Listening

Winston Churchill once famously said “the most important thing about education is the appetite.” We teach and coach communication skills all day, every day, here at The Latimer Group. And we see all kinds of people walk into our workshops. We see the willing, the unwilling, the motivated, the unmotivated… and everything in between. Some […]

Communicating with empathy might be the most important skill you can master. Why so?  Because it’s quite possible that machines are going to be dramatically better at almost – almost – everything else, and maybe much sooner than we expect. What we know for sure is that artificial intelligence (AI) is already very much woven […]

Today’s post was written by Brett Slater, Chief Social Media Officer at The Latimer Group. In addition to my work with The Latimer Group, I also work in the tap room of a local craft brewery in the tourist town of Boothbay, Maine. On any given summer Saturday, I interact with literally hundreds of people […]

It takes less than 30 seconds for people to decide what kind of person they think you are. What a quaint idea! In fact, Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov have demonstrated that study participants make judgments about a person’s competence and trustworthiness in as little as a tenth of a second. One of the […]

[Author’s Note: This post was originally written in September 2019, right as my son was starting fourth grade.] My son started fourth grade this week, and on his first day he brought home something from his teacher that I found profound and inspiring. As he was excitedly recounting his first day, and telling us about […]

Stereotyping… I thought we weren’t doing this anymore? I thought that as a society we had realized that making broad generalizations about a person based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, or demographic was no longer acceptable. Well, I guess Good Morning America host Lara Spencer didn’t get the memo. Or at least, the version […]

We work with our clients all the time on message development. We think that figuring out what you want or need to say is critical to great communication in today’s world. Otherwise, your unorganized, unplanned message will just drift in the background noise of an incredibly loud and busy world. But there is another way to […]

We think and talk about persuasion a lot over here at The Latimer Group. We believe that the ability to use your words to create good outcomes is a critical skill in our world today… this has probably always been true, but perhaps never MORE true than it is today. In a world where communication and information […]

My colleagues and I write and talk all the time about having a message plan. And furthermore, we write and talk all the time about how strong listening skills can make your message planning stronger and easier. But what do we listen for? Listening is great and important, and most people don’t do it very well. But is it enough […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council, July 2019. We all face many moments of persuasion in our careers: convincing an executive to back a new initiative, selling a product or service to a new client, bringing our teams on board to change strategies. But perhaps the most important and nerve-racking persuasion opportunity is much more personal: […]