Chris in the News

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What Do We Hear When Women Speak?

“Women come into training sessions more aware of what they need to work on because they have been dealing with the tone police all of their lives.”

Forget Suits. Show the Tattoo. Female Candidates Are Breaking the Rules.

“These different women who are running, and the way they’re running, is going to change politics forever.”

Writing Her Own Dress Code

“She has successfully avoided the Stepford-wife look of red suits and helmet hair adopted by some presidential candidates’ spouses,” said Christine K. Jahnke, a media trainer who advised Hillary Rodham Clinton during her presidential campaign. “In some of the things she wears, she is quite contemporary.”

How can the women on the debate stage stand out?

“I work with female candidates to go slow and low, to very purposefully slow your pace and lower the tone a bit, because that will add meaning or gravitas to whatever it is you’re talking about.”

Ryan and Romney: A contrast in sartorial styles

“Paul Ryan looked like what he is: a rumpled, think-tank policy wonk sort of guy,” said Christine K. Jahnke, president of Positive Communications, a Washington-based media and image-consultant company (her hundreds of clients have included The Washington Post). “I don’t think that will change as the campaign goes on. If he clicks it up too much, both he and Romney will have the distant CEO-Wall Street look.”

Do Women Have to Talk Like Men to Be Taken Seriously? And Should They?

Jahnke didn’t set out for a career in politics. She grew up in Albert Lea, Minnesota, in a family, as she puts it, of “people who worked on their feet all day”—namely, farmers and laborers. She wanted to become a television reporter and landed her first job right out of college, as the weekend weathercaster at a station in Rochester, Minnesota. Unexpectedly, she hated it. “I was nervous, extremely nervous,” she recalls. “The whole experience was truly humbling.”

How to Get Over Your Fear of Speaking Up—in Public or Not

“He broke all the rules of public speaking,” says media trainer Christine K. Jahnke, author of The Well-Spoken Woman: Your Guide to Looking and Sounding Your Best. “There’s a reason why he didn’t hang in and panicked instead. It was a classic worst moment in public speaking.”

Practice Makes Perfect For Confident Women

Christine Jahnke admits that she was an awkward teenager. By junior high school, she towered over all the boys her age. She was 5-foot-10-inches tall, and while that was great for basketball, it took a toll on her self-confidence—not to mention her wardrobe.

Is she likable enough? We’re still asking that?

It came as no surprise to Christine Jahnke that the chattering classes would instantly cast doubt on whether Elizabeth Warren is “likable enough” to be elected president in 2020.

What was new to Jahnke, a D.C.-based speech coach who trains female politicians, was the backlash: a collective howl raised by voters and political analysts who resisted the premise that the next promising female candidate for president could be critiqued and dismissed in precisely the same manner as the last one. Within hours, Warren’s exploratory committee seized on a swipe perceived as sexist to raise money for a possible presidential campaign.

It’s 2018, and Female Candidates Are Tweeting About Lipstick. Is This Progress?

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” says Chris Jahnke, a Washington, D.C.-based speech coach who was a consultant on Clinton’s 2008 campaign and has worked with Michelle Obama. “It goes against the conventional wisdom of how women candidates should act.”