The Sage Sayers

You don’t get great at entrepreneurship without being an amazing storyteller. And Mark DeSantis, an entrepreneur whose robotics company was acquired by Kubota Corporation, is truly excellent. 

But not everyone embraces the opportunity of storytelling or knows they can bring these skills they use with their kids, those they love, or friends to work. Even fewer realize that storytelling might simply be framing an idea as “our experience.” 

Failure to employ this innate skill we all possess is a missed opportunity, especially for leaders, Mark muses in our insightful interview. (And don’t even get him started about his disdain for slide decks, the very death of effective persuasion—and storytelling, in his view.)

You can hear our earlier interview from January, another favorite episode here. You can find Mark DeSantis who also consults and teaches entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University here. 

Your show host, D G McCullough is a former reporter for the Guardian, the Economist, and the FT of London. She runs Hanging Rock Coaching and serves as a communications coach to leaders all over the globe. Find her on LinkedIn.  Join her active listening workshop on Maven, Listen Like a Boss. 

My guest this week is Stephen Lancaster. He’s a vocal artist, baritone, and teacher who has performed song recitals in New York, Paris, Berlin, and Gstaad. Media like Fanfare Magazine describe him as “varied in tone and alive to feeling,” and having invited him to the Sage Sayers, we fully agree. 

In our delightful conversation, Stephen, who is also Professor of the Practice at University of Notre Dame, shares his early starts into music (which began from his church). We hear of the confidence that comes from using our voice with ease and the freedom and startling joy from breakthroughs. He even teaches us activities for the days when our voice won’t cooperate, which feels very freeing indeed. 

Reach out to Prof. Stephen on LinkedIn or via his website. 

Your show host, D G McCullough is a former reporter for the Guardian, the Economist, and the FT of London. She runs Hanging Rock Coaching and serves as a communications coach to leaders all over the globe. Find her on LinkedIn. Want to listen better and ask better questions? Join her active listening workshop on Maven, Listen Like a Boss.

Listening well goes beyond silent, bobbing heads and affirming mm-hmm's. If we really want to listen deeply, we must ask powerful questions that invoke and invite reflection, eureka moments, and pause. We've not an exhaustive list here; but in this week's episode I'm offering up my top ten tips to asking questions that help create space, inspire new takes on things, and drive powerful outcomes and deals.

Your show host, D G McCullough is a former reporter for the Guardian, the Economist, and the FT of London. She runs Hanging Rock Coaching and serves as a communications coach to leaders all over the globe. Find her on LinkedIn. Want to listen better and ask better questions? Join her active listening workshop on Maven, Listen Like a Boss. 

Interrupting others before they’re done with their conversation turn brands us poorly in most situations. 

Coaching has shown me just how much I interrupt and for surprising reasons that bring pink to my cheeks. Sometimes it’s arrogance, thinking I’ve a better or grander idea. Sometimes it’s sloppy coaching and a poor habit I’ve cultivated from being super creative with too many ideas. Other times it’s excitement, a genuine want to share and contribute to the cause. 

In this week’s podcast, reading from my essay on Medium, I’m sharing the five main reasons I find we interrupt and some active listening tips and hacks to cut back on the habit lest we lose too many friends.   

Your show host, D G McCullough is a former reporter for the Guardian, the Economist, and the FT of London. She runs Hanging Rock Coaching and serves as a communications coach to leaders all over the globe. Find her on LinkedIn. Want to listen better? Join her active listening workshop on Maven, Listen Like a Boss.

Select Model Management fashion model, Gina Magro, never cared much for fashion growing up. Like your show host, she enjoyed casual clothes and exploring more than prancing. “I placed a lot of value on comfort so I could climb and move with freedom,” she recalls. 

Today (with both Select Milan, Paris, and Chicago, and ELITE NYC) she graces runways in international centers in China, Europe, and New York. And  having joined our Sage Sayers show last spring in Chicago, her home base, we brought her back to talk more on fashion, ease and flow with our appearances, but also ensuring we pull ourselves together well for the audiences that matter to us the most. 

We learn of the power in simple fixes, clothes that feel comfortable but flatter, and the need (at all times) to stay true to ourselves as we figure out our aesthetic, while also honoring how we want and need to be. Executive leadership presence, after all, ties in part to how we appear, feel, and seem. 

You can find Gina’s portfolio by clicking here and find her on LinkedIn here. You can reach out to me, your show host, for communications coaching and training via my website or Linkedin. And join me for my first live workshop via Maven Learning in April: Listen Like a Boss. 

Two weeks ago, I coached and listened in deeper ways that will stay with me forever. I felt deeply connected to my coachee. And she to me. I slowed things down. As did she. I poured in very little. In fact, I only asked questions. I mirrored back. I got deeply curious. I noticed inconsistencies between her non-verbal cues and her words, but without trying to mold, steer, nor change. 

We experienced joy, abandonment, discovery—all through me actively listening. And the entire call, all 38 minutes and 25 seconds of it, focused on what she wanted and needed, not me, and the results and clarity were huge. I never poured in one solution. She had the answers—all of them. By giving her the space, she changed how she related to her business and creativity, even her time, all from what she unearthed with me in under 40 minutes. 

Reading from my essay on Medium, I’m exploring what happened in this recorded call, one I can submit to the International Coaching Federation for my mentors to evaluate me as a hopeful, certifying Master Certified Coach. (I’m chronicling this journey in my Competency No 5 podcast. But I wanted to bring this piece of my journey, this breakthrough as an active listener and coach, to my Sage Sayers show. It ties back nicely to effective, stand-out communications.)

I’ve realized from experiencing active listening and coaching flow this deeply, and for the entirety of a call, the empowerment and connection that comes feels extraordinary. Life changing. Emotional. I want you to experience this joy with me, which can change how you relate to others and feel about yourself. And it can help us in business as well. 

You can reach out to me, your show host, on all things to do with storytelling, public speaking, branding and positioning via my website or Linkedin. And join me for my first workshop in active listening via Maven Learning this month through my Listen Like a Boss three-hour workshop. 

Few LinkedIn bios are as concise as Mark DeSantis whose title alone sits within one word: Entrepreneur. Of course, he is so much more. Mark teaches entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. And his robotics business, Bloomfield Robotics, got on the radar of Kubota Corporation, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of farm machinery, who acquired them. Mark now serves as advisor.

Our ad hoc, unscripted interview started as complete strangers, two professionals with a shared love for brevity and non-fluff communications on the social media platform that scares so many. Hearing Mark’s story inspires me. The posts he and his team created employed basic but powerful storytelling techniques: Showing how their technology changes the lives of farmers. Using the farmers’ own videos. Humanizing the people behind the scenes building the technology, in good times and bad. Resisting calls to action and anything resembling cheesy marketing. Simple, but powerful, and something you can do too.

You can reach out to Mark DeSantis on LinkedIn here. You can reach out to me, your show host, on all things to do with storytelling, public speaking, branding and positioning via my website or Linkedin. Stay tuned for courses on Maven Learning, launching February 2025. 

We've oodles of assessments available to understand our strengths; but People Development Strengths Coach Lindsay Moskovitz loves Gallup's Clifton Strengths assessment because the clarity that the report reveals feels pretty "spot on" and profound. She's even built her coaching career around helping teams harness the wisdom from the assessment to ensure they're doing the right work and with the right people.

Having taken the Clifton Strengths assessment for this interview with Lindsay, I'm agreeing 100%. My top five strengths, which include ideation, positivity, and strategy reminded me (how Clifton wrote on them) of my girlhood self. The assessment feels affirming and gives me confidence: I'm on the right path. Nothing in my career is ad hoc. I'm applying my strengths in the perfect way for me and those I serve as a coach. (And all reinventions: journalist to professor, professor to coach, and the entrepreneurship theme throughout all make perfect sense.)

In our New Year's conversation around all this, and on the cusp of Lunar New Year, the year of the wood snake (which is all about creativity, bold moves and more), Lindsay's insights feel super on pointe, hopeful, and just delightful. Super helpful for interviews and any time we're talking about ourselves and our work. 

You can find Lindsay on LinkedIn here. Reach out to me, your show host on all things to do with storytelling, overcoming public speaking fear, active listening, and reinvention via my website, or find me also on LinkedIn.




 

I once took a 20+ hour journey from New Zealand to Malaysia at age 11 with minimal assistance aside from a sibling, the occasional airline chaperone, and then my Mum from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. It felt very defining then as it feels today and brings me fodder on how and I why I grew so comfortable speaking with and being around strangers.

I’m reading this week from an essay I enjoyed writing on Medium, inspired purely by the lovely men and women who’ve asked me to coach them on the delightful (but daunting) ebbs and flows of human conversation. Special thanks to Dotun Ayeni, my friend and producer, who always lifts me up as much as he does these episodes. This one might be a favorite for 2024, despite my slightly husky voice from a recovering cold.

You can reach Dotun (and I do recommend him for your podcast production) via LinkedIn or on Twitter @dotmanly. Reach out to me, your show host on all things to do with storytelling, overcoming public speaking fear, active listening, and reinvention via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.








 

Many of us listen to eight podcasts a week and three to four million podcasts exist globally (depending on how you define them). I host two bi-weekly podcasts: the Sage Sayers and Competency No 5. Both bring me joy, help me keep my ad hoc presentation skills fresh, and allow me to interview really interesting people—giving them the spotlight.

In this interview with Coach Anita Rodriguez, I field her questions on the process of podcasting now she’s prepping to launch her own. We also hear from my dear friend and my sound producer, Dotun Ayeni, who produces my two podcasts (among many others for his other clients) on what we ought to keep in mind as newbie podcasters.

Listener note: I misspoke. My downloads (per Buzzsprout.com data) are far higher than I thought. Total downloads across two podcasts with almost zero marketing sits around 10,000. That I did not know this data speaks to my scrappiness, which I hope you will forgive!

You can reach Dotun (and I do recommend him for your podcast production —very highly) via LinkedIn or on Twitter @dotmanly. Reach out to Coach Anita Rodriguez via her website and via LinkedIn. Reach out to me, your show host on all things to do with storytelling, overcoming public speaking fear, active listening, and reinvention via my website, or find me also on Linkedin.