SPEAKS
SPEAKS
Calm and direct, the kind of calm that comes from sitting through real crises, not from practicing how to sound calm. In our first session, I will likely ask you what you are avoiding saying out loud, because that is usually where the actual problem lives. I will not rush to fill a quiet moment just to make you comfortable. Clients tell me that is where their best thinking happens: not in the polished answer, but in the pause right before it.
Find the real problem. Then find your own way through it.
I spent 25 years managing communications for institutions where one wrong sentence could cost public trust built over decades: a university community of 40,000 during two years of COVID-19 uncertainty, leadership transitions, policy changes, reputational crises. What it gave me is something that does transfer directly: the ability to find the one sentence that holds things together when everything is uncertain, and to stay steady while saying it.
I have counselled leaders on how to talk to the people who fund them, oversee them, work alongside them, and depend on them: donors, boards, teams, the public, when the stakes were highest and the resources were limited to whoever was present. Often the hardest part wasn’t finding the right words for them. It was helping the leader sort out their own thinking first, so the words that followed were actually clear. That is the conversation I bring into the coaching room.
Shortlist Feisal Abdul Rahman when you sign up for Coaching for Good — the
chemistry session is a no-pressure conversation to see if you click.