Well Said

Clothing Allows You to Communicate Before You Say a Word | Ryan Wood, Apparel Designer

Ryan Wood spent sixteen years deciding what hangs on the rack at Urban Outfitters and The North Face, and he'll tell you plainly that a lot of it ended up in a landfill.

The Checklist That Tells the Surgeon to Ask for Help | Dr. Robert Cho

Dr. Robert Cho operates on children's spines with Pearl Jam playing. When the monitors show the electrical signals between a child's brain and spinal cord starting to dro

How to Pitch Without Trying to Win the Room | Steve M. Cullen @ All Together Now

Steve M. Cullen has presented roughly 200 times a year for two decades. He'll tell you privately that a pitch is warfare, that his mother's retirement is riding on it, th

The Mediator Who's Spent 30+ Years Finding the Real Fight Behind the Lawsuit | Angela Reddock-Wright

For 30+ years, Angela Reddock-Wright has sat between people who cannot stand each other. First as an employment litigator, then as a workplace investigator during the rec

The Secret Behind Writing a Newsletter to 15,000 People Every Day for 5 Years | Ryan Weiss

Ryan Weiss learned the most important thing he knows about communication while dangling from a 40-foot rope in a monkey costume. He was a swing in Wicked, handed a track

How to Make Anyone Feel Safe in the First 60 Seconds with Naz Perez

For 14 years, Naz Perez has done the near-impossible: getting the most famous, most media-trained people on earth to drop the script. She landed Will Smith's first sit-do

Why Your "Safe" Corporate Job Is the Riskier Bet | A Q&A with Pia and Kelly

For over a year, former colleagues have been sending Kelly and Pia the same questions. How did you actually start Cuore? How did you land your first client? How did you k

How This Founder "Brainwashed" Himself Into Confidence | Shadi Bakour @ PATH

Before Shadi Bakour ever framed a message for a customer, he engineered the one he told himself. Driving Uber and waiting tables through three years of making $0, he list

The Professor Who Learned Why Nouns vs. Verbs Can Reinvent How We Communicate | Christopher Bryan

Christopher Bryan has spent his career proving something most communicators only sense intuitively: the words we choose don't just describe behavior, they build identity,

How This Journalist Uncovers and Communicates the Story Nobody Else Is Telling with Sam Sanders

Sam Sanders has spent two decades learning that the best conversations aren't the polished ones. After years at NPR cutting five seconds off a segment because "the clock

What Witnessing Thousands of Deaths Taught This Hospice CEO About Living a Good Life | Amy Sweet

Most advice about communication is about control: managing a room, softening bad news, performing under pressure. Amy Sweet works where all of that falls away. As the fou

Why Attention is the ONLY Currency That Matters (and How to Capture It)

For twenty years, Pia Arthur and Kelly Cheeseman watched the single megaphone of mass media shatter into a million independent microphones. In this solo episode of Well S

How to Build Relationships in PR (So AI Will Never Replace You) with Elaine Garza @ Giant Noise

Elaine Garza spent 12 years in New York running PR for Spin, Vibe, and Outside before she put a baby in the backseat, drove to Austin, and started a PR agency out of her

The James Beard-Winning Chef Who Says Your Price Is Your Most Powerful Communication Tool | JJ Johnson

Chef JJ Johnson built a fast-casual rice bowl restaurant on an idea most investors called crazy: that a single grain of rice could carry the story of the entire African d

What 40 Years as a Celebrity Trainer Taught Him About Honest Communication | David Kirsch

David Kirsch passed the bar exam. Then he called his parents and told them he was going to be a fitness trainer. Dead silence. That call (and the 40 years that followed)

The Standup Comedian's Guide to Communicating In Any Room with Ben Gleib

From ages four to twenty-two, Ben Gleib had a stutter and a vocal disfluency so severe that his chords would lock down mid-sentence. He'd sit in class dreading being call

How a Celebrity Hair Stylist Communicates Under Pressure | Alex Pardoe

What does a celebrity hairstylist know about communication that most executives don't? More than you'd think. Alex Pardoe has done hair for Paris Hilton at 3am, worked r

How to Communicate Hard News from an ER Doctor Who’s Been to Nearly Every Country | Calvin Sun

Dr. Calvin D. Sun is an emergency room physician, author of Monsoon Diaries (HarperCollins), and founder of the Monsoon Diaries travel community. He has visited every UN-

How to Have Hard Conversations Without Sounding Cold or Scripted

Thank you for an incredible first month of Well Said. The questions, the feedback, and the support have meant everything to us. We (Kelly and Pia) are the co-founders of

How to Talk to Anyone: Lessons from a Michelin Star Chef Who Does It 100 Times a Day | PJ Calapa

PJ Calapa is the Brand Executive Chef of Marea, one of the most celebrated Italian seafood restaurants in American fine dining, with locations in New York, Beverly Hills,