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Spotlight on Anne Litwin
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When
Anne Litwin, an organization development consultant from Jamaica Plain,
Massachusetts, began working with Carla Kimball to hone her public speaking
skills, she expected to take away more confidence, new techniques, and
an improved presentation. She never imagined that Carla would have her
dancing on stage in front of hundreds of people.
But that’s exactly what happened. Carla encouraged Anne to incorporate her natural grace and personality into her lecture—a keynote talk on the challenges of navigating cultural differences within multinational corporations, which she delivered at a conference for consultants in Mysore, India.
“Carla showed me how to use my body to make my speech more interesting—how to use my hands, get out from behind the podium, and speak from my whole being,” Anne says. “In one of our practice sessions, I was talking about how consultants have to learn to dance with their own values, the values of the field, and the values of a culture, and I started doing a little dance. She told me, ‘That’s what you’re going to do in your talk.’”
Carla also helped her to map out the flow of her lecture and to streamline both the speech and the PowerPoint presentation, distilling them down to the stories and points that had the most impact. In the end, Anne’s keynote stood out from all the others at the conference. “People were really awake,” she says. “It stirred them and got them thinking.”
Anne says her two one-on-one coaching sessions with Carla, coupled with her attendance at one of Carla’s SpeakingPresence courses, have given her what she needed to take her lectures and leadership trainings to another level. She hopes to offer her fine-tuned presentation at Fielding Graduate University, based in Santa Barbara, California, where she is earning her PhD in Human and Organization Development.
Public speaking, she says, will add another dimension to her work helping businesses to increase their effectiveness in cross-cultural and multinational settings. “I’m very comfortable in a workshop setting, but public speaking in front of a large group is somewhat newer for me,” she says. “I didn’t know how to connect with a large audience or how to organize my material in a way that was easy to follow. To learn how to tighten it up, how to relate to people using eye contact and body language, and how to deliver my ideas in an interesting way has made all the difference.”
Visit Anne’s website at www.annelitwin.com or e-mail her at annelitwin@earthlink.net.
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