Melanie sturm
Melanie Sturm is the founder of Engage to Win and The Win Coach for leaders of all stripes – elected officials, candidates, corporate executives, policy analysts and advocates, students, and non-profit and movement leaders.
Because persuasion involves winning people over to common ground they instinctively share, Melanie teaches how to inspire an audience – even skeptics – to follow your lead, not based on what you say, but on what your audience hears you say. Even in our hyper-partisan era, most people are persuadable if approached the right way, a unifying reality awaiting compelling communicators to forge.
Based on the truism that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, Melanie focuses on how to become more “hearable” by cultivating Six Powers of Persuasion. She also specializes in crafting customized, issue-focused persuasive messaging.
Having learned through her column – Think Again, you might change your mind – how to persuade people who think they disagree, Melanie launched Engage to Win in 2014 to help people unlock the power of their ideas. Her columns have been published in papers throughout the Rocky Mountains and in the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller and the Denver Post.
Melanie’s prior work experience is in finance: International Finance Corporation (private sector affiliate of the World Bank), Morgan Stanley (London) and Drexel Burnham Lambert (New York). Melanie has an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and undergraduate degrees in international relations and economics from Tufts University.
