Illuminate: Conversation with Patti Sanchez

Patti Sanchez is a communicator with nearly 25 years of experience leading transformative marketing initiatives for brands and causes, and the co-author of Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, and Symbols. As Chief Strategy Officer for Duarte, Inc., Patti facilitates workshops and counsels clients on how to create authentic connections with their audiences through persuasive presentations. Follow her on Twitter: @PattiSan.

In this conversation, Patti talks about Illuminate.

Geetesh: Patti, tell us more about the experience of writing Illuminate. And how do you believe that reading Illuminate will help others?

Patti: Nancy and I complement each other really well: she's the visionary and I'm the empath. She envisions where we need to be in the future, and I anticipate what it will feel like for people to go there. When we set out to write Illuminate, we combined these two passions of ours to help leaders navigate the monumental task of getting their people on board to undergo and bring about major change.

Anyone in the role of change-maker in some way knows that effectively communicating is vital to the success of a venture. After decades of helping leaders communicate well during high-stakes moments, we know the power of the spoken word. But we also know that communicating well in one moment isn't enough to drive adoption of truly bold and transformative ideas. We wrote Illuminate to fully support today's leaders at every stage of their change journey, including the good times and the bad times, the victories and the failures, the moments to be proud and the moments to be humble. Each of these moments is an opportunity to bring people closer together and embolden them to see their venture through to a successful conclusion.

Geetesh: Do you want to share an experience about an influence, a response or anything else that happened while writing this book? And how did that make a difference?

Patti: Writing Illuminate was very meta – we found that we were applying the principles and models to our own company. As we wrote the book, our company went through an internal restructuring that disrupted nearly every role in the organization, all while business was booming and our people were already stretched thin. So we imagined how our people would feel as the new future of Duarte, Inc., would play out in their daily lives. We asked ourselves what we should say, show, and do to make the transition less challenging and more exciting. In other words, we took our own medicine!

So Illuminate's readers should know that we were testing the book's ideas at the very time we were developing them, applying our models to our own business and refining our ideas. The result of all of this is a book with a methodology rooted in real life situations and examples that can guide readers through their own change communication challenges.

See Also: Patti Sanchez on Indezine

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