Workshops & Training
Give your team the method, not just the message
A tested message solves today's problem. A team that knows how to build tested messages solves next year's too. Michael's workshops transfer the discipline of credible language to the people who write yours every day.
What happens in the room
These are not lecture days. Every workshop is built around your organization's real material — the sales deck that isn't converting, the FAQ that generates more calls than it prevents, the change announcement that landed badly last quarter. Michael opens with the research foundations: how skeptical audiences process corporate language, why well-intended phrases backfire, and the four principles that consistently separate credible messages from ignored ones. Then the room goes to work.
Participants rewrite their own messages in small groups, pressure-test each other's drafts playing the role of the skeptic, and compare their instincts against dial-test data from similar language. By mid-afternoon the wall is covered with before-and-after pairs, and the difference between them is visible to everyone — including the executives who approved the "before" versions.
Core curriculum
- The skeptic's ear. How modern audiences actually process claims, credentials, numbers, and reassurance — and the trigger words that switch listening off.
- The four principles in practice. Personal, plainspoken, positive, plausible: what each one means at the sentence level, with drills that build the reflex.
- Answering hard questions. A repeatable structure for questions about price, failures, risk, and change that keeps credibility intact under pressure.
- The editing pass. A practical checklist teams can run on any draft in ten minutes to catch jargon, hedges, overclaims, and buried leads before the audience does.
Formats
- Full-day team workshop — up to 25 participants, the complete curriculum applied to your live material.
- Half-day executive intensive — for leadership teams preparing for a specific moment: a transformation, a roadshow, a difficult season.
- Workshop series — three to six sessions over a quarter for communications, marketing, or sales organizations that want the method to stick, with assignments between sessions and coaching on real work product.
- Train-the-trainer — for large organizations that want internal champions equipped to carry the principles forward.
Who benefits most
The workshops were designed for the people who create high-stakes language at scale: corporate communications and PR teams, marketing and brand groups, sales enablement, investor relations, HR leaders managing change, and customer-facing teams in regulated industries. Mixed-function cohorts often produce the best sessions, because the sales team hears what legal worries about — and vice versa — for the first time.
What participants leave with
Beyond the rebuilt messages themselves, every participant takes home the working toolkit: the ten-minute editing checklist, a bank of tested alternatives to the most common trigger phrases in your industry, and a scoring rubric for evaluating drafts the way an audience would. Sponsoring leaders receive a short debrief memo summarizing the strongest rewrites from the session and the recurring language habits worth addressing across the organization.
"Six months later, people still ask 'would that survive the dial test?' in message reviews. The vocabulary stuck." Director of Communications, technology company
Bring the workshop in-house
Share your team's size, the material you'd want to work on, and your timing. Michael will recommend a format and send a detailed session outline within two business days.