Story Coaching for Performance and Business

Now that we’re all meeting on Zoom, you’re never more than 30 seconds away from someone opening another browser tab and shopping on Amazon while you’re trying to get your point across.

If you give a great PowerPoint presentation, people will remember the presentation.
If you tell a great joke, people will remember the joke.
If you tell a great story, people will remember YOU.

I offer storytelling coaching and workshops via FaceTime and Zoom to anyone that speaks English, anywhere in the world.

I can teach you how to develop funny, relatable stories for the stage/performance, and how to make a professional presentation or pitch dynamic and unforgettable. If your public speaking skills are nascent or rusty I can coach you into confidence, quick.

Hit these links to see what I can offer you:

ABOUT ME
STORYTELLING FOR PERFORMANCE
STORYTELLING FOR BUSINESS
TESTIMONIALS
BIO 
CONTACT ME

There are a lot of "storytelling coaches" out there, "brand story experts," etc. Most of them got up at the Moth twice and now spend more time on their Instagram profiles than their writing and performing.

If you want to sound like an inspirational yoga mat, I'm not your guy.

If you want someone who's spent twelve years getting New Yorkers to stop texting and start laughing, read on.

There are maybe ten storytelling coaches in the United States who reliably and consistently get onstage and put in the work to grow as writers and performers themselves. Five of those people took my classes.

Look, it's only bragging if you can't back up the claim. You can check out my albums of standup and storytelling here and see video of a live performance here:

I offer 1:1 coaching and group workshops for people looking to tighten their storytelling skills in the workplace. You could work in highly technical field and have a difficult time keeping an audience's interest because every detail feels relevant but you get lost in a spiral every time you present at work. Or maybe your team wastes time trying to communicate internally because it’s hard to get buy-in when nobody involved knows how to say what they really mean.

I can teach you how to talk like a real, actual person who knows that the words "leverage," "impact," "brand story" and "visionary" are corporate camouflage for people that don't know what they're talking about.

I can teach you clean, crisp storytelling but I can also scrub the jargon out of your mouth like an angry nun with a bar of soap.

If you know what you're talking about but aren't sure how to talk about it, I'm in your corner.
This is ideal for people who want to develop a one-time story like a keynote presentation, wedding toast or a pitch - or take an anecdote and flesh it out into something more satisfying to an audience than 5-10 minutes of jokes.

I can work with a single person to develop a single story, or offer ongoing coaching to strengthen skills - and also lead group workshops to make sure your whole team grows together. Every organization is different, and I’ll work with you ahead of time to ensure that we address your particular challenges.

Also, there's this: We all know that dude at work (it's always a dude) who took an improv class once and loves 'Cards Against Humanity' too much and says "geez, you can't say anything fun anymore without getting canceled" even though nobody was even talking about that in the first place.

He's wrong about this, of course. A well-placed laugh in a talk or presentation keeps the audience engaged like nothing else. But it can be intimidating to make jokes in a professional environment when you're new at it, and nobody wants to earn a trip to HR. And nobody wants to be that dude either.

I can teach you to write and deliver jokes and funny stories that will keep your workplace audience engaged and HR out of your business. Or I can just write them for you. All humor involves risk but I can teach you how to mitigate that risk and reap those sweet rewards.

Contact me here to inquire about 1:1 coaching or a workshop tailored to your business' needs.

If you're a comedian who wants to develop stories are more memorable than 5-10 minutes of setups and punchlines, I'm your guy.

If you're a storyteller who isn't sure if the audience is silent because they're thoughtfully engaged or because they're totally bored, I can show you how to maximize your laughs.

My performing clients have appeared on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon," "The Daily Show," Comedy Central's "This Is Not Happening," and "Ramy" on Hulu. I work with performers at all levels, from complete beginners to nationally touring headliners.

PRIVATE COACHING
One-on-one coaching can be focused, efficient, and conform to meet your needs completely. Maybe the story you want to develop doesn't map specifically to a group workshop. Or you want to keep new material under wraps for a little while so you can drop it hard and leave a crater later. It could be that you know you want to make something awful into something inspiring and funny and you're understandably shy.

Maybe your story is bigger than you thought and you're trying to make sense of it and the jokes are good but man, it's dragging in between the punchlines.

Contact me to learn more about 1:1 coaching for story performance.

GROUP WORKSHOPS You learn a lot when you share with other people. Getting notes from a group, sharing your input and developing a shared language for a story fast-forwards your development - and at a lonely, difficult time it's a lot of fun!

Join my mailing list here and you'll get announcements as soon as the next round of workshops is open. Now that the world is learning online, you can take the class from London, Australia and McMurdo Station if you want!

Contact me to learn more about upcoming workshops.

I’d been performing stand-up for a few years, and was starting to get into storytelling. I felt comfortable with the stage aspect but I wanted more help with the structure. I wanted to know how to consistently put together the funny moments in my life into story format. Jeff taught me the value in, and the process of, finding what’s driving a story forward, and how to use that information to help you create a well-crafted tale. But more so, he gave me the tools to be able to do that with any of the funny things that happen in my life.

Want to win a Moth, tighten a closing bit for your set, or just be more entertaining at your dinner parties? You need to see Jeff.

Ro Reddick, New York University

We brought Jeff in to lead a series of storytelling workshops for the 12 students in our Creative Career Design Fellowship. Our goal with the workshops was to build the student’s communication skills so that they would become better at sharing their strengths and differentiating qualities as artists.

Jeff was able to successfully translate that goal into an actionable lesson plan built around his framework for storytelling. The curriculum balanced lecture, group work, and 1:1 feedback that allowed each student to apply their learnings and receive developmental feedback.

We found Jeff to be professional, open, and communicative during the planning process, incorporating our feedback into his curriculum. The students loved his workshops. In the end of program assessment, the students rated Jeff’s work as one of the top three most valuable activities during the semester long program.

The workshops were engaging, well structured -- and fun! We wouldn’t hesitate to bring Jeff back in the future.

When I started in Jeff's class I really wanted to stop being so serious, get out of my own head as a storyteller, and bring joy into my storytelling. I got really valuable input on what makes a story a great story, which will be useful for all storytellers, seasoned or not, and real tips on how to bring humor and lightness into my stories. I felt the difference immediately in the story I ended up telling for the showcase.

Two months after taking Jeff's class, I used part of the story we workshopped in class for another story for a special showcase with The Moth and which ended up on the Moth Radio Hour on NPR!

Andie Grace, Burning Man Project
Jeff and I worked together at the beginning of my new role in storytelling and content production at Burning Man. Now that the coronavirus has ended mass gathering events, stories are more important than ever to keep our cultural community connected around the world.

I've been a writer and communications professional for more than 20 years, but in just one session, Jeff gave me an entirely new framework for thinking about storytelling strategically, in the specific context of our nonprofit's needs.

I'd always thought that one must have a natural talent for storytelling to be good at it, but Jeff's theories and approach accelerated my understanding of the structure of a successful story, and how storytelling strategy can be implemented for a culture-bearing organization such as ours.

I'd recommend Jeff's trainings for any business or individual seeking deeper awareness of how a well-told story moves and motivates the listener into understanding—and action.

I'm a standup comic and storyteller whose stories have appeared on Risk!, This American Life, The Moth‘s podcast, PBS’ Stories From the Stage and in written form in The Paris Review Daily and Newsweek.

I host and co-produce “The Reluctant Phoenix” podcast, available on iTunes and everywhere else.

My latest album of standup and storytelling is called "Why You Should Be Happy" and was released on May 5, 2020, by Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla Records and is available wherever the very finest digital music and comedy is sold. My previous album, And I Am Not Lying, was released in June 2017 and reached #1 on the iTunes comedy charts. It was pressed onto pink vinyl and is distributed by Dischord Records.

My performing clients have appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Comedy Central's "This Is Not Happening," and "Ramy" on Hulu.

Business and educational clients include NYU and Burning Man.

Prior to my work as a performer and story coach, I worked for five years as the Director of Digital Communications for Time Warner Cable where I developed crisis communications, developed overall story and messaging arcs and edited/developed the official company blog.