A tough job market rewards the people who can say, in one sentence, why they, and not the other thousand applicants, should get the role.

This episode turns into a live coaching session. Dr. Kyle Elliott, a tech career and executive coach, walks Ben through the exercise he uses with senior leaders across Silicon Valley: gathering feedback from people who knew you as a child and people who know you now, then finding the overlap. That overlap, in Kyle's language, is your fabulousness, the specific and provable things that set you apart from everyone else with a similar background.

The episode moves from theory into practice quickly. Kyle coaches Ben live, drawing out how Ben's own friends describe him, then pressing for the proof behind each trait: not just positive, but the specific week a deal fell through and Ben kept going anyway. That gap between a personality trait and a concrete story is where resumes and LinkedIn profiles usually fall flat, a problem Sales Engineers, Technical Consultants, and Customer Success leaders run into constantly once a market tightens.

The conversation also covers the part of hiring nobody agrees on right now: how much AI is actually reading resumes, and how much a candidate should let AI write theirs. Kyle's answer, drawn from clients inside Google, Amazon, and other large tech companies, cuts against the assumption that bots decide everything. He also unpacks his cake and frosting framework for balancing the qualifications a role demands against the individuality that gets someone remembered, and how to talk about weaknesses in an interview without hiding them or handing the interviewer a reason to say no.

Dr. Kyle Elliott, is a tech career coach and executive coach at CaffeinatedKyle.com, working with senior managers, executives, and job seekers across Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry. He is a member of the invitation-only Forbes Coaches Council and a consultant with the Myers-Briggs Company, and his coaching has been featured in Business Insider, Fortune, and the Harvard Business Review.

Show notes footer:

Listen and subscribe:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1yU6AcoCLySqE1wGn80HOT?si=649d8f8c3d8b47a3

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/tech-world-human-skills/id1674003078

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@techworldhumanskills/podcasts

Newsletter and archive: https://www.techworldhumanskills.com

Connect with Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpthoughts

Technical Storytelling for Individuals: https://www.elevatedyou.live/individuals

Technical Storytelling for Organisations: https://www.elevatedyou.live/organisations

Dr Kyle Elliott: https://caffeinatedkyle.com/freebies/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylecromerelliott/

This episode is the second of two conversations with Ron Whitson, and it picks up where part one left off. Ron returns to walk through the remaining four of his seven timeless behaviors for presales and solutions consulting professionals: show empathy, have a conversation, practice humility, and tell a story. Each behavior sounds intuitive on paper. Ron's job, and he does it well, is to show exactly how technical people get each one wrong in practice.

The empathy conversation goes further than the standard put-yourself-in-the-customer's-shoes framing. Ron draws a clear distinction between being in service to your audience and being focused on your own performance, and flags a specific mistake that catches a lot of experienced practitioners: when someone shares something and you jump in with "the same thing happened to me," you think you're building rapport. You're actually discounting them. The humility section is one of the most candid stretches of either episode. Ron talks openly about the early-career arrogance that came with knowing every piece of software on the market, and the slower realisation that telling an audience "I don't know, let me find out" can do more for your credibility than pretending you have every answer.

On storytelling, the conversation gets concrete. Ron argues for plain language over technical vocabulary, and makes the point with a tight example: one company presented storage capacity as 300 gigabytes an hour. Another described the same capability as 40 hours of content. Only one of those stays in the room after you leave. Ben adds his own angle on the Aristotle trifecta of credibility, logic, and emotional connection, and there is a brief, genuinely useful argument about English mustard.

Ron Whitson is Senior Director of Solutions Consulting at Thomson Reuters and author of A Friendly Human in Presales, a practical guide built from 28 years in the field. A signed copy and free audiobook codes are available at timelessbehaviors.com. Connect with Ron on LinkedIn.

Show notes footer:

Listen and subscribe:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1yU6AcoCLySqE1wGn80HOT?si=649d8f8c3d8b47a3

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/tech-world-human-skills/id1674003078

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@techworldhumanskills/podcasts

Newsletter and archive: https://www.techworldhumanskills.com

Connect with Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpthoughts

Technical Storytelling for Individuals: https://www.elevatedyou.live/individuals

Technical Storytelling for Organisations: https://www.elevatedyou.live/organisations

Ron Links
https://timelessbehaviors.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronwhitsonse/

Most technical professionals can fill a presentation with content. The harder problem is deciding what belongs, what order it goes in, and how to stop the audience forgetting everything before they walk out the door.

In this solo episode, Ben unpacks two frameworks he comes back to every time he coaches someone through a high-stakes presentation. One is AOREN, a five-question template that acts as a North Star before a single slide gets built. The other is his go-to presentation structure, which maps the whole session from opening to close.

AOREN stands for Audience, Objective, Remembered, Emotion, Next Steps. Ben walks through each element in detail: who is in the room and what they care about, how to hold two objectives in mind at once (yours and theirs), why narrowing down to three key messages before you start designing dramatically sharpens everything that follows, how to build emotional connection into content that is often dry and data-heavy, and how to be deliberate about what the audience should do the moment the session ends. He draws on recent coaching work with a head of data presenting an AI strategy to senior leaders, a professional navigating a difficult budget conversation, and a consultant pitching to government officials in developing countries. The same framework applies in all of them.

The second half covers the go-to structure: a distinct beginning, three key theme sections that correspond directly to the Remembered section of AOREN, and a deliberate ending. Ben breaks down what actually goes inside each of those sections. The opening framework runs from breathe-and-smile through a hook, a clear statement of benefit, and the key messages upfront, before the audience has had a chance to zone out. The closing framework runs from a verbal signal that the session is ending through to a clean next-step ask. He also explains why building in the key messages at the start is not giving away the punchline: it is the only reliable way to make sure the people who matter hear them at least once.

Listen and subscribe:

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eUGUEB7s

Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eMHTNE-3

YouTube: https://lnkd.in/esq9jDs2

Newsletter and archive: https://www.techworldhumanskills.com

Connect with Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benpthoughts

Blog Articles:

AOREN - https://www.elevatedyou.live/blog/tslAOREN

Content Flow - https://www.elevatedyou.live/blog/contentflow

Beginning - https://www.elevatedyou.live/blog/presentation-opening-win-the-audience-in-60-seconds-elevated-you

Ending - https://www.elevatedyou.live/blog/endingpresentationstrongly