I’ve been busy.
I’m a storyteller, speaker, media strategist, and writer with an extensive background in broadcasting, theater, and stand-up comedy. I believe that it – business, and life – is all about the story.
Telling a great story attracts and engages your target market, driving the growth of your enterprise – whether your “enterprise” is a Fortune 500 or a small community health center. Your organization is telling a story every day, to every human that interacts with you in any way. Do you feel like you know every story your org is telling? Are you sure? If you haven’t asked everyone, from the C-suite to the custodian to the folks in your waiting room (and if you still have a waiting room, we need to talk), then you don’t know every part of your story.
And you are definitely not yet in the #NoBullshit zone. Which is where I can help!
Why me?
I studied theater and performance at the University of San Francisco, American Conservatory Theater, HB Studios, and the American Comedy Institute. So I get absurdity at the cellular level. And I know how to turn absurdity into opportunity.
From there, I launched a two-decade career in broadcast news and sports, covering stories for Dateline and Today, presidential campaigns, wars, presidential campaigns that turned into wars, NFL Playoff games, Stanley Cup hockey, and the NBA. I know how to talk to people in pretty much any context – academia, Fortune 10 CEOs, farm workers, suburban moms, hackers, church ladies, the whole human carnival – so I can build questions that get at your real story.
The highest and best use of my theater and improv training came when I talked my way out of police custody in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Shield in 1991. I talked my way out of jail, and then got to stay in Saudi for four months – I’m still not sure that was really a win, but it’s a great story. Hey, I already said I found opportunity in absurdity, didn’t i?
I honed my in-the-moment skills doing stand-up comedy, performing at Caroline’s, Gotham Comedy Club, Catch A Rising Star, and the New York Comedy Club. After facing drunken hecklers, healthcare system audiences are a walk in the park.
I spent a number of years as a family caregiver. Then, just days before Christmas in 2007, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I used those experiences to write a book about managing medical care, “Cancer for Christmas: Making the Most of a Daunting Gift“, which became an Amazon Best Seller in October 2009.
Since then, I’ve been working the patient engagement and citizen science lanes hard – recognized as someone who’s savvy on patient engagement by the WHO, work groups on everything from health tech to privacy rights to human rights in research, even some comedy sketches at conferences to point out the absurdity of some of the “we’ve always done it this way” thinking in any established order on, well, anything.
If you want solid storytelling with a deep vein of humanity-infused humor, I’m your girl. If you want to shake up the status quo, cause some “good trouble” to make healthcare more human, get in touch.
Let’s do this.
