Listening

Is it possible to communicate too much during a crisis? Let’s dig into that question a bit. During a crisis, emotions tend to run higher than normal, for everyone. And the default setting for most people during such a period is to hyper communicate. The common wisdom is that “more information is better” during a […]

I’m thinking a lot about how well we listen. How well do you actually listen to the people around you? Do you think you listen well? Are you sure? I think I listen well, most of the time. When I focus on it, which is often, I listen really well. But it is really easy […]

Frequently, one of the participants in a Latimer workshop will say something that totally grabs me. And I always will pause the workshop, write a note in my “ideas book” and then say, “That will be a blog post, and I can footnote you, if you want.” In this case, the participant politely declined a footnote. We […]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal behaviors, especially in relation to how we “show up” in a professional setting. And here are five things that always seem to jump to the front of the line for me, as being the most important communication behaviors. Think about this… What would it be like if you […]

This post was written by Dan Cooney, Director of Business Development at The Latimer Group. We were recently coaching a talented systems and operations manager (“Mike”) who previewed a presentation he was about to give on the importance of merging contact records in Salesforce for the sake of data hygiene. The intended audience for this presentation […]

Everyone who frequents this blog knows that we write about communication. But every once in a while we also like to share stories about other things, simple things, everyday ordinary things. This is one of those times. Last week was one the most important weeks of our year here at The Latimer Group. One of […]

This post was written by Hannah Morris, Director of Assessment & Advancement at The Latimer Group. Confidence is not a trait. It is a behavior. In fact, confidence comes from the Latin verb confido, confidere, meaning “to trust.” When we trust ourselves, our skills, our experience, our decisions, and our ability, we feel and project confidence. When […]

This post was written by Dan Cooney, Director of Business Development at The Latimer Group. Have you ever been in a meeting with a busy PowerPoint slide beaming on the screen while a confident speaker proudly proclaims, “The numbers speak for themselves!”  You look at the slide and wonder, “Do they?” When a speaker makes this […]

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. And then occasionally we discuss here the other half of the communication […]

In 1990, psychologist Elizabeth Newton asked her Stanford University students to play a simple game. Half of them were told they would be “tappers,” and their job was to tap the rhythm of one of several universally known songs, like “Happy Birthday.” The other half of the students were asked to be “listeners,” and their […]