BIG CONFERENCE DIGITAL SPEECH
Digital Performance, Story Preparation

1:1 CLIENT

Sometimes clients whose stories I coached for my storytelling series I produce and host, BACKFENCE PDX , become clients out in the world. One such person, Nishat, is a wildly creative illustrator, storyteller, and Creative Director at Instrument.

Nishat and I worked on a speech she was invited to give for the prestigious 99U conference originally scheduled in New York, but shifted online. We worked on the story through a relaxing, supportive, and really fun (I promise) interview process that I conducted. Through this process we dug deep for emotional engagement and juicy details of her personal story behind the social experiment she was asked to speak about. By doing this the talk became much more compelling and fun for the audience to hear and for her to tell. She cried while we worked together, not because she was sad, but because the story, her words, “suddenly became far more meaningful” with personal details. It’s an incredible experience to watch a client light up when the talk turns to being in their own words, with meaningful reflections. We banished corpo-speak to the land of wind and ghosts. Lastly, we took care of little details like staging the space and lighting behind her talk to use the medium to its fullest. The talk was a huge success, Nishat knocked it out of the park.