We are all improvising all the time. None of us wakes up to find a script for the day sitting on our bedside table. We must figure out how to respond, connect, make choices as we go along. As the world moves faster and becomes less predictable, this ability becomes harder, and good improv skills become more important to maximizing your strategic impact. Through improv you can:

• Exercise your awareness so you recognize opportunities to develop your team and your business

• Celebrate risk-taking to expand your ability to innovate, deal with change, and step into new roles

• Unleash your creative genius so you can solve problems and design solutions quickly and effectively

• Build collaborative momentum by supporting and building on others’ ideas

Figure out how in this dynamic keynote session!

Business success in the 21st century requires all the focus, courage, clarity and strength that it has always required. In addition, professional effectiveness now calls for incredible flexibility, responsiveness, comfort with diversity of all sorts, an openness to ongoing learning and growth and an awareness that change is constant. And on top of it all, many leaders, like yours, must understand that leadership is about group dynamics as much as individual motivation.

Speakers share how they discovered the power of improvisational theater and how she helps her clients use it as a “gym” to exercise their creativity, communication, collaboration and influencing skills.

We all know that listening is important for our success as team members, cross-functional partners, salespeople, and leaders. But what does it really mean to listen well? How can we expand our awareness, so we capture not just information but needs, values, emotions? How can we exercise our listening “muscles” so that we notice more, understand more deeply and engage with more curiosity? In this interactive keynote session, we will:

• Test our listening skills

• Distinguish "listening as a partner" from "listening as a competitor”

• Expand our tolerance for silence and exploration

• Practice multi-dimensional listening

• Explore listening as a relationship-building and problem-solving tool

It’s even more rewarding (and complicated) than you thought!

Have you ever shared a wonderful idea only to have it ignored? Do you ever feel tension in the air and suspect you might be caught in a power struggle? Do you want to have influence at a higher level? Would you like to be able to shift the group climate to be more collaborative and productive? A conscious awareness of the dynamics of status and power can help you inspire trust, have your ideas heard and taken seriously, minimize unhealthy conflict and create environments where people feel engaged and respected. In this dynamic keynote, we will:

• Learn the non-verbal vocabulary of status, authority, and power

• Expand awareness of your habitual status behaviors and where they help and hurt your cause

• Identify positive status moves

• Apply status fluency to communicate with confidence and difficult situations

As the most cutting-edge business cultures are recognizing, storytelling skills are not just a “nice-to-have” in today’s world. Rather, this oldest of communication tools tap into the fundamental way our brain makes meaning and helps us understand new concepts, engage deeply, tap into our passion, and connect with others. In this compelling keynote, we will unpack the power of story as a knowledge-sharing, culture-building, and problem-solving tool, and discover our innate storytellers within.

• Learn tools for structuring and styling a story

• Apply the 6 secrets for making stories compelling and memorable

• Tap your inner storyteller and learn to harvest great stories everywhere

• Practice creating meaningful stories that link to a business message or object