When Peter Novak told his parents he wanted to study something practical, they said no. He did it anyway, and it led somewhere none of them could have predicted: seven years in a Jesuit seminary, a doctorate in a field almost nobody can name, a role as a university vice provost overseeing everything from campus security to Title IX, and eventually a firm coaching Fortune 500 executives on communication. On the latest episode of The Pivot Effect, Peter sat down with hosts Teri Zipper and Susan Richards to walk through that path and made a case that’s stuck with us: every human problem is a communication problem, and it can be solved through communication.
The seminary years weren’t a detour so much as a first training ground. Alongside coursework in philosophy and theology, Peter worked as a hospital chaplain, spent time with HIV/AIDS patients, and learned a formal process of discernment, a structured way of making high-stakes decisions rooted in servant leadership. It was also where he discovered he loved teaching, starting at Santa Clara University. Leaving the order after seven years, he says, was one of the hardest decisions of his life. There was no more program telling him what came next.
What came next was graduate school again, a doctorate at Yale in dramaturgy. He completed it by leading a team of actors and fellow dramaturgs through a two-year project translating Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night into American Sign Language for deaf audiences. It was slow, difficult, collaborative work, and it taught him something he still relies on: how to shape not just what a message says, but how an audience actually receives it. That single idea, that communication is a craft you build and rehearse, is the throughline connecting a dramaturgy degree to a corporate coaching practice.
From Yale, Peter returned to a Jesuit university in San Francisco, where he spent twenty-two years teaching and, for five of them, served as vice provost overseeing student affairs. The portfolio was enormous: housing, academic advising, campus security, student government, disability services, counseling, Title IX. It meant learning to communicate with wildly different audiences, sometimes all in the same day, and to stay steady while everyone brought him their hardest problems. It was, he says plainly, the most demanding job of his life, and it eventually burned him out.
The next pivot started small: informal speech coaching for a Silicon Valley executive, which led to a referral, then another, until Peter was building Strictly Speaking Group, a firm doing high-stakes event coaching, executive coaching, and workshops for major corporations across finance, med tech, pharma, and beyond. His specialty became something most native English speakers never think about: what it actually takes for a non-native speaker to participate in a meeting, registering tone shifts, gauging formality, and mentally translating idioms and phrasal verbs that carry no meaning outside American culture.
That work led him to accent bias, the well-documented tendency for people with an outgroup accent to be promoted more slowly, regardless of ability. Peter’s reframe: “It’s not an accent, it’s an identity.” He points to a McGill University study showing that people trust an unfamiliar accent less, unless that person speaks with confidence. The research points not to accent reduction, but to prosody: volume, pacing, pausing, inflection. You don’t have to sound different to be heard differently, and unlike an accent, prosody is a skill you can build.
That’s what makes this a pivot story, not just a career story. Anyone moving into a new industry, function, or country walks in with skills the new room hasn’t learned to hear yet, and credibility gets read before the track record does. Peter’s own path proves it: the seminary gave him discernment and steady presence under pressure, the dramaturgy degree gave him a craft for shaping how messages land, and two decades in university leadership gave him range across audiences who all needed something different from him. None of it looked like coaching. All of it became the coaching.
His advice for anyone navigating their own pivot follows directly from his own: the skills you built somewhere else count, even when it’s hard to see how. And as AI reshapes how we work, his closing thought is the one worth sitting with, that the goal isn’t to compete with it, but to keep the human at the center of communication, where people feel seen, heard, and understood.
Peter Novak is the founder and CEO of Strictly Speaking Group. Connect with him on LinkedIn or learn more at strictlyspeakinggroup.com.
Watch the full conversation with Teri A. Zipper and Susan Richards on The Pivot Effect:
Watch Here- https://youtu.be/lYP59LvedYE
Listen Now- https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wlStY7zy8MevDYASTfKot?si=xkTEEiZ6SlOYGnxnwIDSdg
