We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lauren Monitz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lauren below.
Lauren, so great to have you on the platform and excited to have you share your wisdom with our community today. Communication skills often play a powerful role in our ability to be effective and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your communication skills.
At a most basic level, I think about how I would want to be spoken to under various circumstances.
For my travel blog, I always try to add value to my readers by including insider tips, tricks, and hacks in a more conversational tone as a thank you for tuning in so they think of me as their trustworthy friend on the internet. Vacation days are limited and finite; what would I want to know to make this trip memorable and unforgettable?
As a government employee, I think of myself as a citizen first. So much of what we do is translating complex concepts into layman’s terms. If I don’t understand it with a master’s degree, I know few others are going to. With each post, press release, or asset we release, I have a running checklist of questions in my head:
-What do I need to know?
-Did I include all the essential information (the who, what, where, when, and why)?
-How would this statement make me feel?
-Are solutions actively being proposed?
-What would frustrate me?
With everything, I try to infuse an appropriate level of humor to cut through the noise. There’s information overload everywhere – to capture people’s attention, you really have to master the art of “infotainment,” educating people in an entertaining manner.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I have had about as non-linear a career path as one could possibly have. Very few people can say they built a city corporate communications department from scratch.
Even fewer can say that was the pivot after circumnavigating the globe as a full-time content creator, writer, blogger, and professional iPhone photographer. At the peak of my influencer career, I worked with national and international destinations to tell their story. It seemed glamorous and like the dream job, but with everything, there are plusses and minuses, and eventually, I got burnt out of being on the road 75% of the year with no stability.
I love what I did then, and I love what I do now for completely different reasons. Then, it was all about flexibility. I was my own boss; I could work from my bed in yoga pants.
Now, I love that no day is the same, and having to think on my feet. It’s a challenge to stay calm, cool, and collected to be the voice of reason during crises.
Right now, I’m very excited now to be checking something off my personal bucket list – that I’m writing my first book, which will be out later this year.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Master the Pitch. Whatever you do, you have about 3 seconds to capture someone’s attention. Make it meaningful and matter. Read, memorize and obsess over “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
2. Recognize that People Communicate Differently. Identify what type of person you are from the book “the Tipping Point” and capitalize on your strengths. I am inherently a connector.
3. It’s easy to think you know everything right after college. (Guilty).The sooner you realize you don’t, the better off you’ll be. I learn new things each and every single day.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
The Tipping Point, it really gets to the core of how ideas spread, what types of things go viral, and that there is a scientific formula to it, it’s not random.
The biggest takeaway for me was that different people need to be communicated to in different ways. It may sound simple but it really was an aha moment that understanding those differences makes communication much more effective. “Mass communication” and trying to reach everyone really is an outdated concept. Everything, especially online, needs to be much more personalized now.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thedownlo.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lmonitz/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedownlotravel
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmonitz/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/LaurenMonitz
