I was on call with a prospective client whose friend told her that a coach would teach her how to breathe.

I do teach my clients a couple quick breathing techniques to help you calm your nerves.

But these are 10 other things you’ll learn:

☑ How to advocate for yourself.

☑ How to tell stories that connect with your audience.

☑ How to get your point across without rambling.

☑ How to deliver presentations that engage.

☑ How to introduce yourself to a room full of strangers.

☑ How to give constructive feedback without stepping on toes.

☑ How to set boundaries with your clients.

☑ How to make decisions without flipflopping for days.

☑ How to recover from stumbles when presentations don’t go as planned.

☑ How to build consensus with stakeholders and your team.

What would change if you could do these things?

Book a time to talk to me and find out.

I have coaching spots available in June.

Hi, I’m Madeline.

I help you develop quiet authority and articulate your vision in clear, concise messaging.

My clients have called me a lifesaver, career therapist and secret weapon. I can take all the ideas in your head and put them together in a way that makes sense and tastes good to other people.

Book a free discovery call.

If you want to change your experience, change your thinking.

It’s like moving the furniture.

You can have all the same pieces but if you move the couch, the entire room looks different.

That’s what it’s like when you change the thoughts in your head.

Your entire perspective shifts and everything looks different.

That’s why mindset is one of the 5 foundational skills in the C.A.L.M.S. framework to communication.

And that’s why I moved my furniture 5 times during the pandemic. (You can read about it my adventures in rearranging here).

You can have all the strategies in the world, but if you don’t change your thinking, not much else is going to change.

It’s the reason so many public speaking programs miss the mark.

It’s the reason you can have the perfect elevator pitch but you don't make any connections.

It's the reason you can be well rehearsed but your presentation falls flat.

Want to learn more about the C.A.L.M.S. Framework to communication? Read my article in Forbes.

Hi, I’m Madeline.

I help quiet leaders speak up in a world of loud talkers and I help organizations articulate their vision in clear, concise messaging.

I've been called a lifesaver and a secret weapon and my superpower is listening. I can take all the ideas in your head and put them together in a way that makes sense and tastes good to other people.

Get in touch at madeline@madelineschwarz.com

I’m reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and he talks about the difference between taking action and being in motion.

Planning, strategizing and learning put us in motion. They feel productive without actually moving us closer to our goal.

Taking action delivers results.

For example, watching TED talks, reading articles about public speaking, rewriting the same slide over and over again are all in motion.

These are not the things to spend your time on.

Taking action is:

• Giving a talk

• Practicing for a few friends and soliciting feedback

• Raising your hand to lead the presentation before you feel ready

Want help moving into action?

I teach my clients 3 things:

1. How to get crystal clear on your message and articulate it in a way your audience cares

2. How to present your work with confidence in any situation

3. How to apply a growth mindset and change how you feel about communication forever

If you’ve been keeping yourself busy with lots of motion, and you’re ready to take action, let’s talk.

Here’s what my client Mimi said:

"Working with Madeline increased my public speaking and presentation skills significantly. Using her tools, I got through a Today Show interview with minimal nerves, have spoken on panels, and presented to an audience of 500 people."

I would love to talk to you. Grab a time for a free discovery call.

There's no better time to take action.

Hi, I’m Madeline.

I help quiet leaders speak up in a world of loud talkers and I help organizations articulate their vision in clear, concise messaging.

I've been called a lifesaver and a secret weapon and my superpower is listening. I can take all the ideas in your head and put them together in a way that makes sense and tastes good to other people.

Get in touch at madeline@madelineschwarz.com

Water is the place I feel calm - beach, bathtub, lake, pool. I love them all.

I’m working remotely in Morgantown, WV this summer (my home state, if not my hometown) and we’re staying 7 minutes from the town pool. 

It’s reminiscent of my childhood, complete with teenage lifeguards and bad pop music, but this time I’m old enough to stay in for adult swim.

There’s something methodical and meditative about swimming laps.  The back and forth is calming and familiar. 

It requires just enough concentration and coordination to occupy the brain and take my mind off everything else.

Teaching my 7 year old how to swim is another story. 

What feels natural and fluid to me is complicated and chaotic for a beginner.

There’s a lot to coordinate.

Much like communication, it takes practice.

In the water, your arms and legs need to work together with your breathing to keep you afloat.

To communicate, your mouth and mind need to work together to get your message across. 

Sometimes it’s fluid and sometimes its flailing limbs and mouthfuls of water.

Sometimes everything is working and sometimes you stray out of your lane and crash into the side of the pool.

Both swimming and communication work better when you have a strategy and techniques to make it easier. 

But you have to get in the water.

No amount of reading or studying will help unless you get wet.

Having a coach and strategic advisor is like having a life vest, swim coach, and goggles all wrapped up in one:

• They see where you’re going when your vision is obscured.

• They throw you a life preserver when you feel like you’re drowning.

• They cheer your progress when you’re too close to see it.

Want to dip your toes in the water? 

Schedule a consult and lets talk about working together.

Hi, I’m Madeline.

I help quiet leaders speak up in a world of loud talkers and I help organizations articulate their vision in clear, concise messaging.

I've been called a lifesaver and a secret weapon and my superpower is listening. I can take all the ideas in your head and put them together in a way that makes sense and tastes good to other people.

Get in touch at madeline@madelineschwarz.com

The key to success is failing. 

There’s tons written about this, countless TED talks, thousands of podcasts, but this was simply not a concept I grew up with. 

I had no model for healthy failure as a child.

Anything less than an A required explaining in my family.

It didn’t help that I had a perfect older sister.

I was a good student but my sister was an exceptional student.

When I got to high school, her reputation preceded me. I had big shoes to fill, literally and figuratively. In middle school, a teacher once asked if I was wearing canoes on my feet. (I’ve worn size 9 since the 7th grade but more on canoes another time.)

My sister and I did all the same stuff and I worked hard to live up to everyone else’s expectations.

I got straight A’s my first semester in college, with the exception of organic chemistry which I nearly failed.

My dad asked what happened when he saw the C-. 

I screamed back that perhaps he had failed to notice I got A’s in everything else.

I studied and suffered my way through college, feeling out of my league, worried that small town smarts were not going to cut it in the big league.

I didn’t know how to fail and certainly didn’t know how to rebound.

This led to a paralyzing fear of failure and an unhealthy striving for perfectionism.

I avoided things I didn’t know how to do. I sat out activities that might have been fun or silly for fear of looking stupid. I kept quiet when I had things to say because I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

You’ve probably seen 6000 (or 60,000) posts on social media about recovered perfectionists. None of them are mine. The thoughts we’ve practiced for 10 or 20 years don’t disappear overnight.

It’s a constant practice.

As a parent, I’m doing my best to teach my 7-year old that failure is part of the process. Instilling him with a healthy relationship to failure means I have to talk about my own failures.

I listened to a podcast where Todd Herman shared the 4 questions he asks his kids at dinner every night to build resilient humans.

Here's the one that stood out:

Did you have any good fails today?

Todd says a day without fails is a waste of a day. 

This podcast completely changed our dinner conversation and gave us a way to normalize failure. (I recommend it regardless of whether you have children.)

It’s given me a way to laugh about things that are uncomfortable, like the time I posted about an event and invited thousands of people to a workshop on Networking for Inroverts.

I don’t think I would have noticed my typo except for the stranger who publicly commented IN ALL CAPS that I should fix my spelling error.

My first thought was: How mortifying, I better delete the post ASAP.

My second thought was: Lots of people commented and shared and probably didn’t notice.

My third thought was: You don’t need to be a perfect speller to be a great networker.

I chose to leave the post up. It was uncomfortable but I'm a work in progress.

What about you?

What are your good fails?

I’d love to hear them.

Hi, I’m Madeline.

I help quiet leaders speak up in a world of loud talkers and I help organizations articulate their vision in clear, concise messaging.

I've been called a lifesaver and a secret weapon and my superpower is listening. I can take all the ideas in your head and put them together in a way that makes sense and tastes good to other people.

Get in touch at madeline@madelineschwarz.com

A couple years ago, I went to an Ellevate event where all the name tags had conversation starters. Mine said The title of my book is:

When I approached a small group of people, someone asked “What’s the title of your book?” I answered Small Town Girl in the Big City.

This started a long conversation about my childhood growing up on a farm in rural West Virginia and how I came to live in Brooklyn. 

I’m sure we eventually talked about our professional lives but it wasn’t what sparked the connection. And it wasn’t the reason we kept in touch.

How many times have you answered the question “What do you do?”

How many times did it kick off a really great conversation where you felt totally at ease?

I read a Forbes article recently where the author asked when’s the last time you delivered a 30 second elevator pitch and got offered a job? Probably never.

What do you do is my least favorite question because it asks multi-dimensional people to define themselves in one dimension.

It puts you on the defensive trying to sum up 10, 20 or 30 years of professional expertise in a 30 second pitch.

On the flip side, it makes the other person feel like they’re being sold to when they just came for the wine and cheese.

Before you kick off another conversation with What do you do consider this:

I recently surveyed 71 introverted professionals about how they're thinking about, feeling about and experiencing networking 1 year into the pandemic.

30% of respondents have a conversation problem. They struggle with what to say, how to introduce themselves, and how to keep conversations going once they've started.

46% have a mindset problem. They're in their heads, worried about being interesting and anxious about coming across as contrived and transactional.

These are fixable problems.

There are much better ways to start conversations and build genuine relationships.

Join me on Wednesday April 7th for a workshop on Networking for Introverts.

I will share tips and strategies to build your confidence, sharpen your skills, and make better connections. Details are here.

And if you can’t make the workshop, check out my interview on the Spitfire podcast? We talk trends from the survey and tips to move past the awkward and start networking with ease.

Hi, I’m Madeline.

I help quiet leaders speak up in a world of loud talkers and I help organizations articulate their vision in clear, concise messaging.

I've been called a lifesaver and a secret weapon and my superpower is listening. I can take all the ideas in your head and put them together in a way that makes sense and tastes good to other people.

Get in touch at madeline@madelineschwarz.com

TWO PEOPLE replied to my Networking for Introverts survey that they'd rather get a root canal than go to a networking event. 

I went to the dictionary to see what Miriam Webster has to say about networking and they define it as:

the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions

specifically: the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business

Sounds pretty stale and transactional.

Doesn't exactly make you run toward the next zoom happy hour.

But we can redefine networking.

I see networking as an opportunity to connect with interesting people and make new friends.

The number one reason people avoid networking, public speaking, or difficult conversations is they think it’s going to be painful. So painful they’d rather get a root canal without novocaine (a respondent’s actual words).

My mission is to make communication more fun.

Fun is the missing ingredient. When it’s fun, you can inspire other people, share your story, lead your team and make change in the world.

What kind of change?

Yesterday a client shared she aced 7 rounds of interviews and accepted a new job offer. She got a title promotion and shattered her own glass ceiling.

Another client gave her best presentation ever and said she felt more confident than ever in her ability to do her job.

I give people tools to not only speak differently, but think differently and it changes everything.

Don’t wait until you need a new job or want to sell something to start networking.

Start now.

I can help you get clear on your message, connect with any audience and change your mindset so you never think about communication the same way. Let’s talk. 

Hi, I’m Madeline.

I help quiet leaders and organizations communicate their story and invite audiences into their world.

I use my signature process to make communication fun and transform how you communicate at work, at home, in life.

Get in touch at madeline@madelineschwarz.com