Sarah Gershman is the CEO of Green Room Speakers and is an executive speech coach in Washington DC. She's been coaching CEOs and other executives for 20 years. She works with companies like Microsoft, Marriot, Walmart, and the US Government. Sarah is a Professor of Communications at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. We discuss the perennial fear of public speaking and how it feels like we are in mortal danger, how we experience the audience as a threat, we rationalize and tell ourselves stories and the very primal experience of being watched by predators which leads our brains to tell us the audience is a predator. We discuss that it's in our DNA and it's how we're programmed to respond. We discuss overcoming it by turning it on its head, taking that energy and turning it back onto the audience. We talk about the fact that the politicians who can connect emotionally are much more successful than the ones who merely spout the facts. We talk about how answering the technical question but not the emotional questions will leave your audiences cold. We discuss speaking anxiety, brilliant, technical experts having trouble translating their brilliance for external audiences, taking an audience-focused approach, and speaking as an act of service. We discuss the power in making people feel understood, women in the workplace and their natural advantages, tension to redemption, conflict to resolution... bring structure without compromising the data you need to deliver and the importance of letting the audience feel before you deliver the data. We talk about the specific challenge of CEO communication, communicating to the board, or communicating the big change in an organization, how lonely it can be to be a CEO, the importance of vulnerability, the natural desire to want to present a view that everything's great, and how terrifying, yet valuable, it can be to reveal their own vulnerability.
Sarah has spent the last 15 years coaching global executives in over 50 industries and is the founder and owner of Green Room Speakers. Whether preparing for a keynote address, briefing senior officials or pitching a product, Sarah helps leaders find their core message – and make that message stick. Sarah works with executives in Fortune 50 companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations.
Sarah is a Professor of Communications at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she lectures regularly to students from around the world.
Find Sarah at https://greenroomspeakers.com/ and at https://www.linkedin.com/in/greenroomspeakers/