Own The Room

Every audience you will ever face is one glance away from something they would rather be looking at. That is the new reality of presenting, and it is why the person who can own the room—any room, of any shape, on any screen—has never been more valuable.

Own the Room is the fully rewritten second edition of Turn Me On, the presenting playbook from leadership strategist Jody Holland and technology executive Mike Grigsby. Between them they have delivered well over ten thousand presentations, and the book reads the way they teach: story first, laugh in the right place, then the tool you can use on Monday.

You will learn how to invent the presenter inside you and get out of their way. How to watch your own game film with the sound off and fix what the audience actually sees. How to handle the heckler, the skeptic, and the question you cannot answer without losing the room. How to build stories that stick using the G.U.I.D.E. Story Method™: Ground, Uncover, Intensify, Discover, Extend. How to kill death by bullet point, use AI to sharpen a talk without flattening your voice, and keep going when the projector dies. How to win the first sixty seconds and design the moments people will clip and share. How to own the room when the room is a screen—on camera, on Zoom, and in the hybrid meeting where half the team is at the table and half is a rectangle on the wall. And how to turn it on before the curtain goes up, so they ask for another helping.

Every chapter closes with a summary and an Own the Room practice, because the difference between people who read about presenting and people who become great presenters is that the second group does the reps.

Whether you run a Monday huddle, a training room, or a keynote stage, this book will light a fire in you—and in the people you're speaking to.