Ambassador discusses skills
of communication
By Megan Finnerty
Features
Editor
The recent U.S. Ambassador to Belize is not a career
politician, but she's a career communicator who has written President
Clinton's speeches, negotiated foreign treaties and produced ABC's "Nightline."
And this former Exponent sports editor shared her
secret to effective communication Tuesday at a luncheon held by Lafayette's
Professionals in Communication.
"Education, experience and empathy," she said.
"Those three things make good communicators."
The theme of Carolyn Curiel's brief speech was
one of women's empowerment and skilled communication. She spoke about
the obstacles she, as a woman, had to overcome during her time as a
sports reporter at the Exponent.
Once, while covering a game in Michigan for a men's
sports team, the then coach, who she refused to name, told the bus driver
to leave without her, serving as a reminder that, as a woman, she was
not welcome on an otherwise all-male bus.
She ran down the highway, chasing the bus until
it stopped for her.
"It was intimidation, but I dealt with it," she
said as she smiled. "We broke down a lot of barriers back then."
Curiel has continued to do so in her professional
career. She was the first Latina to be a presidential speechwriter and
the first woman to serve as an ambassador to Belize. But her revolutionary
trip to the White House was via journalism, not politics.
After graduation, Curiel worked as a sports reporter
for United Press International in the Caribbean and then as a reporter
for the Washington Post and as an editor at The New York Times.
After five years at the Times, she worked as a
producer for "Nightline" until she received a fateful call from then
President-elect Clinton's speechwriter.
As a speechwriter, she said empathy for the struggles
of working Americans was one of her greatest assets, enabling her to
write in a way that let Clinton explain his policies to Americans so
they could understand how he was going to help them.
Curiel said women learn to communicate in a man's
world in order to succeed, but they learn to communicate at home in
order to survive. This way of viewing her role as a communicator helped
her many times as a speechwriter, but especially so when she was writing
Clinton's speech following the Oklahoma City bombing.
"How do you communicate how these people felt,
what they lost?" she asked.
Curiel knew she had to empathize with the pain
parents were feeling at the time, but not being a parent herself, she
called one of her sisters, who is a mother, to ask her for help.
Curiel said her success in that situation, and
many others from speechwriting to job interviews, was a result of asking
for help.
"Women are socially raised to be natural communicators,"
she said. "We always ask for help, I know I do. Unless you can tell
people what you can do, you're not going to get that job. You can't
be afraid to ask for help."
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