What's Your
Plan Be?
Signature Keynote
Grande Vanilla Latte. That’s my order. I drink coffee every day and I love to have a chat with a friend while I get my daily dose of caffeine. Ten years ago, over coffee, a question emerged that changed my life. “What’s Your Plan Be?” came to me at the right time—I was building a business and feeling a little frustration with clients who couldn’t figure out who they wanted to be! After a week of brainstorming, the question became a program and over time a philosophy and later a book. I applied Plan Be to my business, using it to focus on the possibilities of what my business would be. I passed Plan Be on to my clients, utilizing a series of activities to “find Plan Be.” With each conversation I could see a shift--I was POWERFUL, living my PURPOSE, and fueled by my POTENTIAL.
In 2017, through a series of UNPLANNED events, I was called to apply Plan Be to my personal life. Little did I know in 2010, Plan Be arrived to get me ready for the hard stuff—you know the hard stuff right? Its all that junk that rises to the surface to challenge us during times of disruption and uncertainty to see what we are really made of. Delivered in a variety of packages—job loss! divorce! health crisis! or a global pandemic, these challenges rarely wrapped in gold foil paper with bow on top. Plan Be is about who you are when things are great and who you are when things royally stink. That is the measure of being. In this keynote you learn the origin story of Plan Be, how to change your mindset from doing to being, the philosophy of Plan Be (Roots and Wings), and participate in a Plan Be activity to get you started.
You leave ready to Name it! Claim it! and Live it!
*Add the Book to your event for a takeaway for attendees.
What's Your
Plan Be?
Print and Digital Book Coming Soon!
Keynote
MEET ME AROUND
THE CAMPFIRE
Leaders Tell Stories to Engage, Motivate, & Inspire
Leadership is about getting people to act on a vision, idea, or mission. How do you do that? Many leaders take the tired and worn out PowerPoint path, using slides overflowing with charts, graphs, and data points, all rendered in 12 point font, to try to inspire action. But rarely does an audience experience an emotional reaction to the latest quarterly earnings statement. It is STORY that moves people. GREAT leaders tell POWERFUL stories, the kind that make sense of the data and illuminate facts, figures, and statistics in a way that an audience is moved to ACTION. In this keynote, I share the SEVEN stories every leader must master, common mistakes made in storytelling, and ideas for how to USE story in an intentional and honest way. In a noisy, crowded, and competitive marketplace, your story will be the way you stand out. Learn how to do it right. Effective storytelling recruits talent, retains talent, makes sense of chaos during times of disruption, positions you in a crowded and competitive marketplace, wins new customers and clients, and keeps the ones you have. Don’t miss the chance to improve your storytelling skills and meet me around the campfire. I’ll bring the knowledge, you bring the hot dogs and fixings for s’mores.
Keynote
WHAT DO YOU BRING TO THE TABLE?
Toll House Pie, Chicken and Dumplings, Homemade cheese rolls. Everyone in my family brought something to the table except me. This unexpected realization prompted me to figure out what the heck I could bring to the table the next time I was with my family. I chose wisely: Chicken Salad and Quiche. The two things my daughters actually request of me (I am not known for my cooking….) I quietly added both to the buffet style lunch laid out one summer day and watched as the chicken salad disappeared and the quiche was consumed in the blink of an eye. The next day my niece asked, “Who brought that chicken salad? Oh my gosh it’s the best I have ever had.” It was me! I was beaming with pride. Turned out everyone loved the quiche too and I was bombarded with requests for the recipe.
Beyond food, I love the visual of asking what do you bring to the table? Our talents, gifts, strengths, stories, experiences, and more offer our family, team, friends, and community the value add that we all need to be successful. There is a lot of talk about making room at the table and as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm taught us, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair…”
But what happens when you GET to the table? What value do you provide?
In this fun and thought provoking keynote I show you how to answer the question on four levels:
What do I bring to the table? (INDIVIDUAL)
What do WE bring to the table? (TEAM)
What do WE bring to the table? (ORGANIZATION)
What do WE bring to the table? (COMMUNITY)
The best part? Show and Tell. Work with me in advance and we will choose THREE people from the audience to come up and share their answer. Your audience leaves energized, engaged, motivated, and maybe a little hungry for their mama’s home cooking.
DOIN’ TIME IN THE PRINCIPALS OFFICE:
Keynote
Ask any adult who knew me as a kid and I bet you a dollar to a donut the word BRAT will come up. I was a brat, so I hold no ill will toward their honesty. I am from the generation of corporal punishment at school. A paddling is what you had coming your way if you continuously misbehaved in the classroom. And despite how much time I spent in the office of my principal, Mr. Bill Roach, I came away with zero “licks.” In fact, he never threatened to paddle me. Instead he took time with me. I talked and he listened. He did ask why I kept showing up in his office, but the truth is a child has little understanding
of the why behind their behavior. To say the time spent in Mr. Roach’s office was a God send would be an understatement.
The term Emotional Intelligence would not be coined until 1991 when it emerged from the world of psychology and slowly made its way into the mainstream. Mr. Roach was the ideal model of an emotionally intelligent leader well before EQ was on everyone’s mind. And because of that, I am a better person. You know the impact a teacher can have on a child’s development and life. My teachers were my angels. Mr. Roach was the head angel. We maintained our friendship until he died, tragically, in 2006. At his funeral, I had the (surreal) pleasure of reconnecting with ALL my elementary teachers as we celebrated the life of a man who changed so many kid’s lives at Bowie Elementary. Today, as an adult, I understand Mr. Roach MODELED REAL LEADERSHIP and while it took years for it to fully bloom, he showed me what it looks like to BE a leader.
Leadership Lessons Learned from
My Elementary School Principal
In this fun and thought provoking keynote, I relay the SEVEN leadership lessons I learned from Mr. Roach. I hope to inspire and motivate, of course. More importantly, I share how you can use leadership to model lessons for those around you. After all, the job of the leader is to create new leaders. No matter your role, what you do matters. We all can show up as leaders.
