A nine-week live cohort

Media Influence
Mastery

Authentic leadership and intelligent articulation, built for a media environment where synthetic content is cheap and a clear human position is not.

For executives, founders, and public-facing experts whose public voice has gone generic — over-coached, over-cautious, and increasingly indistinguishable from what a model could draft for them. We rebuild it in nine weeks, on camera, against real pressure.

11
Seats per cohort, by design
9 wks
From audit to live simulation
6
Cohorts run since 2022
The two non-negotiables

Confidence on camera is a side effect. These are the cause.

Authentic Leadership

Your point of view, stated without hedging. We strip away the borrowed phrases and rehearsed neutrality that make leaders sound interchangeable, and rebuild your message from what you actually believe.

Intelligent Articulation

Precision under pressure. You learn to compress a complex position into a sentence a reporter, a board, or a feed algorithm cannot misquote — and to do it live, without notes.

Six modules, nine weeks

The curriculum

01

The Signal Audit

We pull your last twelve months of public statements, interviews, and posts and map where your voice gets diluted by committee language, jargon, or algorithmic pandering.

02

Position Before Performance

Before any camera work, you draft the four positions you are willing to defend in public. Everything downstream — interviews, panels, posts — gets built from these, not invented in the moment.

03

The AI-Saturated Feed

Why synthetic content has made plainly human, specific speech more valuable, not less — and how to write and speak in a register that reads as unmistakably yours, even when a bot could mimic your syntax.

04

Live Interview Mechanics

Bridging, the three-second pause, and how to answer a hostile question without sounding defensive. Drilled on camera against unscripted follow-ups from a former segment producer.

05

Short-Form Without Shrinking

Translating a nuanced argument into 45 seconds for a clip, a Reel, or a quote tile — without flattening it into a slogan. Includes a teardown of your own draft scripts.

06

Crisis & Contradiction

What to say in the six minutes after something you said gets taken out of context. A rehearsed framework, not a panic response, with two live simulations.

How the cohort moves

The nine-week arc

Week 1

Diagnostic interview + signal audit delivered

0
Weeks 2–3

Position drafting, three 1:1 working sessions

1
Weeks 4–6

On-camera drills, cohort table-reads, producer feedback

2
Weeks 7–8

Live simulation: unscripted interview + crisis scenario

3
Week 9

Final cut review and your standing message library

4
Who is teaching this

Esmée Okonkwo-Reyes

Spent eleven years as a correspondent covering policy and markets for a national broadcast desk before moving into executive communications. Built the spokesperson training programs at two Fortune 500 companies before founding Counsel & Cadence in 2022.

She has prepped guests for over 400 live interviews and has spent the last two years rebuilding her own curriculum around one problem: leaders sound more cautious and more synthetic the more media training they receive. This program is the correction.

Former broadcast correspondent, 11 yrsBuilt spokesperson programs at 2 Fortune 500 firms400+ live interview preps
From recent cohorts

What changed for them

I came in able to write a good memo and left able to survive an unscripted cross-talk segment without my comms director wincing. The crisis module alone was worth the fee.

Desmond Achebe-Lin
COO, Tradewind Logistics

My board kept telling me to 'be more authentic' without ever defining it. This program defined it: four positions, stated plainly, defended the same way every time. My retention numbers on long-form video are up 31% since.

Renata Vossberg
Founder, Halden Materials

Six weeks in, a journalist tried the exact bridging trap we drilled against in module four. I caught it in real time and the clip is still the most-shared thing I have ever said publicly.

Priyamvada Oduya
Policy Director, Carrow Institute
Before you apply

Questions worth answering up front

Executives, founders, board members, and public-facing experts who are already being interviewed, quoted, or filmed — and who feel their public voice has gotten generic, overly careful, or indistinguishable from AI-written copy.

Both, deliberately. Media training without a defined point of view produces polished evasiveness. Leadership coaching without articulation drills produces conviction nobody can hear clearly. We run them together.

Eleven participants per cohort, capped so every on-camera drill gets reviewed individually by the instructor and a former broadcast producer, not just by peers.

Every session is recorded and you get one make-up 1:1 slot per missed session. The two live simulations in weeks 7–8 are the exception — those are rescheduled with the next cohort if missed.

Yes. Executive pairs and leadership trios from the same organization join at a reduced per-seat rate so your public messaging stays consistent across spokespeople.

Cohort 7 — applications open

Apply to the next cohort

Tell us where your public voice currently falls short. Esmée reads every application and replies herself — this is not a funnel into a sales call.

Eleven seats per cohort. Applications for the next cohort close two weeks before the diagnostic interviews begin.