Blog

I was speaking with a good friend recently. He’s a business owner, and the definition of a straight shooter. He doesn’t tolerate people who waste his time or who don’t deliver as promised. He shared a story of a contractor he was working with who never, ever seemed to be able to meet a deadline. And his […]

Making the determination about what is and what is not appropriate is a judgment call that we can only make when we are honest with ourselves about who our audience is and what the context is for our meeting.

Great and powerful communication is not a single skill set. No, in fact great and powerful communication is actually four skills. And like any other elite artist or athlete, great performances are built first by breaking the overall skill into subskills. When we break things down into smaller parts, it is easier to build a […]

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 […]

Many of us in our professional lives will get to a point where we have a lot of experience. We have done the job for a while, we know the products, we know the stakeholders, we know what our clients or customers want or don’t want. Experience matters, a lot. And when we accumulate significant […]

One of the things that consistently comes up in conversation during coaching and training is the moving target of credibility. How to get it… what to do if you don’t have it… and how much of it is needed. And just like any other “power source” it helps to first understand the sources of credibility, […]

My colleagues and I are always making the case for stronger communication skills. And if we are going to make that case, then we also have to make the case for better preparation. And if we are going to make that case, then we also need to create some time in our work lives to […]

I spend a lot more time thinking about listening now than I used to. Why? I am not really sure. It could be my advancing age. It could be parenthood. It could be experience in my job. It could be the influence of some of the people in my life. Probably, it is a little bit of […]

I was recently leading a workshop, when a participant named Paul started talking about the card game poker. We were discussing body language and presence, and Paul equated the conversation to having a good “poker face” while playing cards. In other words, he was talking about maintaining a consistent presence when speaking, no matter what we might […]

The world is noisy and getting noisier by the day. The amount of information available — through email, texts, chats, video calls, meetings, online media, and more — can be overwhelming, disorienting, and is almost always distracting. Good information becomes difficult to separate from bad. And in a business context, all this noise makes it harder to be heard causing good ideas to be ignored, important decisions to be delayed, and decreasing employee morale. Companies that want to compete and thrive need to find strategies to diminish the distraction.