Business Communication Skills Can Help with More than Just Business You won’t hear this at a job interview, but the fact is, there’s a lot of inter-personal emotion mixed into our daily business lives: People have trouble accepting feedback. People get annoyed with (and are sometimes rude to) their coworkers. Personal situations show up at Read More
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The 3 Rules of Great Pitching
There are two kinds of great pitching: One happens on a baseball diamond. The other happens when employees, entrepreneurs — really, anyone in business — “pitches” a prospect, donor, influencer, or boss to get support for a project or an idea. If you work “outside the home,” you’ve probably given a business pitch, and you’ll Read More
Got One Minute? Build Your Skills With These Five Public Speaking Exercises
How can five public speaking exercises that take just one minute to complete help you become a better public speaker? Well, as with any physical discipline (and public speaking is physical; you speak with your body), a little bit of daily practice can produce more dramatic results than the occasional cram session. Yes, public speaking mastery takes Read More
How to Give an Academic Talk, TED-Style
Giving an Academic Talk in the TED style? Start with a Big Idea and Passion! If you’ve ever seen a TED, TEDx, or TED-style presentation, you already know that they’re very different from standard academic research-based presentations. (They’re different from standard business presentations, too.) This means, to use an expression that I love, You can’t get Read More
Advice to a Worried Speaker: Trust Yourself, and Your Lifetime of Experience
It’s Hard to Trust Yourself When a Speech is Near I recently received this note from a client, Jezra, I’m presenting tomorrow, but I haven’t had much time to practice, and the person who invited me to speak has suggestions he wants to give me tonight. There’s a lot of pressure and things feel off. Do Read More