Elizabeth Ruiz
Psychology of a Leader, Principal, Researcher and Facilitator
Houston, Texas, United States
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Elizabeth A. Ruiz, PhD, is a Leadership Psychology Scholar-Practitioner. She is a dynamic force in strategic communication and leadership development. With over 35 years of experience, she has honed a unique expertise in leadership psychology, human capital, and organizational growth. As a Leadership Psychology Architect and Transformation Facilitator, Elizabeth empowers individuals and organizations to unlock their full potential through tailored business solutions, cutting-edge training, and strategic insights. Elizabeth’s passion for helping others grow is the driving force behind her career. She specializes in developing leaders who can navigate the complexities of today's business landscape with confidence and resilience. Through learning assessments, leadership training, or strategic business solutions, Elizabeth’s work empowers others with the skills they need to succeed. Elizabeth is not just a scholar-practitioner—she is a catalyst for transformation, inspiring leaders to reach new heights and organizations to achieve sustainable growth.
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Strategic Storyteller
The ability to find, craft, and tell a story is an essential tool in the professional communicator’s arsenal. Contrary to the notion that storytelling is just a nice “add on” to strategic communication, this session will show how it’s actually at the very core of our work. Used strategically, a well told story can convey an organization’s mission and culture, attract the attention of the media, raise funds, sell a product, influence decision makers, and even help societies embark on new paths. Stories that resonate propel political candidates into office, move a business ahead of the competition, and form the basis for social movements and causes that effect lasting changes. While narrative is a powerful strategic tool, learning how to communicate a story in and across different media is a skill requiring intense discipline and effort. An average presentation, annual report, marketing brochure, or website will always become more compelling through established and emerging techniques for applied storytelling.
The purpose of this session is to provide you with a deep and broad understanding of stories and how they can be used in strategic communication. Drawing from a wealth of evidence-based and field-tested work on storytelling from both local and global contexts, participants will learn why stories tend to be so powerful and—with a focus on the written, performed, and transmedia aspects of storytelling—gain experience in telling stories to achieve organizational objectives.
Your skills will be sharpened through a lively discussion, storytelling exercises, workshop-style coaching, and in-session practicing presentations. By the end, you will walk away with a new mindset and a host of strategies that can be immediately implemented in your everyday work.
The Compelling Communicator
The ability to communicate simply, clearly and with confidence, in an engaging, influential and persuasive way, is a key competency for leaders. Understanding the audience and using words and language effectively is critical, whether written or spoken. However, as emerging leaders gain proficiency in their areas of expertise they often don’t recognize the subtle shift in emphasis on their ability to communicate effectively with different audiences through multiple channels. Framing the message and then translating it through writing and verbal delivery is a skill and competency developed through awareness, preparation and practice.
In this session, participants learn the foundational communication skills leaders need today to effectively inform, engage, motivate and inspire stakeholders through a variety of written and spoken exercises. The first part focuses on written communications, emphasizing audience-framed messaging and developing simple, clear and persuasive content. The second part transitions to enhancing spoken delivery and presentation skills. Participants gain experience in developing compelling and engaging slide presentations using visualization and data that address audience needs.
Strategic Visual Communication
With the ever-increasing number of options in the marketplace, the emergence of new and more media, and the frenzied pace of business today, consumers and business people alike have shorter attention spans and less time to devote to digesting information. Globalization has compounded the problem as organizations attempt to market their goods and services in the midst of disparate cultural norms and languages. As a result, all types of organizations now need to communicate more quickly, clearly, and effectively across channels, markets, and cultures. Visual communications have become increasingly critical for organizations to accomplish their objectives. Whether the challenge lies in building and managing brands, connecting with key stakeholders through traditional and emerging channels, or presenting information to key stakeholders, using visual communications strategically can help organizations clarify, convince, and connect with their audiences.
This session is designed for professionals in the corporate or nonprofit arena who want to be more visually literate and better equipped to present their ideas more clearly, communicate with design professionals more effectively, or lead a branding initiative for a product, service or organization. The course is intended to help professionals better understand the value visuals play in the brand communications mix, set objectives for visual identity and design programs, and analyze creative solutions from a strategic perspective.
Behavioral Economics
This session places participants at the intersection of two converging fields, behavioral economics and communication, to teach them how our predictable irrationality can become a competitive advantage in persuading people, groups and organizations to take favorable actions. Through lecture, case analysis, and a group project, participants learn and apply a variety of psychological principles to communication thinking, planning and leadership. Participants are challenged to think broadly about communication - advertising, PR, social media, content and internal communications - in their application of cognitive bias and heuristics principles including anchoring, framing, loss aversion, group biases, time-discounting and choice overload.
Ultimately, the goal of this session is to prepare and challenge participants on how best to align positioning and message delivery with driving value for the bottom line.
Participants in this session should expect to have the following critical questions discussed, debated and answered:
What role does/can psychology play in communication planning?
How do cognitive biases and heuristics inform persuasion?
Is it really possibly to control behavior?
How does application of these behavioral economics theories to communication decision-making drive brand value for an organization?
Principles in Persuasion
How do we change minds and move people to action? It’s an eternal human question and one that’s critical for strategic communicators. This session focuses on key principles in persuasion, from classical rhetoric to behavioral economics. Participants learn to gauge audience needs and desires, anticipate decision-making processes and choose the persuasive strategies that best fit the situation. Because our aim is audience-centered communication, we also consider the ethics of persuasion.
Methods: Persuasive messaging on behalf of organizations is an iterative process requiring collaboration and commitment from colleagues at multiple levels. In this session, we explore rhetorical techniques through discussion and small-group exercises. We simulate organizational processes using “internal regroups” (i.e., meetings with colleagues to reveal and justify our work).
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