Meetings

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: […]

In our coaching and training, we end up discussing the interview process all the time. Many of our clients interview regularly for promotions within their company. And almost all of our clients have to conduct interviews with others, for positions they are trying to fill on their own teams. Part of our coaching process is to ask […]

I recently got a great email from a client named Colin. We’ve done extensive work with his company over the last five years, and Colin will occasionally reach out and give me a great idea for a blog post or a podcast. Colin listed for me the ways that his colleagues can reach him: work email (which […]

There is this flawed perception that comes up in workshops all the time. And that perception is that “presence” is primarily created by the way one dresses, acts and speaks. We hear it all the time. First-time participants in our workshops want to separate the overall presentation performance into separate buckets: “Okay, let’s work on […]

We had a great conversation with clients recently, in one of our Persuasive Communication Skills Workshops. And the topic of this conversation was typical. We were discussing with participants the need for getting to the point in the 21st century business world. And several of the participants were politely but firmly pushing back, concerned that I was coaching […]

Your audience will only remember a small percentage of what you say. Some studies suggest it will be less than 20%. Fact. Other studies suggest that the average adult attention span is now about 8 seconds. Bummer. So what do you do about it? Focus on all three aspects of the audience experience: Make sure […]

Here are some stats that will shock you: The average American employee attends 62 meetings per month, half of which are described by those same workers as a “total waste of time.” That translates into 31 hours per month, per employee of unproductive time. In addition, 45% of those polled felt “overwhelmed” by the number […]

Originally posted with the Forbes Coaches Council, April 2019 Maybe this has happened to you: You walk into a conference room fully confident that you’ve prepared well and put together a crisp, persuasive presentation that will instantly wow your audience. The proposal you’ve developed is clearly the right choice, and you know the numbers that support your […]

So often in preparing to communicate, we make a fundamental mistake: we enter a messenger mindset. Rather than establishing a clear goal and aiming to persuade our audience, we set out to inform, to update, to share. On this path, we end our inquiry with a period: here’s what I need to say, full stop. But […]