Listening

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council, February 2019 Think about the best leader you’ve ever seen. What made her compelling? Many of us would say, “She just had ‘it.’ Her charisma was off the charts.” It may be hard to believe, but “it” — that combination of confidence, authority and personality that makes an executive engaging and inspiring — isn’t necessarily an […]

One of the things I listen closely for in our workshops is a certain kind of vocabulary that we call “weak” or “qualifying” language. And when I hear it, my coaching sensors start ringing loudly. Words or phrases like “sort of,” “kind of,” “pretty much,” or “basically,” can be toxic for the speaker and dramatically […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council, December 2018. One of our central tenets in teaching persuasive communication is to know your audience. Having an informed sense of your audience’s needs, concerns, and context (did the company just suffer a drop in the stock price, did the VP in the room just get a big promotion, […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council, December 2018. When we go into a meeting, we all usually have some sort of plan for what we want to say. But how many of us make a listening plan? Now, listening may seem like the simplest thing in the world to do, and the idea of taking a […]

In our communication workshops, we work with clients from many countries, across several continents, and of course, in varying age groups, from just-out-of-college Millennials to Gen X’ers to late Baby-Boomers. In our work with these individuals, we often find a disconnect between how the generations speak to each other. These differences across the generations exist […]

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, with a major milestone looming on the horizon. It could be parenthood. It could be experience in my job. It could be the influence of some of the people […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council, September 2018. As a coach, I see a lot of different kinds of speakers: those who are confident and controlled and others who are nervous and still figuring out how to get their point across. And I’ve had people ask, “Don’t you sometimes want to laugh at how bad some […]

My colleagues and I always talk about the importance of knowing your audience, and preparing for your work communication correctly. We work with our clients on their ability to clarify the message and the ask, and to try to anticipate what the audience will care about, and the questions or objections they may have. And […]

America lost more than a well-known politician on Saturday, August 25. We lost one of the last leaders of a breed that is not only dying, but might perhaps now be extinct. We lost a politician who was not afraid to speak his mind, but always did so with respect and decency for those with […]

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 […]