Known for a warm and engaging style, I offer a fresh angle on leadership and belonging.

About

Gender

  • Female
 

Based in

  • United Kingdom

Languages

  • English

Themes

  • Communication
  • Conscious Inclusion
  • Corporate Culture
  • Employee Engagement
  • Equality and Inclusion
  • Health and Wellbeing
  • Leadership
  • Leadership Development
  • Organizational Culture
  • Presentation Skills
  • Storytelling
  • Teambuilding
  • Teamwork

Biography highlights

  • Speaks on Approachable Leadership through strategic storytelling
  • Primary audience of female leaders in the professional sector
  • can adapt keynotes to more of a workshop-style session
  • warm, engaging style that demonstrates her message

Biography

One of Rachel’s first observations about successful speakers was they all seemed to have a powerful story to share.

Initially held back by a belief that she didn’t have a story to share, she set out to find her own way of bringing stories to her speaking and now trains and coaches other speakers, working with them on developing and crafting their respective stories.

Her own speaking career began in the juvenile court room, later moving on to creating and delivering training programmes, including presentation skills and ultimately to delivering her own keynotes to business professionals.

More recently she has added another dimension to her work around storytelling and speaks primarily to female leaders in the professional sectors on achieving approachable leadership through strategic storytelling.

Most leaders already have the more recognised leadership qualities of decision-making, drive and motivation. Rachel’s presentations offer a simple way to develop the less recognised qualities of humility, support and compassion that turn a good leader into a great leader.

Rachel also trains and coaches in public speaking skills, communications skills and she works with business professionals on identifying their personal and brand stories.

She is a Professional Member of the Professional Speaking Association and was Regional President for the London region in 2022.

Videos

Talks

Achieving Approachable Leadership through strategic storytelling

As an expert is your field with your years of experience behind you, once you become a leader it’s all too easy to unwittingly create a gap between you and your people.

This presentation offers a fresh insightful angle on storytelling as a means of bridging that gap.

3 key learning points:

  1. How that gap occurs and what can happen if you fail to build the bridge.
  2. How to apply strategic storytelling as a means of bridging that gap.
  3. How strategic storytelling benefits you as well as your audience.

 

Available as a virtual talk

The Power of Sharing Stories

As well as explaining why stories are so important in presentations, Rachel will cover what kind of stories to include and she’ll include some tips on how to craft a simple presentation.

Key takeaways:

  1. The importance of stories and why to share them.
  2. Which ones to share.
  3. How to craft them.

 

Available as a virtual talk

5 simple techniques to get your audience hanging on your every word.

It’s not enough to have valuable content for your audience. Before they’ll take action, you need to fully engage them.

But how can you do that?

Rachel shares some simple techniques you can start using straight away.

Key takeaways:

  1. It’s not enough to be a confident speaker sharing good content.

2. Being a truly competent and engaging speaker is a learnable skill and art that can be developed.

3. 5 tips on how to engage your audience more fully.

Available as a virtual talk

Testimonials

What’s great about Rachel is not just the storytelling and the idea of the power of stories. It’s that she models it, so her authenticity. As she talks about it, she’s doing it. To watch her masterfully craft stories, relate lessons and make them relevant and applicable is just brilliant.

David Avrin

Customer Experience Keynote Speaker and Consultant, The Customer Experience Advantage


I wanted to say a massive thank you for yesterday’s session! It went really well, there was a really positive buzz in the room and I thought everyone seemed to really enjoy your talk and the breakout sessions afterwards. Thank you for making it such an engaging and interactive afternoon.

Liz Watt

Founder, Women in Indirect Tax Network


As a result of hearing Rachel’s presentation on The Power of Sharing Stories, we weaved some client stories into a presentation we were due to deliver the following week. They made the room go silent. It really is a powerful way to engage the audience. Caroline Milne, Menopause Coach and winner of the 2023 Female Executive Coach Awards (AI influential Business Women’s Awards).

Caroline Milne

Founder and CEO, Coaching with Caroline


Rachel spoke with such passion, experience, knowledge and humour and really got her message across effectively. Really powerful.

Mark Lee

Facilitator and Leader; Speaker, Book Mark Lee


Rachel is so inspiring. She uses stories to really draw her audience in and I learned so much from her. She was funny, she was personable and she really has the audience at the heart of everything she does.

Edmee Mendonca Carroll

Master NLP Coach, Mentor, Speaker, Powertalk (UK) Ltd.

Programmes & workshops

1. Getting Comfortable with Public Speaking - how to create and deliver your presentations with confidence, clarity and competence.

The ability to deliver a presentation with confidence and clarity says a lot about you. Unfair but true, assumptions will be made about your ability to fulfil your role from your ability, and willingness, to present competently. What does is it say about you if you turn down an opportunity to speak in front of others? What does it say about you if you do it badly? This course is designed to help you put together a short presentation and to deliver it confidently and competently. Objectives: • To share the importance of being clear about the message you want to convey • To share a simple format for putting content together which will make it both easier for the audience to follow and for the speaker to remember • To give participants the opportunity to practise delivery and receive constructive feedback Outcomes: Participants will come away with: • A presentation in draft form and a template for further use • An understanding of how to structure a presentation • An understanding of how to repurpose speech content • New techniques for getting your message across clearly • More confidence in delivery ‘Prior to this course, I was filled with dread at the thought of giving a presentation. I now feel I’m capable of doing it! I thought the format of the day was perfect. Enough balance between writing, presenting and teaching of skills. Thank you! Amanda Phillips-Wyld. Solicitor’

2. Public Speaking and Presentation Skills – the next level.

Course style: 70/30 teaching to interaction Who is this for? Those who have experience in presenting and recognise the value of a skills refresher programme; those who have completed the Getting Comfortable with Presenting course and feel ready to take the next step forward. Overview: There’s a difference between good and great and what makes that difference when it comes to speaking in public? A good speaker will deliver a well-constructed, interesting and informative presentation with confidence. A great speaker will have their audience engaged from the outset, wanting to hear more. But how do they do that? Often it’s only the little things that make the difference but they’re not always obvious – and they can be learned. This course covers many of those little things and gives participants an opportunity to get comfortable with using them, so that they too can go from good to great. Objectives: • To provide an opportunity for participants to challenge themselves and their presentation skills. There’s always something new to learn! • To introduce participants to a higher level of public speaking techniques for even greater audience engagement • To provide an opportunity for participants to experiment with those techniques and to receive feedback Outcomes: Participants can expect to: • Have a greater understanding of how to achieve greater audience engagement • Have learned techniques to take their public speaking to a higher level • Have identified at least 3 of those techniques they can incorporate/develop further within their own presentations straight away

3. Effective storytelling for business

It’s one thing to deliver a presentation confidently and competently, but quite another to really engage your audience and achieve the outcome you set out to achieve, both for that audience and for you and your organisation. When you can effectively make use of stories within your presentations, you’re already engaging much more meaningfully with your audience, which makes them more likely to take the action you want them to take. Stories evoke emotions. They travel down through generations and stay in people’s minds much more easily than a set of facts and figures. Don’t have an ‘against the odds’ tale? Your own everyday stories and your client stories are just as powerful. Objectives: • To raise awareness of how important everyday stories are for engaging and connecting with your presentation audience • To raise awareness of why stories are so powerful • To give an overview of the different types of story that can be used • To give examples of different ways of using different types of story Outcomes: • Participants to identify some of their own stories they can use in their presentations • To understand the simplicity of recording everyday stories • Tips and ideas on how to weave different types of stories into presentations for greatest effect, i.e. a great story doesn’t always start at the beginning.