What We Do at Ignite

I’d recommend Kat and Kevin, because they both really, really want you to be effective communicators. They really want you to bring out the best that you’ve got. What I love about both of them is that they’re very authentic people. That’s important so that you connect with them and trust them to bring out the authentic you.

They can work with you to define your needs and what you’re trying to achieve and not come at it from a prescriptive way… they have a process, they put you through, that’ll get you to where you need to be as an individual or for your organization.

The things that I learned from the breathing exercises that Kevin taught, every one is something that I use to this day, even as a musician and a songwriter when I sing. The same thing applies to performance. Anything to do with your voice is performance, so making sure you’re breathing with your diagram, using your natural voice. Not trying to talk in a deep voice, because people will listen to that and they know it’s fake.

They’ve (Ignite’s) compiled all this knowledge, combined with their own experience, allowing them teach in such a way that they can cater to really anyone, because performance changes so much from individual to individual.

Qualities of a good performer, it’s gotta be confidence. It’s gotta be charisma. You have to have a certain amount of belief in what you’re saying… but how do you reach in and be authentic? You got to warm yourself up… to get your mind and your soul ready to perform… at first I thought they were talking some hippie stuff. But your body needs training just like your voice… I’ve never thought about it like an instrument. You gotta warm it up… Kevin and Kat, are crystal clear about it.

They have excellent skills to bring out the best in us, to help us learn how to communicate and talk with each other, to build bridges into different communities, starting with heart and moving to head, and they know how to reach hearts first and then get us to think about what we’ve done.

It had a lot of impact that I took forward in my career. Learning how to share an idea with somebody is so special, because so many people are afraid to speak up, so many people are afraid to share their ideas and their thoughts.  If you can confidently express yourself, and confidently share or convince or train, you are ultimately going to be really successful in anything you do. Whether it’s giving a ted talk or it’s presenting to a board room or it’s training a group of servers about a wine on a wine list. If you can if you can tell the story about that winery, if you can tell that story about that territory and share that sense of place and get people excited about that, then you have buy-in, and when you have buy-in emotionally, you often have buy-in financially.

Working with Kat and Kevin was really unique, because they’ve done this for a long time. They know what they’re doing. They’ve had different personalities coming through their doors throughout the years, so they were able to develop some really interesting and very particular plans and setups for me personally, as well as all the other people that I worked with. They did a really good job in articulating the differences between me, somebody else and the other guy two doors down. As a result I think it really helped out my own personal communication skills, because now it’s my full-time job to be able to communicate and storytell in this kind of way.  A lot of that foundation was built upon what we learned with Kat and Kevin.

I would recommend Kat and Kevin, because they’ve both been teaching for a long time. And there’s really nowhere I can go in media without running into someone who has had Kevin or Kat mentor them or have touched them somehow or inspired them in the past.