Paul Marks

Paul Marks Speaking Topics

• Leadership Development & Humor: Can they Coexist in a Corporation?

  In a presentation that mixes corporate culture, improv, science, and humor, Paul give actionable tips to nurture your leadership style. Leaders today need business tools to help strengthen quick-thinking skills, enhance active listening, improve adaptability during unforeseen circumstances, and most importantly, use a sense of humor to encourage people to be creative, take risks, and nurture customer and coworker relationships.

  Paul's leadership development workshops teach all of these skills by nurturing the right side of the brain in a refreshingly candid course. By fusing science, improv, creativity, and humor together, leaders and teams leave the event with exercises and takeaways that can be practiced at home instantly. Whether your interest is in strengthening communication skills, enhancing empathy, adding humor into your style, or a multitude of other nuances within the scope of leadership, Paul's workshop can help on both a professional and personal level.

  Areas of potential growth:

  • Make genuine connections and build rapport with colleagues and the teams you lead
  • Enhance quick thinking skills
  • Learn to pivot in the moment and make clear and confident decisions seamlessly
  • Read body language and adjust your meeting accordingly
  • Learn to present with confidence and passion
  • Add humor to your meeting to make it memorable
  • Become a great storyteller
  • Improve active listening skills

• Team Building Workshop that asks "Whatever Happened To Recess"?

  "How corporate 'play time' can lead to innovative solutions, better team development, and improve the overall happiness within an organization". Team building is an essential service for businesses looking to achieve success. With our team building activities, we focus on developing the right side of the brain to enhance skills such as empathy, creativity, humor, and acceptance of ideas, while also recognizing the different personalities of each individual. Through this, we create an environment of collaboration, trust, and cohesion that can be applied to the workplace.

  In addition, our goal is to break down the silo effect, enhance camaraderie, help people to get to know each other in a way that makes a deeper connection, improve confidence, and learn to laugh and have fun.

  Once the team building exercises have been practiced for a few weeks, the temporary neural connections become stronger and more permanent, making skills such as quick thinking, humor, and empathy much easier to utilize. Our goal is to make the next water cooler conversation more about bonding as a group, thinking as a team member, and incorporating the philosophy that not only is the sum greater than its parts, it can be a lot more fun too.

  LEARNING OUTCOMES

  • Learn to nurture the right side of the brain to help with creativity

  • Develop a new skill set to improve quick thinking skills

  • Improve public speaking skills and self-confidence with exercises that have been taught at Stanford University

  • Enhance active listening skills through observation and interaction

  • Leave the workshop with a list of exercises to practice at your leisure to help strengthen right brain thinking

  "I serve on the board and the experience with your workshop was one of the best moments in my year". • Hank Talmadge, Ronald McDonald House.

Presenting With Ease: Making a Good Speech Great

Paul's program isn’t just about what we see when a person gives a presentation. To help with confidence, Paul delves into scientific studies and exercises to help people strengthen neural connections to aid with quick thinking skills, adaptability, memory recall, and alleviate stress, allowing their true personalities to shine at the podium. This high energy, highly interactive workshop is like a boot camp for the brain. All of this is done in a way that is refreshingly honest and thought-provoking.

What learning outcomes can folks expect?

• Top of the list is confidence. Obviously, practicing a speech and knowledge of the subject is very helpful, but Paul uses a unique set of subcategories to help calm anxiety and let a speaker’s true personality come out on stage.

• The first subcategory is quick thinking skills. Paul uses an assortment of improv exercises which, when practiced again and again, help develop a myelin sheath around specific neural connections, and over time allows a speaker to go off script and adlib with ease, making the whole experience better for the audience

• The second broad subcategory teaches a myriad of skills such as eye contact, tone of a speech, speed of one’s delivery, and the ability to properly read the body language in the room.

• The third subcategory is a section unto itself: active listening. Through observation and interaction folks begin to realize the importance of the Socratic Method as an incredibly effective tool for participation and listening.

• The final subcategory is energy and flow. Everyone will learn how to increase their energy and vitality on stage. They will learn how to incorporate both enthusiasm and silence in a proper flow. They will grasp and utilize the concept of not talking “at” the audience but with the audience and providing table conversations when a speech calls for it.

“We are still talking about your workshop a year later. We’d love for you to do a 6 city ‘tour’ for us.” -Jody Weeks, Wells Fargo Bank