FAQs

Both.I can meet people in person if they are in the Kansas City area. I moved all my instruction online in 2020 and have kept meeting people by Zoom ever since. There are advantages to meeting online: 1) when we both wear headphones and use a mic, we each get a clear signal of each other's speech,2) you can see yourself in the webcam view so you have continuous feedback of how you are moving your lips and jaw, 3) it's easy to record our sessions if you'd like to,4) there's no travel time.

There is no fee for materials. I provide all of the teaching materials with practice exercises. Then, we apply that skill to your own material such as vocabulary common to your profession or major, presentations and decks you have used in the past or new ones coming up, and any non-confidential material from your work. I want everything we practice to be immediately applied to the language and speaking situations you have in your life.

These are the stages that everyone progresses through in the coaching process:Speech EvaluationWith the guidance of a speech evaluation, you will know what to focus on and that brings anything that was unknown into the known. - a move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence = Now you know what to work on.Lessons and PracticeThe next step is to progress to having control over those features when you concentrate on it.- a move from conscious incompetence to conscious competence = Now you can be successful at it when you try.Self-Directed Practice and ApplicationThe progress to the final stage takes more time and more practice to reach a level of automaticity. - a move from conscious competence to unconscious competence. = Now you are consistently successful at producing that speech feature.I track progress in each speech feature in these ways:Progress on awareness, control, and self-analysisControl of speech in structured to unstructured situationsPsychological stages of learning a new skillEveryone progress at different rates on different speech features not because some are more difficult than others, but because each person has unique experience and practice with different aspects of speaking skills.For more details, download the pdf.

The speech evaluation can be taken on its own without lessons. Sometimes people just want to know what is making the biggest impact on how easy they are to understand. Private Individual Coaching A Focus Session is a one-time meeting to prepare for a speaking situation such as an interview, presentation, or anything you want to practice. A Cycle of three months includes the speech evaluation, weekly one-to-one meetings, practice recordings, and evaluation updates after every four sessions. Monthly Membership, "The Speech Habit"Email-Only membership - A weekly email with practice exercises and audio examples. Full membership - A weekly email, a one-to-one coaching session, feedback for practice recordings, access to all online materials, downloads, and mini-courses.