Find tips on how you can become a better communicator. My blog explains how to use communications techniques like images to make your point.
Only twice in my life I’ve said to my husband: “I will never have dinner with those people again.” The first time was years ago. Two rising stars in my husband’s industry, a husband and wife team, invited us and two other couples to their house for a dinner party. I was seven months pregnant and still teaching, which made me the odd one out on both counts. They talked shop all night until one terrifying moment over the main…
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“Planking is a powerful pose.” This is the sort of thing my yoga teacher proclaims to exhort me to sweat out another minute. Surely there is some power involved here, but who knew it was the same kind of power that you might witness in a persuasive meeting, a TED talk, or a board meeting? I trust my yoga teacher implicitly, and as it turns out, it happens that she knows a thing or two about what it takes to…
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I feel sorry for this guy. Not because his car is jacked up–it’s a commercial after all–but because, as an actor, he has the same script as a 16-year-old girl getting surprised with a car for her birthday. His job is to make us feel sorry for him, but the words are not going to get him there. He only has tone to do it. The commercial is effective because he and the girl get the tone right. There is…
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An astounding number of managers and business leaders, 67% of them, report being uncomfortable communicating with their employees. That discomfort is about half attributable to the difficulty of delivering tough messages to employees, from feedback to company initiatives. It also includes a fair share of people who find it difficult to communicate even good news to employees. It’s difficult for many bosses to even deliver positive feedback like crediting others with good ideas (16%) or praising employees for their achievements…
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“I have a dream.” It’s rightly famous, perhaps one of the most memorable lines ever spoken. So, why do we remember some phrases and not others? More importantly: How do we say something in a way that other people, like our teams, remember our message? Martin Luther King knew exactly how to write so that people will remember the key message. Repetition, he knew, was important. And a lot of it. He’d used it in his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech,…
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