Mary Van Dorn

I started my career in mortgage banking, working in sales and teaching night school for 7 years in the evenings after work. Teaching mortgage banking, which is a dry subject with lots of numbers and conversion ratios, taught me how to keep people engaged after they'd already worked 8 hours during the day. I had to find a way to keep them awake and entertained while they learned. I discovered that my superpower was getting out in front of large audiences of potential clients and referral partners, where I could communicate my skills and knowledge best. That's how I built my business and became known as an authority in the industry because of the information I was sharing on stages. Colleagues started asking me for help with their presentations, which led me to start coaching people on the side. I've been getting paid professionally for coaching for 12 years, going on 13 years now, though I was helping people within companies before that. I absolutely love what I do. Today I work with clients one-on-one, do workshops, and hold online classes. I've engaged a VA and use AI to help me, though I don't use AI to write presentations. I work with speakers who want to use AI effectively without having AI write their speech in a voice that doesn't sound like them. I just launched the Cardiseph Speaking Institute tomorrow, which is spelled C-A-R-D-I-C-E-P-H, coming from the Latin root words cardi meaning heart and ceph meaning head, because I believe that when great presenters and leaders lead with their heart and their head, that's when the human connection comes together and we're most powerful. I started the Institute because there were a lot of people who needed my skills but might not be at that C level or upper management who can afford it, but they need those skills to advance in their careers and become better presenters no matter how big a stage they're on, even if it's a room of 4. About a month ago I published a book on Amazon called A Speaker's Private Archive. It came about because when I work with speakers, one of their biggest challenges is that they say they don't have any stories. I would have them journal throughout the day, and then we'd circle back to see which stories we could use. The journal has 40 prompts to help people think of stories, and at the back there's a way to index all the stories by category like humor, failure, sadness, inspiration, so when you're sitting down to write a talk and need something inspirational or humorous, you can look under those categories and find all the stories you've marked. When you can weave your own story into any kind of presentation, there's a spot that's like home, it's comfort, you feel safe there, and it builds you up to then present the point you're trying to make.