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When you speak to an audience — be it a room full of executives, a staff meeting, or a one-on-one phone call with a client — keeping a few key concepts in mind can help you get your message across persuasively and powerfully. Clarity, for example, ensures that your audience understands exactly what you are saying; brevity […]

Let’s talk about elite performance today. Every business leader or business owner knows that running a successful business is really hard. It is a competitive endeavor of the highest order. The things required to build, grow, and sustain a successful business is a long list. There are hard choices and performance requirements that pop up […]

Let’s talk about building credibility… real credibility. Not the short term version of credibility that comes from a referral or a common friendship or the personal courtesy of someone giving you a chance. No… let’s talk about the long-term credibility that is built by you, your actions and your performance. Real credibility is created in […]

One of the things I listen closely for in our workshops is a certain kind of vocabulary that we call “weak” or “qualifying” language. And when I hear it, my coaching sensors start ringing loudly. Words or phrases like “sort of,” “kind of,” “pretty much,” or “basically,” can be toxic for the speaker and dramatically […]

We spend a lot of our time with clients working on message development. We focus on delivery as well, but good delivery is almost irrelevant if you have not first worked out what the message will be. In other words: What you say is really more important than how you say it. When building a […]

Every organization is a dynamic organism, in a constant state of evolution… sometimes expanding, sometimes contracting, sometimes getting stronger, sometimes weaker. What an organization needs at any given moment is likely to be different from what it needed one year ago, or will need one year from now. And it is important for leaders to […]

As a coach, I see a lot of different kinds of speakers: those who are confident and controlled and others who are nervous and still figuring out how to get their point across. And I’ve had people ask, “Don’t you sometimes want to laugh at how bad some of these presentations can be?” It might be hard to believe, […]

Good morning friends, and happy new year from our team at The Latimer Group. As we all shake off the rust and get back into our work after a holiday break, I have three thoughts for you to start off the work year. When you think about your own goals for the new year, and […]

Greetings from my hotel room in New York City, early in the morning on December 29. My wife and children are sound asleep nearby and we are soon to be up and out the door for a day of holiday sightseeing. A visit to Radio City Music Hall and The Met are on the list […]

(Author’s Note: The following story happened on December 6, 2021 during a quiet afternoon at our office. I happened to be sitting at our conference table with my wife Emily. We were having lunch, doing Christmas cards, and just making small talk about all the things we had to get done between then and the […]