About Melinda Henning

What distinguishes Melinda Henning in the world of presentation consultants? In a word, experience.

Over 35 years, Melinda has become known as the go-to consultant and coach for anyone with an opportunity to make a difference by speaking. She  can read people quickly, understand business issues readily, craft messages with precision and grace, give direction with sensitivity to individual motivations, and create impressive results with a wide range of clients in remarkably short order.

Hundreds of citizen activists, public figures, thought leaders, social entrepreneurs, and executives from mission-driven organizations such as Benetech, FLY, Echoing Green, Stanford University, SciMagix, KeraVision, and the Institute for One World Health have sought Melinda’s expertise to help them get the results they need when they must keynote a high-profile industry event, inspire enterprise-wide change initiatives, compete for funding awards, testify on controversial issues in a public forum, or orchestrate multi-speaker showcase events.

Thousands of business presenters, technical experts, and scientists in top corporations in the US and Europe including Apple, HP, Cisco, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Genentech, and Roche  Pharmaceuticals have enjoyed Melinda’s interactive teaching style and incisive coaching during her 20+ years leading the renowned PowerSpeaking® trainings as well as HighTech Speaking®, SalesSpeaking®, and Speaking to the Big Dogs® (www.powerspeaking.com)

“Today, I’d rather watch a good business speaker than go to a movie,” says Melinda, who gave her own first public speech as a sixth grader. “I’ve always been fascinated with the power a person could gain with just the right turn of phrase, or a meaningful pause. Now words and ideas are my stock in trade! And people expressing their opinions to make good things happen! I cannot imagine better work!”

Melinda has been teaching people to be effective communicators since the 1960s. Starting out as a high school English teacher, she later worked with some of the toughest students around: prison inmates, psychiatric patients, acting-out adolescents, and athletes-with-an-attitude. And an early stint as a probation officer left no doubt that she can work with just about anyone. (When someone suggests they might be a “difficult” client today, Melinda just smiles.)

Melinda Henning has successfully combined her experience in education, training, and business (including an MBA in Marketing) to build a coaching practice centered on her personal belief that, as she puts it, “one person can make a difference…by speaking, – that is by speaking well, and with conviction.”  She helps social entrepreneurs and nonprofits (Planned Parenthood, Institute for One World Health, Bring Me a Book Foundation, and others) raise money, change minds, and solve problems. She serves on two nonprofit boards and has been active in the National Speakers Association, Women in Consulting, the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and the VC Task Force.