Beth

About Beth Nyland

Beth refuses bland and boring. She's a communicator, leader, advisor, teacher, illustrator, and entrepreneur who gets results through creativity, good questions, and active listening. She’s also a daily practice junkie who takes on insane creative challenges, like writing a poem or drawing a picture every day for a year.

Your quest to be more creative starts here

By |2023-02-28T14:24:20+00:00February 28, 2023|Categories: Creative Confidence, Creativity, Everyday Communication, Learning, Life|

How To Be Creative is a theme that surfaces again and again when I sit down to write. Not because people flock to me asking, “Oh Beth, you creative wizard, will you please publish your wisdom?!” Nope, that’s not the spark that lights my blog-posting flame. Most of the time, my creativity-focused posts begin from a [...]

Want your point to have power? Here are 7 things NOT to say.

By |2023-01-27T03:32:22+00:00January 27, 2023|Categories: Presenting, Storytelling, Visual Communication|

Lucky you! You get to speak at an industry event, corporate conference, or team meeting.  No doubt, your presentation will include a set of slides. Slides are a de facto requirement for most business presentations. You gotta have ‘em, right? Incidentally, Jill and I have decided we don’t gotta have ‘em. In Story Mode, we avoid [...]

How to turn “I don’t know” into a conversational advantage

By |2022-12-30T18:44:49+00:00December 30, 2022|Categories: Creative Confidence, Everyday Communication, Learning, Life|

As 2022 drew to a close, several of my friends announced that they were stepping away from social media, at least until January. To detox from the digital noise, they chose to disconnect. Stepping away can be good practice for analog conversations, too. In tense situations, sometimes the best response is no response at all. Step [...]

Eliminate acronyms from your vocabulary (except the ones I invented)

By |2022-11-30T15:47:12+00:00November 29, 2022|Categories: Everyday Communication, Writing|

So much workplace communication is just crap. Big words trying to sound smart and important. Vague words trying to obscure the specifics. Jargon trying to belong with the insiders’ club. And OMG the acronyms. Several years ago, I invented an acronym to illustrate just how senseless and confusing the vocabulary of business can be: C.R.A.P.  = [...]

You’re boring. Stop that.

By |2022-08-31T02:56:37+00:00August 31, 2022|Categories: Creative Confidence, Creativity, Everyday Communication, Learning, Life|

When Jill and I started our Story Mode program, we easily landed on our motto/tagline/hashtag: Refuse To Be Boring. This phrase is our “way.” It’s our constant reminder and also an apt description of how we think, act, talk, create, work, relate. It’s how we live. We spend so much time refusing to be boring, we [...]

Stories need struggle. Storytellers do not.

By |2022-06-30T20:47:54+00:00June 30, 2022|Categories: Creative Confidence, Creativity, Life|

“I thought it would be easy.” When Jill and I use this prompt as a warm-up exercise in our Story Mode workshops, the result is always a fascinating variety of struggle stories. After just three minutes of writing, participants share vivid scenes that range from heart-wrenching to hilarious. The loss of an aged pet. A first [...]

We’ve outlawed disclaimers. Here’s why.

By |2022-05-25T20:22:09+00:00May 25, 2022|Categories: Creative Confidence, Creativity, Everyday Communication, Learning|

When it comes to creative communication, I am not fond of rules—unless I’m breaking them. I tweak templates, bust boundaries, and write wrong. Perhaps this is why I’m self-employed; I take serious pleasure in challenging “the way we’ve always done it” and going against the grain. But in our Story Mode workshops, Jill and I enforce [...]

This Is A Custom Widget

This Sliding Bar can be switched on or off in theme options, and can take any widget you throw at it or even fill it with your custom HTML Code. Its perfect for grabbing the attention of your viewers. Choose between 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns, set the background color, widget divider color, activate transparency, a top border or fully disable it on desktop and mobile.

This Is A Custom Widget

This Sliding Bar can be switched on or off in theme options, and can take any widget you throw at it or even fill it with your custom HTML Code. Its perfect for grabbing the attention of your viewers. Choose between 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns, set the background color, widget divider color, activate transparency, a top border or fully disable it on desktop and mobile.