Blog - Lauren Sergy

Your corporate approved slideshows are killing your employees!

November 3, 2014

For all you creators, approvers, or presenters of corporate slideshows, those company-approved visuals that employees are required to use in their presentations: this post is for you. This is a miniature rant inspired by one of my workshops.* I’m not going to give you the full blast of the workshop here – you’ll need to…

Wooing with honesty and generosity

September 30, 2014

I don’t fall in love quickly. If a really fantastic thinker crosses my path, I might follow her videos and blog for a year before really falling in love. A great speaker might cross my radar, but I won’t giggle like a besotted teenager until I’ve figured out if the rest of his stuff is…

TL:DR and the Marginal Utility of Words

September 22, 2014

If you strip away some of the more complex quantifications, there are many economics concepts that can be applied to business and public speaking. (If you are new here, you may not have encountered a full blast of my nerdy nature. Consider yourself initiated, and hang on for the ride). Right now, I’m delighted by…

Things don’t always go according to plan

September 15, 2014

Actually, things rarely go according to plan. Take today, for instance. Take this very post. I had planned to re-launch my blog today after months of inactivity. I had temporarily suspended active posting while I re-vamped my website and created a raft of new content ready for regular publication. Planning, writing, designing, building – for a…

Want to write great stuff? Here’s something to help you get started.

May 7, 2014

I’ve always loved storytelling. As a kid, I liked to record improvised “radio plays” on cassette tapes and would take long walks during which I rambled adventures to myself out loud, looking for all the world like the neighbourhood madgirl. Later, once the glories of the internet opened up to me, I spent hours in online…

Editing Heavily

May 5, 2014

It is hard to chop content out of your presentation. You worked on it, you had a vision of where you wanted to go and how you would go about getting there. You filled that presentation chock full of ideas. It was loaded with stuff that you wanted to share with your audience. You crafted…

Conversations with ourselves

April 17, 2014

People like you and I spend a lot of time planning words that we are to deliver to other people. It’s impossible to get away from it, really. Every speech is a conversation, every conversation contains mini-speeches, and this is true whether the speeches or conversations are pre-conceived, rehearsed, or utterly spontaneous. We focus so…

So you are not outspoken…

March 11, 2014

There are people who come to me for help because they love speaking and want to get better at it. There are people who come to me for help because they are terrified of speaking, because they are desperately uncomfortable being heard and raising their voice, or because their shyness has started to get in…

Proximity and expertise: according to Seth.

March 2, 2014

You may be aware that I am a bit of a Seth Godin fangirl. It takes a great deal of restraint for me to not share nearly every one of his daily blog updates here on my own blog (Twitter is a better vehicle for sharing that sort of thing). Every now and then, though,…

The communicator you need

February 27, 2014

It may be that the person who makes you uncomfortable, who openly challenges your actions and ideas, who unapologetically but lovingly debunks your dearly held notions is precisely the communicator you need. Good communicators are not necessarily those who make you feel good or uplifted. They are the ones who bring you clarity, who get…