Meetings

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 […]

Showing your audience respect has a lot of great payoffs. It makes your audience feel engaged and positive, it can enable a culture of buy-in, in which people feel committed not only to execute a plan or implement a new product but to make it succeed… and it can make you a more specific, persuasive […]

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, is a merger shaking everything up?) allows you to craft […]

Over the course of this blog, we write frequently about the important ingredients for great communication… clarity and brevity chief among them. Today we touch on a third critical ingredient: context. Context is critical. Context creates relevance. Context helps your audience engage and listen. Context helps your audience care. We are all time starved. We are all attention deprived, to varying […]

Have you ever run a virtual meeting — over the phone or by video — and felt like no one was on the other end of the line? Have you ever asked a question and been met with what feels like an ocean of silence? Have you ever wondered how to create more engagement? Sure, […]

Simple idea today, that comes up in our coaching sessions all the time. My colleagues and I talk constantly about great communication skills, and all the things that help create those skills. We believe that when we take the time to prepare for our meetings, presentations and calls, we will do a much better job creating success, and […]

This post was written by Hannah Morris, Facilitator and Coach at The Latimer Group.   Situational awareness – being aware of what is going on around us – is a crucial element of successful communication and connection. It starts with paying attention to and getting familiar with a baseline of what is normal, what can be expected. Once […]

Quite some time ago, we got some bad news from a vendor we used to work with. A major deadline was going to be missed, and a deliverable we were counting on was not going to arrive on time. We had discussed this deadline with our vendor openly and emphatically as being important to us. […]

Do you find it easy to persuade people? That’s a broad question, with an answer that is likely to be some version of, “sometimes.” Whether someone is easily persuaded depends on a lot. The size of the ask, the environment and situation you’re in, the kind of person you’re trying to persuade, and other variables can all play […]

Have you ever sat through a meeting, or a conference call, or a presentation, and thought to yourself… “Oh my god… I wish this person would get to the point…“? Yeah. Me too. Many, many times. We all know what it feels like to have our time wasted by someone who just won’t, or can’t, […]