.
I wonder sometimes, what happens to all of this love when the object of our love is gone from us? Where does it go? Does anyone benefit from it or does it just float away like pollen on a breeze?
When our love is focused on an individual or individuals, they experience it as warmth, connection and care for their wellbeing – like little boy in Syria dressed in warm clothes to keep out the cold – but when that person is gone from us, there is no outlet for our love. When there is no loved one there to receive it, maybe all of this love goes into a kind of collective pot that anyone can access at any time if they choose to. If that is the case and you are alone right now or lacking love from your life, I hope you can find a way to tune into the collective love of humanity. Maybe more than ever right now, we need to wrap the collective love of humanity around ourselves like a blanket to keep out the cold of winter and the chilling evidence of so much inhumanity in the world.
]]>I’ve been a professional copywriter for the last three decades and I’ve learned that, whether it feels right or not, every day contains the possibility for writing something great (unless, of course, you’re unwell, I’m not advocating forcing yourself to work when you’re ill).
For me, today was a bad day. Two months ago I got my heart badly broken by the man I love. Some days – like today – I feel barely able to function; I miss him so much it’s like having a constant toothache. My life is a mess, I feel lonely and afraid. I’ve no idea what the future holds and the present is a moment-by-moment challenge
I don’t know what triggered it, but right from the word go today I was upset. I started crying at around 9.30 and by 11.30 I was still going. My friend Katie, who I work alongside, hugged me and held my hand, patiently participating in the same circular conversations we’ve had a hundred times before. I just wanted to go to back bed, to pull the duvet up over my head and not get up until the Spring or until this pain has passed.
But, like any job, copywriting comes with its deadlines and its commitments. I was supposed to be writing an article today for an online magazine on the topic of… wait for it… happiness.
In my state of abject misery, the last thing I felt able to connect to was happiness. How could I write anything meaningful through swollen eyes and with a brain full of cotton wool? And what the hell do I know about happiness anyway? But the person I was writing the article for is also a friend. I didn’t want to let her down, I didn’t want to let the magazine down and, like every self-employed person, I know that if I don’t work I don’t eat.
So, I put the tissues away and started to write.
It wasn’t easy. When I am feeling good, often I can hear the words dictated in my head before I write them down. Today wasn’t like that. I had to go searching for the words. I wrote and rewrote, struggling to find the flow that comes so easily on good days. I had to keep pulling my thoughts back from my messed-up personal life to the subject of happiness. But, I kept going. Slowly, I was able to find more focus, the words I was reading made more sense, I started to be able to string sentences together and to make a coherent argument. A few hours later – admittedly longer than it should have taken me – I had an article that I was happy with (excuse the pun).
Working as a professional writer has taught me that there is no such thing as a day when you can’t write. There are days when it is far harder to write and there are days when creative ideas elude you, but it is always possible to generate written content… and sometimes the very days that seem the hardest produce the best writing. I’m not sure what that is all about.
My advice to anyone who is struggling to write is: do it anyway. If you don’t feel in the mood, do it anyway. If the ideas aren’t flowing, do it anyway. The best days are the days when it all flows beautifully but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write on the other days. If you have aspirations to be a professional writer, you need to be able to overcome the blocks that can get in your way. And the best way to do this is to treat writing like a job. Get up and get to work, whether you feel like it or not. You might just surprise yourself.
I learned some stuff about happiness today. Maybe I can apply it to my life. Maybe someone else will benefit from what I wrote. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day for me.
If you struggle to write some days or feel like you are blocked, here are my top tips:
• Make yourself sit down and write.
• Say to yourself “I will just write what I can write today, it doesn’t matter if it’s not Shakespeare.” This will take some of the pressure off and you may just surprise yourself.
• Writing notes on a piece of paper or mindmapping can sometimes help a troubled mind to focus in a way that writing onto the computer can’t.
• Resist the temptation to keep altering the same sentence again and again. Write a section and then edit it.
• Come back to what you have written on another day when your mind is fresh. You will be able to see more clearly which bits are good and which need binning.
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