Presenting Your Best Self

Rabbi Stephen Pierce was the former chair of the Leo T. McCarthy Center. Beginning in his college days, he didn’t know exactly how to present his best self in a professional setting. In his new book, I Wish I’d Said That: A Guide for Writers, Speakers, and Healers, Pearce provides the tools he learned to the next generation of students informing them that their potential is never limited.

As a past chair of the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, and the recipient of an honorary doctorate, I had an opportunity to encourage and witness the enthusiastic student participants’ growth and development as they used their internships in Sacramento, Washington DC, and San Francisco to gain inspiration for careers and lives that are grounded in ethical public service in government, business, the environment, healthcare, and education. Their intense education enables them to imagine how their training impacts and calls for the encouragement of marginalized and poor citizens—in other words, to make a huge difference in their lives and their own lives. 

I can remember starting out as a college student like so many of our interns and trying to improve my communication skills both verbal and written. Often trying to find the right words for my presentations. I often struggled to find a useful allegory, allusion, ambiguity anecdote, aphorism, fable, folktale, metaphor, myth, paradox, pun, quotation, and witticism that might be employed in spoken and public presentations, or written material. My newly released book  I Wish I’d Said That: A Guide for Writers, Speakers, and Healers was exactly what I needed and I passed it along to the McCarthy Students to make the communications process much more user-friendly. This anthology is a welcome addition to the bookshelf of students, public figures, and those who seek to make a difference. The book is available through Amazon and early reviewer, Dr. Michael Isaacson writes: “It’s my pleasure to recommend this new book by Stephen Pearce to any and all speakers and educators who are looking for that precise word or image to make their verbal expression come alive. There is an extraordinary amount of usable material here under one cover.” USF Past President Fr. Stephen Privette SJ offers the following thumbnail review:

This magisterial tome is a great gift.  I have already used it for two citations for this Sunday’s sermon, one from The Little Prince and the other a poem by Mary Gordon.  What a remarkable distillation of rhetorical “should’ve, would’ve, could’ve.”  I am deeply grateful for your thoughtfulness in sending me a copy of this remarkable testimony to your familiarity with multiple literary genres. The Thematic index is pure gold.  Thank you on my behalf and on behalf of all those who still have to listen to me!

I am grateful to Executive Director Derek Brown and the McCarthy Center staff for encouraging USF McCarthy Center students to discover this remarkable anthology. 

All royalties will go to the San Francisco and Marin Food Bank where Dr. Pearce is a board member helping to distribute over 80m pounds of food to food-challenged individuals and families.

Learning a universal diction only improves one’s capabilities to communicate with others. If you would like mentorship on your writing and speaking skills, please email The Learning, Writing, and Speaking Center on our very own campus at lwsc@usfca.edu