7 Oct What’s Your Theme?
Technical and business presentations can be difficult for both speakers and listeners. Using a theme sentence will be very helpful. A theme is the most important idea or bit of information that you want your listeners to take away. If they forget everything else, what is the one thing you want them to remember? That is your theme.
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19 Jun How to Maintain Eye Contact When Speaking
Eye contact is generally considered to be the most important visual re-enforcer a speaker has. Listeners like to be looked at. This is particularly true in persuasive business speaking. The American business culture relies heavily on the “look ’em straight in the eye” approach.
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26 Sep Learning to Listen
Hearing and listening are not the same process. Hearing is the physical act of sound striking the eardrum. Listening is differentiating among those sounds. Hearing is an involuntary and reflective act. Listening is a voluntary and initiative act. As you read these words, you are hearing sounds in the room or outside the building. You are probably hearing an air-conditioning system or a furnace, or voices in the hallway. Perhaps you are hearing street traffic or an airplane. Hearing these sounds simply means that the sounds are striking your eardrum. It’s not until you focus on these sounds that you are actually listening to them. Now that we’ve mentioned them, do you hear the sounds around you? Are you listening to them? In a business environment, you will hear many sounds that could demand your attention. (more…)
31 May The Best Choice
How many decisions do you make in a day? Hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe many thousands…?
26 Oct Podcast: The Only 3 Ways to Convince Anybody of Anything
Being persuasive is the topic most often requested by our clients. We train people all over the world – Fortune 500 executives, managers in companies of all sizes, entrepreneurs, politicians, athletes, and educators – who tell us again and again: they want to be more convincing. (more…)
18 Aug Man vs Beast
What a tragedy in Charlottesville. From a speech coaching perspective, this is yet he recent another indication that our species has not entirely evolved to the point where we can talk and listen to one another.
It was Aristotle who first pointed out that the human ability to talk and listen is what differentiates us from the forest animals. Yet, we still see the presence of physical violence as a means of communication between members of our species. (more…)