Communications and story telling

Even difficult conversations are easier and more productive when you use story telling and images.

Three Negotiating Mistakes—and How to Correct Them

Everybody negotiates. Avoid these three negotiating mistakes. We negotiate the big stuff, like salaries and contracts, and we negotiate the little stuff, curfews and who will do the dishes. From my years as an entrepreneur and my coach training, I’ve honed my negotiating skills.  I’m not supposed to make negotiating mistakes, but it happened to me recently. In the end, even though I got what I wanted, the whole process left me feeling that I was in the wrong. My…

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How a Vision Becomes a Reality

Today is the 25th anniversary of Sleepless in Seattle, and my husband, Gary Foster, was the driving creative force behind the film.  Of all the people I’ve learned from in my life, I’ve learned more from him than anyone else about the ability to collaborate, be tactfully assertive, and build a great team in order to realize a common goal and vision. Read his piece on what it took to turn a good script from a then-unknown writer into a…

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Everything I Need to be Powerful, I Learned in Yoga

“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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Getting Tone Right in Email

https://youtu.be/F-YuO562M0k 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…

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6 Steps to Better Outcomes for Talking to Employees

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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Lisa D. Foster, Ph.D. ACC  is an independent coach. As an Associate Certified Coach by the International Coaching Federation, Lisa honors and abides by the ICF Code of Ethics.  All coaching sessions and consultations are confidential.

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