After closing her General Session at PRSA ICON 2026 in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 20, three-time Emmy Award winner, author, and entrepreneur Gaby Natale spoke with PRsay about finding opportunities within established organizations, encouraging employees to challenge conventional thinking, and why PR professionals need to get more comfortable promoting their own contributions.
Many PR professionals work within tight budgets and established processes. How can they develop a pioneer mindset when there’s little room to experiment?
I shared three questions during my presentation: What are the stories? What are the opportunities? And, especially, what are the white spaces that you are uniquely qualified to identify?
When you tap into everything that makes you who you are and use it to your advantage, you begin to see opportunities differently.
I’ve always been an underdog. That’s been the story of my life, whether in television or other areas of my career. The key is to use what makes you unique to your advantage and find that white space where you see an opportunity hidden in plain sight.
Maybe there’s a blind spot in an industry or a company. Everyone complains about something, or something isn’t as efficient as it could be, but nobody does anything about it.
That’s where the opportunity comes in.
If you identify that white space and get there before everyone else, you’ve got a fortune. You’re not competing. You’re there, and it’s all yours to take.
For leaders who want their teams to challenge conventional thinking, how can they create an environment where people feel comfortable proposing new ideas?
If you’re a leader and you want to create a culture of pioneering, the first thing is emotional safety.
People won’t share their crazy ideas or more about themselves if they don’t feel safe. You need to make sure everybody knows their opinions and experiences are welcome and that they belong.
The second thing is to make it intentional.
Take some time to ask your team, and yourself: What are we doing just because we’ve always done things this way? What are we doing out of inertia that we could do differently?
That could be on an individual level, a team level, a company level or even an industry level.
You might realize there’s something your entire industry has been doing simply because it’s always been done that way.
What’s one thing PR professionals can do when they return to work to start thinking more like pioneers?
One key takeaway, based on the questions I received today, is the importance of visibility.
We talked about embracing excellence and consistency, but many of the questions from PR professionals highlighted the challenge of making their own work visible.
There’s an irony here. We’re used to making our clients or companies shine, but we’re often the hidden geniuses. We have the consistency and the excellence, but for some reason, we don’t have the visibility.
Some of the people I spoke with don’t even feel comfortable embracing that visibility.
But we need to recognize visibility as a critical tool for raising awareness of what we’re doing and the contributions we’re making — individually, collectively and as an industry.
Photos by Albert Chau
