I admire good public speakers. I don’t know too many of them but I do work with one that I think is an amazing speaker – in a storytelling way. I recently said, wow, I think you are a great speaker. He asked me “Why, what makes you feel that way.”. “You have pace, you have tone, you have amazing word choice and analogies, you identify with anyone you are talking to and you make it comfortable.”

An excerpt from his response goes something like this “Thank you for saying that, coming from you that is a huge compliment. With that situation (referring to our most recent meeting) it’s important to not let the people feel like they are under the bus – with deadlines, deliverables, etc. It’s more important to pick them up from under the bus and show them the seat they have on the bus and how important that is to the ride we are on right now.”

Another creative, thoughtful, identifying way to think about who he was talking to (me) and how I should process the way he had just addressed the others in our meeting. I rest my case.