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Attention business leaders… every once in a while, it is really healthy to pause, look in the mirror, and examine if and how you have changed and evolved. We are all evolving all the time, in varying ways and at varying speeds. We are all always evolving.  But the real learning from that evolution often […]

Have you ever, um, listened, um, to someone who, um, has a distracting pattern to the way they, um, speak? Or, like, have you ever, like, focused so hard on, like, one aspect of their speech pattern, that you, like, can’t hear anything else? OrHowAboutThePersonWhoSpeaksSoQuicklyThatEveryWordSeemsLikeItIs PartOfThePreviousWordAndTheAudienceCan’tRetainAnythingBecauseThe SpeakerWon’tSlowDown? Seemingly tiny distractions in your speech pattern can become a really big deal in the work place. Because once […]

My colleagues and I think about communication in very broad terms. We define our communication as more than just our words or our slides. Our communication is everything we bring into the interaction… our words, slides, body language, facial expression, attire, silence, questions… all of it contributes to what we communicate to people around us.  […]

I missed most of the inaugural festivities on January 20th, due to a long day with several of our clients. But we recorded everything, and my wife and I made a date for that evening to sit and watch all of it. I have only been to one Inaugural, in 1988. But I watch every […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council, November 2019. Have you ever gone into a presentation or a sales meeting convinced that you were about to deliver a slam dunk, only to come out feeling like you threw brick after brick? Have you ever introduced a new initiative to your team with great confidence that it […]

Welcome to the latest episode of The Message Makeover Podcast. In this episode, Dan and I interview Kellie Meiman Hock on the art of international trade negotiations, and the importance of thinking hard about the person, people or group sitting across the table from you.  Kellie is a Managing Partner at McLarty Associates in Washington, DC, […]

(Writer’s Note: We pulled this one from the archive today, for two reasons: First, this concept of followership continues to be an important one, from our perspective. And second, my creative juices were not flowing this morning… I needed a little help from the archive! But in all seriousness, you can’t have good leadership inside […]

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 […]

(Writer’s Note: We write about political issues and events on occasion in this blog, most of the time in the form of commentary on the dysfunction of our national political conversation, and always with a distinct effort to remain as apolitical as possible. This company enters the world as experts in persuasive communication, not in […]

Every good organization is always examining itself, its policies and procedures, behaviors and norms. And when something major changes inside your organization, there often needs to be a close examination of how things are done, and an effort made to adapt to the new reality. This happened, or should have happened, in many ways and […]