Blog

How often do you sit in a meeting, or on a conference call, or listen to a presentation, and feel disengaged within the first five minutes? Yep… me too. It usually takes people forever to simply get to the point, and find ways to engage the audience. And by the time they do, it usually […]

My colleagues and I always preach preparation and practice before you stand up to speak. And whenever I bring up these twin concepts in a workshop, there is almost always someone who raises their hand and says “well, what if you don’t have time to prepare or practice? What do you do then?” That question always […]

We spend a lot of time in this space, and with our clients, discussing how to communicate more effectively. We discuss how to prepare and structure a message, how to capture attention, how to make the meeting valuable, how to get to the point, etc, etc, etc. We talk about how to make your audience more likely to want […]

This post was written by Hannah Morris, Facilitator and Coach at The Latimer Group. In Part 1 of this post, we examined the importance of knowing one’s persuasive point of view to effective communication. It is our thesis statement. It is what our audience most needs to hear in order to understand our message, care […]

This post was written by Hannah Morris, Facilitator and Coach at The Latimer Group. Have you ever found yourself struggling to respond to the question, “What’s your presentation about?” or “Why were you meeting with X?” or “What was in that report you sent?” When asked to create concise summaries of complex topics, many of […]

During work discussions with our colleagues — when we are debating issues and making choices about things like strategy, policy or design — many (perhaps most) conversations come down to the following choice: Which is more important? “Winning” the discussion or maintaining functional dialogue with our colleagues? In other words, when we are debating the […]

Hello friends! We are continuing our latest blog tradition of fielding your questions about effective communication. You can send us the questions any way you want… via phone, email or the “Dear Latimer” box on the right side of most pages on our site. When we get a question we will always answer directly back […]

So this really happened to me… yesterday, May 17, 2022. I was getting ready to run a virtual coaching session with three participants, from my office at Latimer headquarters. The session was due to start in about five minutes. And I ran to our learning studio (where we teach many learning sessions and record audio […]

This post was written by Hannah Morris, Facilitator and Coach at The Latimer Group. In some parts of our lives, we love having rules to follow because they make it easier to make decisions, and they take away the guesswork. In others, we feel constrained by rules and resentful of their imposition. Whether we like it […]

Think of all the communications courses you’ve taken, seminars you’ve attended, and articles you’ve seen in which they tell you how to speak, how to present, or how to create a PowerPoint slide. Compare that to how much less often a course is offered on how to listen. Listening (good, active and intentional listening) is a […]