Talks & workshops
Current sessions range from practical executive-education workshops to a developing keynote built around the central question behind Shouldology: what happens when the list of things we can do becomes much longer than the list of things we should do?
OPEN ANY SESSION FOR THE FULL DESCRIPTION, TAKEAWAYS, AND FORMATS
01
SIGNATURE TOPIC
The Four Words That Derailed My Career: “I Can Do That.”
Why capability is not the same thing as direction, and why successful people
can become especially good at building careers they no longer want.
01
SIGNATURE TOPIC
The Four Words That Derailed My Career: “I Can Do That.”
Why capability is not the same thing as direction, and why successful people can become especially good at building careers they no longer want.
Early in our careers, can is useful. We learn new things, prove ourselves, and accumulate evidence of what we’re capable of doing.
Then something strange happens. The world starts rewarding that evidence. Employers hire it. Managers promote it. People ask us to do more of it. Eventually the list of things we can do becomes much longer than the list of things we probably should do.
Drawing from a career that moved through science, academia, corporate innovation, entrepreneurship, and eventually writing and coaching, this talk explores how capable people become trapped by their own demonstrated competence, and why figuring out what comes next requires looking somewhere other than the résumé.
PARTICIPANTS LEAVE WITH
- A clear distinction between capability and fit
- Why professional success can make career misalignment harder to recognize
- Why strengths are useful evidence but a poor starting point for deciding what comes next
- A practical way to begin noticing energy, purpose, and patterns beneath job titles and accomplishments
Currently developing as my flagship keynote, based on the forthcoming book Shouldology.
02
EXECUTIVE EDUCATION
The Playground
How to Get More From the Experience You’re Already In
An interactive session on using executive education as a low-stakes laboratory
for professional growth.
02
EXECUTIVE EDUCATION
The Playground
How to Get More From the Experience You’re Already In
An interactive session on using executive education as a low-stakes laboratory for professional growth.
Mid-career professionals often enter an MBA or leadership program focused on what they need to learn. The bigger opportunity may be discovering something about themselves.
The Playground helps participants treat the experience as a place to experiment: trying unfamiliar roles, noticing where their energy goes, getting deliberately uncomfortable, and using presentations and group work as chances to become one version better rather than to prove they already belong.
Originally developed for the UT Dallas Executive MBA orientation, the session also addresses the practical reality of balancing an intensive development experience with work, family, and everything else that refuses to disappear while you’re growing.
PARTICIPANTS LEAVE WITH
- A different way to think about executive education: experimentation rather than credentialing
- A practical approach to getting useful feedback and taking low-stakes risks
- Two questions that improve almost any presentation: who is the audience, and what do you want them to walk away with?
- A framework for noticing growth throughout the experience rather than only evaluating it at the end
Developed and delivered for the UT Dallas Executive MBA orientation.
03
WORKSHOP
Audience + Outcome
Better Presentations Start Before You Open PowerPoint
A practical workshop built around two deceptively simple questions: who is your
audience, and what do you want them to walk away with?
03
WORKSHOP
Audience + Outcome
Better Presentations Start Before You Open PowerPoint
A practical workshop built around two deceptively simple questions: who is your audience, and what do you want them to walk away with?
Most presentations are built from the speaker outward. What do I need to cover? What slides do I need? What information belongs in the deck?
Strong presentations work in the opposite direction. This interactive session helps professionals begin with the audience and the desired outcome, then make deliberate choices about content, structure, visuals, and delivery. Participants evaluate their current habits, practice communicating ideas in a low-stakes setting, and leave with a simple framework they can reuse immediately.
PARTICIPANTS LEAVE WITH
- A repeatable audience-and-outcome framework for planning presentations
- A way to distinguish information that matters from information that merely fits on a slide
- Greater awareness of their existing speaking habits
- At least one practical improvement they can apply to their next presentation
