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Tracy Playle
Tracy and I talked about:
- her content strategy consulting work in the education sector
- ContentEd, the conference she organizes
- how she gets people together to get content strategy tasks done
- how she uses the user story framework to introduce the concept of content strategy
- her three-question framework – the why, what and how – for crafting and shaping workshops and other engagement activities
- how she categorizes stakeholders
- folks who know something that you need to know
- others who have an influence, and
- others who will be affected
- how she delegates the process of assembling workshop participants
- the possibilities and problems of conducting virtual workshops
- her “content walk” method – a creativity exercise that she uses – at first she thought it wouldn’t work virtually but then realized that with a good enough internet connection it could
- tools that permit virtualizing workshops
- a surprise benefit of virtual workshops: getting things off of paper and into a more permanent digital format
- possible ways to create content ecosystem maps and similarly complex drawings/models virtually
- her adoption of Austin Kleon’s “Steal Like an Artist” approach in, for example, empathy mapping or content strategy statement formulation
- how using the classic improv yes-and approach can help in workshops
- how domain mapping can lead to fresh insights among diverse stakeholders
- how her ability to find comedy and humor in content strategy led to speaking gigs
- her process (or possible lack thereof) in developing new content strategy methods
- the number of “apprehensive content strategists” she encounters
- the benefits of developing our soft skills as content strategists (her super-power)
- the importance of content strategists getting over our collective impostor syndrome (and her recent blog post on the subject)
- the “myth in the content strategy world that there are people out there that have just got this stuff nailed”
- how “content strategy” is a huge industry, not a specific role
- her new coaching program
- her belief that our success has content strategists depends as much on confidence and coaching as it does on our technical skills
Tracy’s Bio
Tracy Playle is a CEO, coach, content strategist, and award-winning speaker known for delivering inspiring, energetic, and engaging conference keynotes and workshops at events around the world.
Founder of education sector communications consultancy, Pickle Jar Communications, Tracy divides her time between being a CEO, developing sector-leading thoughts on content strategy and marketing, coaching individuals to transform their work and their lives, and speaking at conferences to inspire large audiences.
She is also founder of ContentEd, Europe’s first content strategy conference for the education sector.
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast Intro Transcript
If you want to create good content strategy, You have to hold a lot of meetings and run a lot of workshops. Tracy Playle has mastered the art of getting people together to collaborate on content strategy projects. In this episode, Tracy generously shares insights about how to facilitate content strategy gatherings. Toward the end of our conversation, she also talks about how to deal with impostor syndrome – an affliction that she sees all too often in the content strategy profession.
Interview Transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 49 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Tracy Playle. Tracy is the CEO and the Chief Content Strategist at Pickle Jar Communications. She’s in Newcastle, in England. I’ll let Tracy tell you a little bit more about herself.
Tracy:
Hi. I’m Tracy Playle. I’ve been a consultant and content strategist for about 12 years now. I set my own company up. It feels like yesterday, but yeah, 12 years ago. I spent my life specializing in working with mostly the education sector so helping universities make their websites less bad.
Larry:
That’s a high threshold. To that point, you just came back from ContentEd, the conference you organized. That was last week, right?
Tracy:
That’s right. We were up in Edinburgh this year. We’ve been in London for the last two years, and we had almost 300 content people in different guises from 16 countries coming in for the conference. It’s starting to become quite a big thing now, and it’s the only event of its kind that really serves content strategy in the education sector at the moment.
Larry:
Nice, because I know Confab quit doing their education one. That’s maybe the only one in the world now, right, for education?
Tracy:
Yeah, we claim it is.
Larry:
Great.
Tracy:
Everybody challenged that. There’s an online version of a conference that’s run from an organization based in Canada, but we’re the only real face to face one that we’re aware of. We asked Brain Traffic and Confab to come to Europe and they said no, so we said we’d do it ourselves.
Larry:
Fine, we’ll do it ourselves. Great, I love that. Great. It was actually at Confab that led me to invite you on the program. You did a great session there on workshops and how to conduct content strategy workshops. That had to be one of the densest presentations. I mean dense in a really good way. There was more information. I was scrambling to take notes. I’ve been reviewing the slides ever since. As I was reviewing everything, I realized that, while there’s a lot of activities going on, there are principles and guidelines and things that drive all these activities, whether it’s persona development or domain mapping, or just any stakeholder alignment activity. Can you talk a little bit about how you get people together to get content strategy tasks done?
Tracy:
Yeah. How you get them together and how you get them in the room is a tricky question, and that’s a whole separate session that I’ve delivered before on. How do you explain content strategy to people and how do you explain how it’s relevant to them? In fact, I covered this in the GatherContent webinar, so it’s worth checking this out. I used the user story framework to think about stakeholder engagement. Let’s say we want to get the finance director in the room to come and get them to contribute into content strategy or they might be a key stakeholder. I’ll write a little user story or at least have one in my head. As the finance director, what do they want and need so that they can? You shape your narrative about content strategy that’s completely aligned to their user story. That’s one of the ways that I would make it relevant to get them in the room in the first place.
Tracy:
We also need to think about why we’re getting people in the room. I have what I refer to as my three-question framework, and it’s really simple. Most of the stuff that I do is extremely simple really because I’m quite a simple person. It’s the why, what and how. Why are we actually bringing these people together? What do we need to get out of them, and how will we get that out of them? That’s the framework really for crafting and shaping any workshop or any engagement activity.
Larry:
The why, that just comes up . . . I was in a bookstore yesterday and I picked up that Simon Sinek book about the spinoff of his TED Talk about why. I’ve talked to so many. I was talking to Jonathan Coleman. I’ve talked to a lot of content strategists about the fundamental power of why. I guess between those three, the why, the what and the how, I think most people would jump right to the what and the how, like, oh, how are we going to get? How do you get at the why? Tell me a little bit about that.
Tracy:
Particularly when we’re thinking about stakeholder workshops, it’s really teasing out the role that this person or these people will play in the discovery process or impacting on your project. I have different ways of thinking about stakeholders. They’re either people that know something that you need to know in order to develop an effective content strategy or they’re people who will influence the outcome of your content strategy. They might be a budget holder or the person that needs to sign something off or there’s someone that’s going to be impacted by your content strategy. They might be a copywriter or a developer. Generally, it’s looking at it from that perspective and looking at how the stakeholders slot into those different roles. That’s where you get the why.
Tracy:
I think if they don’t fall into one of those roles or something similar to that, then I would be questioning whether you really need them in the room at all. Sometimes we can just do workshops just for the sake of doing them. I think they have to have purpose because we’re asking people to invest their time into this too. They want to know that they’re doing it with purpose. Most of the time, it will make you feel good about themselves as well.
Larry:
Got you. That’s kind of jumping … I’m thinking of the RACI acronym. There’s that notion of … You’re almost jumping ahead to that now. Who’s going to be responsible for this? Who’s going to be accountable? Who needs to be consulted? Who needs to be informed on these things? What you just said aligns with those . . . having a clear why, clear what you want to do, and clear how. Do you have other guidelines for once you’ve … You have your rationale and then you can start inviting people and planning the actual workshop. Tell me how you do that. Tell me how the actual activity comes together.
Tracy:
I get my clients to do that piece of work. They do it for me. How we actually decide who’s in the room and how we actually get them into the room? It really depends on who the people are that we actually need in the room. Most of the time, people want to be there because they like to be heard. Especially in my world, in the education sector, they like talking a lot. They love it when an external person comes in as well because they feel like something different is happening and unique. So there’s that.
Tracy:
There’s also still this mystery around content strategy with some of the people that we get into the room. There’s a little bit of, oh, what’s this about? We’re going to go and find out about this witchcraft this person is coming to talk to us about. There’s a little bit of that involved.
Larry:
That’s great. I feel like I talk a lot all the time about content strategy and for once, I’m the interesting guy because of that same thing. It’s like, oh, is it witchcraft or some crazy scheme that you’re up to there? Like I said before, everything you’ve talked about so far, I’m thinking about … We talked about how to virtualize these activities. This stuff classically happens in a conference room or a meeting room of some kind and you’re all gathered around with Post-its. I love that. A quick aside about your presentation. You had the best slides, pictures of every gadget, every different kind of Post-it note that’s available, all the different kinds of Sharpies, your Tupperware collection. You showed I think a picture of your whole closet full of all these supplies.
Larry:
We’ve talked a little bit since then about could you do this without that gadgetry? Could you do it like we’re doing now over Zoom or another online medium or there’s probably other ways to virtualize stuff? So much stuff happens nowadays via Slack or Google Docs or things like that. I know you’ve thought a little bit about this. Tell me how you think … I guess the first thing is are there certain activities that you think are more amenable to virtualization and some stuff that still maybe just has to be done in person? I guess that would be the first cut.
Tracy:
I gave this quite a lot of thought because my preference is always to get in the room with them. The reason for that preference is there’s something that you will always miss on virtual stuff. Even when we’re doing like we are right now, we do get body language come across, but the moment that you scale that up and you get 10 people in the room, let’s say, you lose the body language. You can’t quite see the people quite so close on their little screen. That element of it gets lost, and sometimes the little side conversations that people have, whispers to each other, that kind of stuff doesn’t come across virtually. Sometimes that’s where you find the real gold because that’s where you find people’s real concerns or the things that you’re going to need to unpick with them. My preference would always be to get in the room.
Tracy:
I work quite a lot with big organizations I work with. At the moment, one of our clients is a group of international schools. You have a presence in 17 different countries. We just can’t … They can’t just afford to fly everyone into one place to do this stuff. We’ve played with that a little bit in different ways. I was challenging myself in preparing for this call to think, okay, what are the activities that wouldn’t work online? One of the ones that I came up with that I didn’t talk about in my Confab presentation, but I have an activity that I’ve used a few times with people that I call the content walk.
Tracy:
The content walk is really when you’re just trying to get people to come up with creative ideas, generally more at the content marketing end of things or just getting them to think, break out of their standard thinking about creating a new piece of interesting content. On the content walk, I would have to walk around, let’s say, at the school or something like that, walk around the school and just look at something and just say, “Look at the toilet sign,” and just say, “What does that inspire me to think about? The toilet sign might inspire me to think about staying hydrated and a great piece of content around that.” It’s a ritual of coming up with content ideas.
Tracy:
I was thinking, okay, that one would not work online, but then as I was thinking about it, I was like, but no, it would because all you’ve got to have people do is just be on a conference call system, plugged into their headset, and they could still go out and about and do a content walk while on a conference call system with people, so long as they’ve got good enough connection. They can just do the content walk wherever they are. It doesn’t have to be in their own organization.
Tracy:
I look to all of these, and I went, okay, so a combination of Google collaborative tools or what used to be RealtimeBoard, which I believe is now called Miro, collaborative white-boarding. All of these tools really, really make this stuff possible for us. The difference in how you’d approach it really depends on whether you’re looking for real-time virtual collaboration and workshopping or whether you’re looking for virtual workshopping that people can do in their own time. That’s the difference then as to whether you use something like Zoom or I use appear.in a lot or whether you rely more on tools like Cycle, email. There’s nothing wrong with email or commenting.
Larry:
That just reminds me of there are some things that are probably maybe even better accomplished virtually. The benefit of an asynchronous tool like Slack or something like that is that you might have … There’s no pressure. Not that your workshops wouldn’t be high pressure, but they’re time-constrained. Whereas, all my ideas happen either as I wake up in the morning or as I’m in the shower. Having a way to capture those kinds of insights after the fact. I guess it’s not hard to imagine a hybrid situation. Maybe you have some kind of in-person or real-time thing to kick things off, but then augment it with some kind of asynchronous communication. I’m thinking of things like discovery. You can’t just do discovery. You’re constantly discovering stuff. Does that make sense?
Tracy:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, definitely. The nice thing about the virtual approach, because when we do stuff in person, we tend to gather everything on paper. The other nice thing about doing a virtual approach is you’re generally gathering these inputs and insights online or in a digital format. That does some of the follow-up work for you as well already. I’m thinking of something like … Scott Kubie is absolutely the god of content ecosystem mapping. I use this quite a lot as an approach in a lot of the workshops that I do when I’m looking at content ops within an organization. It’s really messy. I have these, you might remember them from my presentation, giant rows of architect’s paper, and I take these giant rolls of paper and they have Post-it notes and pens all over the place and they’re really, really messy maps that people get to.
Tracy:
If I want to do anything with that and I need to digitize that afterwards, that’s a lot of work for me or someone in my team to then replicate that in a digital format. Whereas if, of course we’re doing it virtually already, people are doing that work for you, and the tools don’t have to be complicated. It can be something as simple as Google slides, which actually I think is a really effective tool because you can all be there at once. That ability for it to have a permanent place that people can come back to and reflect on afterwards I think is really powerful. People will often email after a workshop and just go, I was thinking about that thing and we’re not quite sure about that. This way, it’s not set in stone.
Larry:
I love that. I totally hear you on that, but there’s something about a paper artifact too though that, maybe I’m just dating myself, that is comforting. What you just said, there’s some potentially huge efficiencies in doing things this way. It may be some work upfront and figuring out the way to mimic the collaborative creativeness that happens, that can happen more quickly and easily on paper. Have you played with any tools? I’ve been looking for years for something analogous to butcher paper and Sharpies online. Have you found anything like that?
Tracy:
The closest that I’ve come to for that is using something like Bamboo Paper on the iPad where you can freehand draw, but I’ve never used that as a collaborative tool. My hunch is that, how could you do that? You would probably do it on the iPad, your laptop or wherever. You could share the screen over Zoom or appear.in or Hangouts or whatever and then have one person freehand drawing it. I’ve never come across anything where you can have multiple people actually drawing and writing in something. The only tool is where you can have multiple people that I’ve come across doing that would be ones where you’re typing. Like I say, I used it when it was RealtimeBoard but now it’s Miro, and any other collaborative tool, whether it’s Google Docs or Google Slides.
Larry:
I guess a lot of this, you just do it. You’ll start to figure it out. Especially you’ve done these activities. You’ve been consulting, you said, for 12 years now. How has your kit grown over those 12 years? I was listing all the activities you can do. It’s, I don’t know, 15 or 20 things that you can do, everything from persona mapping and journey mapping. Were those things a dozen years ago when you first started? I think of those as coming out of the UX world. I think those are five or 10 years old in terms of content strategy. How has that set of activities grown over the years?
Tracy:
Massively. The fun for me in this is to invent. Opening speaker at ContentEd last week for us was Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist.
Larry:
Wow.
Tracy:
I completely follow Austin’s approach. I steal what other people are doing and then I build on that and I develop something out of that. I use empathy mapping a lot, but then I’ve taken empathy mapping and I now use it in my way. I combine empathy mapping with user journey mapping. That’s a really powerful combination when you bring those two things together, or the whole concept of just using user stories and journey mapping and bringing those two things together. I like to take these pieces that I see out there and then reuse them and repurpose them.
Tracy:
A framework that I really like, but I don’t use it as she has prepared it, is I’m Meghan Casey’s Mad Libs’ style to write in your content strategy statement. I love the idea of content strategy statements. I don’t quite use Meghan’s sentence because it doesn’t always quite work for me in the context that I’m working in with universities and schools. I’ll take that and butcher it and turn it into something different. I’ve got a version that’s like halfway between Meghan’s Mad Libs statement and a user story that’s like a merger of those two things together.
Tracy:
When I started like 12 years ago, personas were definitely around. They’ve been knocking around forever because marketers and advertising people have used them for a long time. A lot of the tools that we have available now, no, they weren’t available. This is the fun. We’re constantly inventing new ways of doing this. Maybe this is slightly high risk of someone who’s a consultant and is being paid to be facilitating workshops, but I will sometimes invent things in the room while I’m there and just test it out and see if it works. Maybe I shouldn’t confess that on a live online thing, but anyway.
Larry:
I think after 12 years, you’ve probably earned some improv. You probably have some instincts you can press that-
Tracy:
You know, Larry, you’ve also just said something there that is a principle that I take into a lot of workshops and improv. You’ve probably and your listeners have probably heard this a million times, but that, yes-and concept that we take from improv. Mike Powers was talking about this last week as well at ContentEd in his keynote. It’s such a powerful tool for us to have. It’s not a framework. It’s nothing. It’s just a way of being and a state of being in a workshop. The more that we can bring that yes-and, the more we open up our workshops to possibility for people or even to explore the impossible a little bit and using impossibility as a way of exploring what we might do and what might be possible to us.
Larry:
I’m loving that concept because so much, I’m just trying to … I’m running through this list of things we do and where they came from. I’m thinking of domain mapping. Have you read designing and creating content?
Tracy:
Absolutely.
Larry:
To me, that’s very familiar to me as a former information architect, but it’s not exactly like an entity relationship diagram. It’s like a slightly different thing. I would argue that’s … I wonder how they came up with that, if that was like in a workshop like you and just said, hey, wait, what if we did a map of just the conceptual domain instead of the actual database entities or something? I don’t know where exactly that came from, but-
Tracy:
I use domain mapping in workshops quite a lot because I think it’s a really, really powerful way of getting people to break out of silos or siloed thinking. I’ve had clients look at that and go, this is so much more to us … This is a way of seeing our organization that nobody has ever mapped before. That’s really powerful in so, so many different ways. That’s gone off on a slight tangent.
Larry:
No. You remind me of something. This came up earlier in the conversation. The fact that you’re a consultant, I think you’re able … That thing is probably easier as a consultant than … Have you ever done in-house content strategy work or you’ve always been a consultant?
Tracy:
I’m not sure that the … Well, I don’t think even the words content strategy work were knocking around in the UK when I became a consultant. I didn’t start calling myself a content strategist until probably around 2011, 2012, and so I was about four or five years into consultancy before I even had this label. Like so many of us where we suddenly go, oh, that’s what I am. Now I belong.
Larry:
That’s funny. That conversation comes up literally two or three times a week. Somebody will tell this story of when their boss came in and waved the wand and said, “Now you’re a content strategist,” or you wake up in the morning and discovered that you are. Anyhow. Actually, I want to see, I’m going to check time real quick here. We’ve just got a few more minutes. I want to go back to improv a little bit. One of the things I’ve attempted to do after a couple of years, because I may be one of the few people who consciously chose to identify as a content strategist and set out to re-brand myself that way. Part of that journey was putting it together in my own unique way. I studied improv for a couple years, and I think that helped me in that. Have you actually studied improv?
Tracy:
I haven’t and I really should have. I shouldn’t use the word should or shouldn’t because that’s dirty language in my world now. Anyway, because a few years ago, I was really known for doing talks around comedy and humor in content strategy. That’s how I started getting speaking slots in the states, was talking about using comedy and humor in content strategy. All these people kept coming up and saying to me, “Hey, Tracy, improv.” I’m like, “Yeah, improv, never done it.” I’m a little bit scared of it, but I use it as a principle.
Larry:
Exactly. I guess that’s what I was getting at. That set of tools and skills, and you see them come up all the time in a business context now, but that idea of the yes-and. The other thing about improv I guess, and this is what I was getting at, I’ve attempted to articulate content strategy as step-by-step activities that any anybody can do because I feel like there’s always going to be more demand for content strategy than there will be content strategists. I’m also trying to democratize things. That’s a thing I’ve attempted to do and continue to attempt to do, is to get people out there.
Larry:
I think within the discipline, we’re all making it up all the time. Actually, I need to hedge my DIY stuff with like, hey, this is not a codified list of things. This is just one way of approaching this. I guess more generically than improv, I guess what’s been your creative process as a consultant in developing these new workshops, approaches, and things like that?
Tracy:
I love your idea of there actually being a process behind anything that I do.
Larry:
You can evaluate it after the fact.
Tracy:
My team would laugh at the idea that I have a process. Sometimes I’ll invent something new because I’m bored of doing it the old way, which is not much of a process, but it certainly keeps me interested in what I’m doing. I guess for me, I keep coming back to that why-what-how framework all the time. What’s the question that we’re trying to answer here? Why are we actually trying to answer that question? Why is that going to be meaningful to us? I just play around with that and say, okay, what would a good outcome look like if that finding for us if we were to imagine what that output looks like, and then work back from that to then say, okay, so how are we going to get there?
Tracy:
I guess there is a process, but I’m a little bit all over the place in how I arrive at that. It looks a lot more structured when I actually then rack up and do the workshop. The process of arriving to it can be a little bit sporadic, and I will change things as well during sessions if I feel like something is not quite hitting the mark in the way that it needs to.
Larry:
That comes back to, you’ve mentioned several times, you’re focused on the user and the customer and you sense that in the moment. If things are going haywire or if there’s a better way you could do something in the moment, you can do that. Tracy, I just noticed we’re getting close to time. Go ahead. Yeah.
Tracy:
I was going to say we spoke a little bit about the content strategy profession there. For me, this plays to this. I spend a lot of time now speaking to people who are very apprehensive content strategists because they feel like they haven’t studied the course on content strategy yet and therefore they can’t call themselves a content strategist. I think that one of my real strengths is around that stakeholder engagement piece. I now think like we’re all content strategists. We have specialism in brackets after our name. My specialism is stakeholder engagement and understanding audience and bringing in a real sense of empathy and reading people to that. That’s really what I’m good at.
Tracy:
I think having that skill is really, really important in workshops, which is why the virtual stuff sometimes makes me a little bit nervous because you don’t get those clues quite as much. I think if we were to develop our softer skills as content strategists, that ability to read a room and to adjust and adapt to what’s going on in the room is a really, really powerful one to develop. I think that’s probably the skill that I see as being my superpower.
Larry:
I don’t know if you’ve ever done online presentations, but man, that’s the most nerve wracking thing in the world because you don’t get that. Like you were saying earlier, you can’t see the people whispering in the corner or 10 pairs of bored eyelids settling down.
Tracy:
Yeah. I pretend that I can now. I just imagine them all laughing and thinking my jokes are the funniest things in the world. You just believe in it.
Larry:
Well, there’s something to that too, like, fake it until you make it. We’re coming up on time, Tracy. I always give my guests the opportunity. Is there anything last … anything that hasn’t come up in this conversation or that’s just on your mind about content strategy or the Interwebs in general and anything last that you want to talk about?
Tracy:
It’s that piece that I was just reflecting on really. This nervousness, and it’s come up quite a few times, and I posted a blog post on my personal blog only last week about this. It’s about the labeling of a content strategist. There was that conversation on Twitter over the last week around the word design and who owns the word design and who is allowed to use the word design. It just got ridiculous. I think this plays into us calling ourselves a “content strategist.” I think about this so much at the moment.
Tracy:
I rock up at Confab year after year, and I normally come as a speaker. There’s a speakers’ drinks reception where we all get together as speakers beforehand and we will get the opportunity to share ideas and discuss. There are usually margaritas involved, which makes it even better. We all sit there and go, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do that piece.” I think we’re developing this myth in the content strategy world that there are people out there that have just got this stuff nailed. I really don’t think we have. I really want to work and do more to raise this notion of content strategy as being a massive spectrum and an industry, not a role. I’m thinking about how individuals have their specialism in there. I guess I’m not really saying anything that I didn’t already say just now about my concept of you’re a content strategist, brackets with some kind of specialism.
Larry:
That makes perfect sense. There’s all these new UX writing books coming out and a lot of attention to that. There’s that whole UX-ey world of it. There’s the whole technical documentation and help documentation world. There’s the whole enterprise … I think of Brain Traffic and Kristina and Blaine Kyllo up in Vancouver as the enterprise content strategists. I don’t know. There are all these different flavors, so that makes perfect sense to me what you just said.
Tracy:
I think it’s just really important that we acknowledge that in the industry because we can’t keep bringing people in to this industry if they think they have to be a fully formed complete content strategist because that’s basically an impossible goal. None of us are that, and none of us will ever be that. I think we need to keep opening that more so that we can keep opening the door to people actually recognizing themselves as content strategists and seeing that and having the belief in themselves that they have what it takes to go out and do the stuff that we’ve been speaking about today, whether that’s running a workshop or domain mapping or taxonomy design or any of that stuff. We need to open those doors a bit wider.
Larry:
No, I’ve had that. I think impostor syndrome comes up a lot too as much as who owns terms like design. That’s an equally common thing on Twitter I think. That should be the first. If we could somehow impart that to anybody thinking of entering the discipline, you’re not an impostor. You’re bringing your unique approach to this and you’ll find your unique slot, and it’s a field, not a role, as you said.
Tracy:
Yeah. This is a shameless plug, but I’m just in the process at the moment of designing a whole … because I also work as a coach as well. I have a coaching practice alongside my content strategy consultancy. I’m just launching a coaching program that is specifically about impostor syndrome. The reason for that is because I have now encountered so many content strategists that have this massive dose of impostor syndrome that I feel like we need to do some work on that. It’s something that I want to help people turn into a positive thing in their lives rather than seeing it as debilitating and something that stops them from putting themselves out there and being great.
Larry:
Have you talked about that at Confab yet?
Tracy:
I haven’t.
Larry:
You should mention that to Kristina.
Tracy:
Yeah. I’ve got a feeling that Sara Wachter-Boettcher did a session once on coaching content strategy, but this is more about coaching confidence and coaching belief. I actually think our success has content strategists depends on those things as much as it does our technical skills. It’s what I was saying. Our success with facilitating workshops depends on personality and that kind of stuff as much as it does … The framework and the toolkit is quite easy. It’s all in my slide deck that I provided for Confab. That’s there, but it’s the personal stuff that we bring to that that really is what makes this really powerful.
Larry:
Exactly. Well, thanks so much. This has been a great conversation, Tracy. I really enjoyed talking with you, as always.
Tracy:
Me too. I loved it. Thank you so much, Larry.
Larry:
You bet.
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