Masterful Communication: 4 Books You Need

I have read, studied and use the techniques from all four on a daily basis. A phenomenal $60 investment...

Slide:ology on Amazon (Used from $20.95)

Presentation Zen on Amazon(Used from $17.86)

Made to Stick on Amazon(Used from $14.00)

Brain Rules on Amazon (Used from $17.78)

Masterful Communication: Handling Nervousness

Click over to the Authenticity Rules blog to see how to turn speaking nervousness into a piece of cake...

C - Change your perspective
A - Audience-focused
K - Knowledge
E - Experience

Go there now

Masterful Communication: Filtering and Indexing

Fifty years ago, access to information was king. It was mostly kept in universities and libraries.

Ten years ago, the information itself was king. Access was digitally pushed/pulled into every household.

Today, the ability to filter (exposing yourself to only the information you need or desire) and the ability to index (the physical, digital and intellectual act of organizing information) share the throne.

Your leadership leverage is determined by your ability to gain clarity and then transfer that clarity to others. To get better at that, get better at filtering and indexing.

On Tour: May 16 - OKC to Pullman, Washington

I will be traveling and speaking solid from May 16 to May 30. During this period my posts will be about what I'm learning, what I'm saying and how I'm saying it....

LEARNING:

Sitting on my first of seven plane rides on this trip, I read a piece in the May 16, 2008 The Week magazine about some recent research indicating that human intelligence can be just as much a function of development as it is about genetics. I.e. - it is possible to get fundamentally smarter. You and I aren't "stuck" with the IQ we have today. We can improve it through mental training. Good thing for some of us!

This particular study showed significant gains in the participants' fluid intelligence - their ability to solve problems, use abstract reasoning and be quick on their feet. Particularly as leaders and communicators, those three tasks are critical to our effectiveness. If you are going to add anything to your life development list this week, add "find out how to improve my fluid intelligence."


SPEAKING:

I also was able to put together my flow for my 30-min. keynote tonight in Pullman to the 3,000+ attendees at the Washington FFA State Conference. While planning, I focused on including personal stories, unique ways of talking about age-old topics, bringing everything back to the client's expectations of my content and including humor, serious points and a touch of audience interaction. Should be fun.

Masterful Communication: Dance With the One That Brought Ya'

The next time you give a presentation, remember to dance with the one that brought ya'. Look for those handful of audience members who are totally with you, checked in, listening up, leaning forward, and "dancing the dance" with you.

Have a conversation with these few people. Make and maintain eye contact with them. Read and respond to their body language. These dance partners will motive, energize and inspire you.

Your new-found energy will bring along the folks who just need to be asked in the right way to dance. Most importantly, forget about the few people who won't dance because they don't like the song, don't like your style, or just don't like to dance at all.

Masterful Communication: The Official 7 Authenticity Rules

If you are a reader of this blog, but haven't been to the Authenticity Rules blog (my presentation skills blog), the following PDF file will introduce you to the rules and hopefully encourage you to check out, study and sign up for your weekly dose of Authenticity!

Right-click to download the PDF - The 7 Authenticity Rules



(get the free Acrobat Reader)

Fostering Relationships: 10 Ways to Weaken Communication

The following 10 actions weaken our ability to communicate openly and honestly with each other - particularly in a work and/or team environment. For each of the 10, there is a solution (which is really just the opposite of the weak action.)

1. Talking bad about someone not present
Stephen Covey says a great way to build trust with people is to talk up about people not present.

2. Talking about problems without offering solutions
This not only doesn't help anything, it also encourages people to avoid having meaningful conversations with you.

3. Asking for advice and not listening
If you really don't want their opinion or ideas, don't ask.

4. Not seeking clarity
The Alpha and Omega of great communication is clarity. Seek it out at all cost.

5. Telling a lie
It is amazing how simple and equally difficult this is to not do. Read this post to put some framework to why you do it.

6. Avoiding a difficult conversation
Make a commitment to your relationships and make the difficult chats happen. When done properly (measured emotion, authentic feelings, mutual respect, separation of behavior and person, etc.) the upsides greatly outweigh the downsides.

7. Criticizing in public
Encourage in public. Praise unreasonably. Only criticize if you have been asked (from a peer) or if it is part of a feedback session (if you are a supervisor/manager/etc.).

8. Talking in generalities
Like clarity, being specific and concrete in your comments strengthens your ability to communicate effectively.

9. Not meeting regularly
Inertia sets in and we lose track of time. Take time to meet (formally or informally) with your team mates, class mates, spouse, children, etc. and don't do anything but talk about how things are going.

10. Being too self-focused
No matter the communication context (one-on-one, public venue, marketing brochure, etc.), being audience-focused is vital and enabling. Think before you talk. Consider how they will recieve it. Put yourself in their shoes.

Masterful Communication: Listen in on Listening

Today, Thursday March 13, at 1 pm Central Time, you will have the opportunity to learn more about my previous post on Listening Like a Leader via a live teleconference featuring yours truly.

The following link will take you to the Kevin Eikenberry Group's teleconference page to learn how to listen in - no charge.

http://www.remarkable-leadership.com/tss_laubach.asp

Masterful Communication: Listening Like a Leader

We can run through all the basics of listening, but I suspect you have heard them all before...

 

• Maintain eye contact
• Lean forward
• Mirror their body language
• Give response body language
• Don't interrupt
• Don't just wait to talk, but actually listen
• And on and on

If you want to get better at listening, you need more than the old standby suggestions.  You need something more tangible, relevant, and, frankly, interesting.

So, let's look at listening not from a "how do I get the information better" stand point, but rather take a look at how you can get better at processing the information you do get.

It starts with listening like a leader.  The leader behavior patterns relevant to information processing are providing value, changing things for the better, serving others, making the most of every interaction, respecting the viewpoints of others, knowing they don't know everything and being available to others.  Adopting these behavior patterns will allow you to listen like a leader and process information more effectively.

1.  Providing value - As you listen, look for ways to provide value to the other person.  I'm not saying you need to always provide feedback or try to improve upon what they are saying (this could hurt the conversation more than help it), but by adopting this mind set you are putting your attention fully in their world.

2.  Changing things for the better - There are times when your expertise is necessary and the situation is ripe for that expertise to be given.  Take the initiative to listen intently, find the gaps your expert opinion can fill and fill them.  If you are offering critical advice to their situation, they have no doubt you are listening.

3.  Serving others - Stop what you are doing.  Provide full attention to the other person.  Ask questions to get them talking about things they are concerned with.  All these say you are interested in them more than yourself.  One person listening fully to another is a powerful example of service-mindedness.  You are giving everything about you to that person at that moment in time.

4.  Making the most of every interaction - Start your conversations, either with friends, peers or perfect strangers, like you were already in the middle of a conversation with them.  Let your guard down and be you from the very start.  It is amazing how quickly people will open up to you.  Which is why most people don't do this - they don't want others to open up.  They are not interested in listening like a leader - they would rather just move on with their life.  My wife always points out service folks (toll booth collectors, drive-thru attendants, etc.) are always telling me their life story.  The reason is because I am natural and authentic with them from the very start.  And I ask questions and respond to their answer.

5.  Knowing they don't know everything - This is the simplest pattern to recognize and sometimes the hardest to adopt.  People who think they know everything (and you know at least two or three) are passively and actively encouraging others to not talk.  They send signals that turn people away from them, intellectually and physically.  They don't listen like a leader.  When you get ok with knowing you don't know everything, you get ok with saying you don't understand something (giving someone else the chance to share their expertise), you end up listening more (giving someone else the chance to talk more) and you appear (because you are) more authentic, natural, imperfect, etc.

6.  Being available to others - This last point taps into a leader's desire to mentor others.  Being available to others doesn't mean you have to set up formal mentoring relationships.  It does mean in order to listen like a leader, you have to put yourself in situations, seek out situations, encourage situations and fully commit to situations where you are providing value to someone else just by being an ear to lean on.  Say yes when someone asks to bounce an idea off you.  Say yes when a younger and/or less experience peer asks for a little of your time.  Be available to share what you can. 

Come to think of it, if you model these six behavior patterns, you won't just be listening like a leader, you will be living like a leader.  Good luck.

Skill Assessment: Personality and Presentations

A few weeks ago I did a post on my Authenticity Rules blog about how your personality impacts your presentations.  If you lead workshops, trainings or give speeches, go check it out...

How Does Your Personality Impact Your Presentations?

Masterful Communication: The Improved Elevator Speech - OTIS Style

In the 1800's Elisha Graves Otis invented a safety device that prevented elevators from falling if the hoisting cable broke. Today Otis Elevator Company is the largest elevator company in the world. Of course what Elisha didn't invent was a safety device to prevent conversations from falling silent in elevators and during other potentially awkward moments. Nor did he invent a method for maximizing those short windows of time many of us have to communicate our ideas to a potential buyer, our resume to a future boss or our background to a new friend.

The "elevator speech" is a time to quickly communicate a message; normally 30-seconds or less. Practice the following formula for any messages you know you will be called to give in the next few days during networking opportunities, business meetings, or socializing (who you are, what your organization is all about, selling an idea, etc.)

O - Opening
First impressions are made in the first three seconds. The eight-second number we have all heard for years is actually the time it takes for someone to either confirm or deny their first thoughts. This means your first words need to be intentional, meaningful and purposeful. They should start taking the listener right where you want them to go. Not an appetizer, but the first bites of the main course.

T - Target
The words you use depends on the recipient. Even within the same context (ex. - sharing an idea about a project to your peers), the words you use will change depending on the person's position, their familiarity with you and the idea, and the purpose of that particular interaction. This may seem obvious, but we can get lazy and very self-focused in situations like this. Being target focused means you have your attention on them. Leaving a "you are more important than me" residue on a conversation is just as important as the words you say during it.

I - Intentional
This speaks to how you engage, why you engage and where you put the focus of your OTIS conversation. Most times you will have to do the initiation because people are primarily interested in talking about themselves or not talking at all. So, be bold and talk first.

Secondly, the biggest question we have when someone starts a conversation with us is "what is this person's intentions?" Answer that question quickly. Getting intentions out in the open will either grease the wheels of the conversation or shut it down quickly. But, better to not have a conversation that the other person really doesn't want to have than to waste time for both of you.

Finally, you will benefit greatly by initiating the conversation in the context of something that interests them, not you. This is easier said than done, but masterful conversationalist get things said quickly and spend most of the conversation listening and asking questions.

S - Simple
Your formula for what is in your elevator speech should be simple. Your preparation should be in bullet point format. Your words should be void of confusing terms or "industry jargon." Communicating in a simple manner is about cutting through the noise and gaining their attention quickly. Stories, while sometimes too long for an elevator speech time frame, are great at simple because they are concrete and visual.

Masterful Communication: Seth Godin Tip

For your next presentation...

• Put up a slide with a simple, but powerful visual (no text).


• Create an "I want to know what that means" moment by delaying explanation or just allowing for a few moments of audience examination.


• Explain the connection between the visual and your content - it should be a leap to connect the two, but not a huge leap.

This tip from Seth comes from Garr Reynolds' new book on giving simple, yet powerful presentations - Presentation Zen.

Masterful Communication: Authenticity Rules Blog

My presentation coaching blog has a new home and a new focus. I have blogged for a year at http://speak.terapad.com and produced 50 posts on everything from AV set-up, overcoming nervousness, storytelling, and many more topics relevant to novice and advanced communicators.

The new blog, Authenticity Rules, will cover much of the same information, but everything will funnel down to how to be more authentic before, during and after your presentations. Check it out, subscribe and forward this link to three friends who present on a regular basis...

Masterful Communication: Memorization Station

I don't often advocate memorizing content for presentations. However, there are times when you do need to memorize a portion of a presentation and very often presentation outlines need to be memorized. Following is a formula you can use to guarantee recall during your next keynote, workshop, class speech or professional presentation.

Memorization Station

You will remember any written text if you follow this formula. The Memorization Station works because of repetition, input varieties and word anchors. I once memorized a 30-page sales presentation using this formula.

Persistent Preparation Prevents Poor Performance
1. Your content should be as complete as possible a minimum of 21 days before your presentation. Complete doesn’t mean that you won’t make adjustments in the final three weeks, but this formula only truly works if you don’t make major adjustments mid-stream. The three week time period allows the material to make its way deeper into your memory.

Read it, Write it, Speak it, Hear it
2. Write your content out word for word at least once. You can type it for organization, editing and saving purposes, but actually write it out for memorization purposes. Next, read your content, word for word, out loud a minimum of 20 times start to finish. This step is really working on your brain strengthening the synapses created when you wrote it out. When you read a sheet of paper, your brain is taking a picture of that entire page and storing it in its entirety; even though you have to read it one word at a time.

Chunk it Down
3. Put your content into paragraphs. Number your paragraphs. Begin memorizing them one at a time. Do not go on to the next paragraph until the one before it is totally memorized and you can say it on command. Write out each paragraph on an index card and keep the one you are currently memorizing (and only that one) with you at all times. This step disciplines your brain to think about that piece of content as one piece of information. Therefore, if your content contains 10 paragraphs, your brain is essentially only needing to recall 10 unique elements during your presentation.

Outline it
4. After you have thoroughly memorized your content, take an index card and number out only the first words of each paragraph. This one card should be all you need to study from this point on. Most people stumble in a presentation trying to recall their very first words and/or when they have to move from paragraph to paragraph (major thought shifts.)

Good luck!

Masterful Communication: Confidence

Regarding giving presentations, you can't improve confidence by dealing with confidence. You improve your confidence by absolutely knowing your subject and by making a connection with your audience as soon as possible and as often as possible.

Masterful Communication: Experts Aren't Always the Best Choice

When you need to communicate the details of something (a product's benefit, a new project concept, etc.), asking an expert can be the wrong move. The reason is experts don't remember what it is like not being an expert. This leads to information overload and leaving out simple details.

It is similar to me trying to explain something on the computer to my grandfather. It can't happen. I know too much about computers and grandpa knows too little. I have to tell my dad, who knows enough about computers to understand me and to provide good explanations to grandpa. When I try to talk to grandpa about computers, I leave out too many basics that I just take for granted.

A good example of this dynamic is product cross-selling. Don't have the product expert try to explain the features and benefits to novices (unless they are great at making things simple and visual.) Utilize an intermediary as a go-between.

Masterful Communcation: 5 Quick Speaking Tips

• Index your information with keywords


• Prepare, but don't overprepare


• Make direct eye contact with the audience


• Be authentic


• Have a conversational speaking style

Click on the following link to watch an interview I did on September 10, 2007 for Oklahoma City's News Channel 5 about these speaking tips...

www.koco.com/video/14136094/index.html?taf=okl

Masterful Communication: The Seven Speaking Skills

The following seven skills are at the core of what we teach to our professional, pageant and student presentation coaching clients...

1. Authenticity is your number one goal. The best communicators know who they are, have a real-life bond with their content and strive to make a genuine connection with their audience. The biggest challenge on the road to speaking success is getting out of your own way and letting the best of the real you shine through.

2. Nervousness and excitement are chemically exactly the same. To the human body, there is no difference between being very nervous and very excited. Don't worry about getting rid of your nerves. Begin down the path of controlling your nerves by simply thinking about them differently. Accept that it is ok to be nervous and leverage your nerves to keep you on your toes.

3. Engage your audience quickly to control their attention. Almost as important as controlling your nerves is controlling the audience's focus. Get them involved in your presentation right from the start. Ask a question. Have them share with a partner. Get them physically moving. Make them laugh. Etc.

4. Send your message through the CVS test. In today's noisy world, the most effective messages cut to the core quickly. Make sure your messages are Concrete (don't make me search too hard for the meaning), Visual (help me see it) and Simple (I'm busy - your message shouldn't be.) The quickest way to achieve CVS is through good story-telling.

5. Master the art of indexing and filtering. Great presenters are great at preparing their content. They index information based on a set range of categories, topics, types of content, etc. they deem necessary for their presentations. We refer to these as buckets. Then they fill these buckets as full as they can. The important step comes during preparation - filtering down the information based on authenticity and the CVS test.

6. Your body language sends thousands of messages while your words only send a few. The most important body language is eye contact. You should make it with specific people and make it often. Think of any presentation as a string of smaller conversations with a number of different people. Beyond that, think moderation and variety when it comes to hand movements, walking, pace, volume, and facial expressions.

7. You can (and should) develop your ability to communicate. Communicating effectively is one-part technical, one-part mental and one-part habitual. No matter your experience level, all three of these can be sharpened and improved. More importantly, because our relationships, influence level and, in many cases, earning ability are dramatically impacted by our speaking skills, you should work to implement these skills this week. If you need more help, contact us. We would love to work with you.

Masterful Communication: Our Way is the Better Way

We hear all the time there are two sides to every conflict - your way and their way.

Expert Leaders understand the power of seeing all three sides to every opportunity to create solutions:  your way, their way and Our way.  When we think, speak and act with Our way in mind, it drastically improves our ability to reach better solutions and reach them in a better way.   Our way also places more importance on the relationship than on the results.  Expert Leaders see leadership as a team sport and relationships are always their most important trump card.

Start with Our way today in your conversations.  Here's how...


1.  Actively listen first.  (Learn more here)

2.  Seek to understand their position first in concrete terms.  Gain a solid understanding of where they are coming from and why.  You know your way intimately.  However, if Our way is going to come to fruition, you need to deeply understand their way.

3.  When you give your opinion and viewpoint, make certain you give it in terms of you, not other people.  Own your way.

4.  Truncate the time you focus on the problem and expand the time you work on solutions.  Problems are the past.  Solutions are the future.  My way and your way are about the past.  Our way is about the future.

5.  Give more credit to the other person for Our way than they deserve.  This type of resolution system is just as much about fostering the relationship as it is about developing a creative solution.

Masterful Communication: A Better Brainstorm

You may be called from time to time to either lead and/or be involved in a group decision making process. These meetings can be effective or ineffective based on the process used. I was called to lead a group of 200 educators and staff members through the process of creating a new vision statement for the school district. We followed this technique and, had we at least 30 more minutes, we could have finished with a final product.

FYI: I didn't tell the group this before we started so as to not hinder creativity, but the best vision statements are short, simple, concrete and visual. They don't include everything we want to do in the future. They only include the most critical element(s) of a new future.

1. Break the big group of 200 into mixed (different roles, responsibilities, etc.) smaller groups of 8-10.

2. Have each group pick one of these four discussion areas: What is our greatest strength? What is our greatest challenges? What words should be included in the statement? Where could the vision statement be used? (Your questions may be different based on the type and nature of your final product.)

3. Give each group an easel pad sheet, a marker and 40-50 stickers. The poster paper and marker are used to capture ideas. Each group picks a discussion leader/scribe. This person numbers the ideas, labels the sheet (which discussion area), and signs their name on the bottom. The scribe should write very legibly.

4. Each group has exactly five minutes to discuss ideas. Do not judge ideas. This first round is about quantity. KEY POINT: the discussion leader/scribe cannot make judgements or throw out ideas - they only write. This is because they could have too much influence and power over the group discussion. They can encourage, ask for clarity and ask questions to get ideas flowing (not judgmental questions though.)

5. After five minutes each group gets a different group's discussion sheet. The new sheet has to be on one of the other three discussion areas. Their task is to add a few new ideas to the list, but mainly to go back through the previous ideas and make them more C.V.S. - Concrete, Visual and Simple. Round two is about quality.

6. After the five minutes is up, each group hangs up their poster of ideas. Each person then grabs three to five stickers and everyone walks around the room and puts a sticker next to an idea that THEY THINK SHOULD BE IN THE VISION STATEMENT. This is a critical step. Only vote on ideas that you think should make the cut.

7. After this step, we ran out of time. However, the next step would have been to take the most popular ideas, have each team get a new easel pad sheet and write down just those (preferably less than 10) and discuss pros and cons. The main output goal here is for each team to whittle the ideas down to their version of a great vision statement.

8. At this point, each team gets one last poster paper and writes their final first draft of their vision statement. These are hung up. Everyone gets ONE STICKER and votes on their favorite one.

9. You can do two things here. Take the winning vote as is or take the best parts of the top two or three and collectively make a final one. This really all depends on how the final ideas are structured.

10. This is a very thorough and quick process for taking a number of ideas, filtering them down and creating a collaborative piece.

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Masterful Communication: Putting the Power Back Into PowerPoint

Click over to my speaking blog to access 10 quick strategies for improving your PowerPoint presentations.

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Masterful Communication: 3947202734 or Bob

You enter a room labeled The Numbers Room. You see fifty people walking around with name tags on and they look like this...

3947202734
2739475214
0481659123
3927511198
2847111873

You then leave and enter a different room labeled The Names Room. You see fifty different people walking around with name tags. Only this time the name tags look like this...

Bob
Steve
Julie
Rick
Tom

Question: In which room would you expect to remember more people's names? The answer, of course, is The Names Room. Remember this the next time you need to deliver a message that you want to stick. The people in The Numbers Room might very well be thoroughly and accurately labeled, but the chances their names would be remembered is slim to none.

To deliver a "rememorable" message, leverage the hidden secrets of the Names Room...

1. Short. Less information is more.

2. Easily Recognizable. Short names and unique faces work for humans. Give your message a short name and only show its "unique face" and you have a winner.

3. Easily Recallable. Look away and spell Bob in your mind. Now look away and "spell" 3947202734 in your mind... big difference. Use simple words and phrases to "stickify" your message.

4. Easily Transferable. How many Bobs have you ever heard of?

5. Overcomes the Knowledge Gap. You probably have never seen 3947202734 before. So, your mind has to work harder to try to remember brand new information. However, you have heard, seen and dealt with the name Bob all your life. Find a way to take pre-existing words, concepts, or labels and give new meaning to them (instead of creating words from scratch.)

Go to my speaking blog at http://speak.terapad.com/ to access even more high level presentation tips.

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Masterful Communication: Your Role Determines Your Effectiveness

My business partner, Jonathan Smith - Professional Speaker, Author, and interview coach for hundreds of successful communicators (including the last two Miss Americas), has identified three primary roles people choose when they open their mouth to speak in front of a group.

1. The Speaker - Their focus is the performance. Over time this focus demands perfection. This need for consistency and perfection too often kills authenticity and blocks their credibility.

2. The Educator - Their focus is the information. The information is king. This need for quantity of information creates attention fatigue and disconnects the emotional side of the exchange.

3. The Communicator - Their focus is the transfer. The goal is simply to take what is in the communicator's heart and transfer it to each audience member's mind. Seth Godin says that all communication is a transfer of emotion. Whatever it is you need to accomplish, don't let your need for perfection or a bad case of information overload prevent you from being effective!

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Masterful Communication: Answering Questions Like a Leader

Leadership is a people business. Conversation, dialogue, discussions, disagreements, and agreements are what move the business of people. Trust is what keeps that movement going in a positive and sustainable direction. There are four general methods for how people impact trust based on how they answer questions and deal with situations. Recognizing and understanding how and why each are different is a critical leadership skill (as well as knowing which to use and which not to use based on the situation!)


1. Answer honestly - Because it is the best course of action and you trust the other person to effectively take good truth, as well as not-so-good truth.

2. Answer guardly - Because you are being sensitive to the current situation's needs. There is not misinformation given here. There is just information given in a selective manner when you know giving all the information at that particular time and place will not be in the best of interest of you or the person asking the question. Trust is at risk here, but the threat level is low.

3. Answer politically - Because you are being sensitive to the current and other directly and/ indirectly connected situations' needs. This is very similar to two, except this situation is more complex with more moving parts. Clarity statements briefly and simply explaining why certain things can't be said are critical. This is because you will have to hold more information back than normally and sometimes that is on a recognizable level. You don't want to break trust, but you also want to protect relationships.

4. Answer dishonestly - Because you are not concerned with maintaining or building trust within the current and/or connected situations. Very rarely do highly effective leaders, who are trustworthy, have to resort to number four.

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Masterful Communication: Presentation Development

While working with an Executive Presentation coaching client today, I helped her gain focus on what she really needs to be spending her presentation time on by taking her through the following steps for each of the major content topics she needed to include in her program...

(This guideline is most valuable with her type of presentation - persuasive.)

1. What is the problem and why are you competent to talk about it? (life-driven)

This speaks to why should they care, as well as why should they listen to you discuss this topic?

2. What are the symptoms? (audience-driven)

This is the connection between the topic and the audience members' lives. How do they know if they are affected by this problem?

3. What are the solutions? (presenter-driven)

What are your unique, authentic and relevant answers to their questions? Are you telling them something they have heard a million times or are you telling them something new?

4. What are the simple, basic tasks to accomplish the solutions? (behavior-driven)

Make it simple and doable today.

5. What is your (the presenter) Unique Position Statement? (stickiness-driven)

This is what will anchor everything you say and do in your presentation. This statement should be short, it should have very unique language to you and your take on your topic, it should be action oriented, it should be postively-driven, not negatively-driven (i.e. - it should tell them what TO DO, not what to STOP DOING), it should be catchy and memorable and it should also be counter-intuitive to get them wanting to know more.


After we went through these steps with her four major content areas, she had more unique, specific and concrete language for what she had been teaching for a long time. This will allow her message and strategies to resonant longer with her audiences!

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Masterful Communication: Passively Strong

In a session today with one of our Executive Coaching clients, we discussed his strategy for how he communicates in meetings with his high level executive peers. He felt like he wasn't being strong enough by not speaking up in meetings everytime he felt he should. However, he also said that he DID speak up when he knew he had an expert opinion or when he felt very strongly about the discussion's issue.

I told him as long as he followed these points of advice when he did speak up, his strategy would continue to serve him well....

1. Use strong language (I believe this, I strongly feel this, etc.)

2. Use inclusive language (This board's strategy is to, Our place is to do, I know we want to, etc.)

3. Be brief and comprehensive (This demands a strong pre-filtering capability of getting right to the heart of the matter)

4. Talk in lists (This will help keep it brief and give others a tracking mechanism)

5. Recognize and point out situations where he is speaking straight from the gut (not much identified supporting data) or vice-versa (not a strong personal belief one way or the other, but a good amount of supporting data).

6. Make certain you do speak up when you feel strongly about something or if you are the resident expert. You can't move up the chain of command just by doing good work. You have to let the right people know about it, also.

After discussing these strategies and validating his current approach, he is now starting to see that his current passive approach to speaking up in high-level meetings actually isn't a weakness. And it won't turn into one if he follows the points above.

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General: Grant Me Leadership...

God grant me...


Vision to see opportunity.

Integrity to be what I say.


Innovativeness to create value.

Wise Judgment to choose right.


Service mindedness to be significant.

Processed Goals to live purposefully.


Emotional Maturity to act with control and grace.

Skill Assessment to engage my strength.


Fostered Relationships to experience the richness of life.

Masterful Communication to bring clarity into an unclear world.

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Masterful Communication: The Language of Leadership

Leadership is influence. Your language determines your influence. Digest this article to super-charge your leadership, your influence and your language...





The Language of Leadership

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Masterful Communication: The Name Tag Guy's Speaking E-Book

Click over to my speaking blog - http://speak.terapad.com - to view a link to a phenomenal (and free) E-Book from Scott Ginsberg, the Name Tag Guy, about writing, delivering and marketing speeches...

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Masterful Communication: Get Past Personality to Productivity

I spent a powerful three hours yesterday with the board members of the National Junior Hereford Association. The workshop was How to Communicate Like a Master and it became a session on how the board can effectively make decisions as a group of "big personality" leaders. (The goal of the entire two-day meeting for the board was to plan two big events coming up this summer.) Here are a few of the "group think" guidelines we developed...

• Have a pre-defined discussion leader. This does not have to be the person with the most authority in the room. It actually works better many times for it not to be.


• If you find you need more information to make decisions in the room, find it now if you can, assign who will track it down if you can't track it down now or don't make the decision now.


• Flip chart your ideas and number the sheets and the bullet points.


• Have a Parking Lot flip chart to capture ideas that you want to revisit, but that will distract from the current conversation.


• The discussion leader needs to hold their tongue on their opinions. They control too much of the conversation flow energy to self-impose their will on the discussion.


• Speak in concrete terms. Who exactly will move that forward? What exactly will that look like?


• Vote first (blindly) on the ideas that have been presented and then offer judgments. You might find that everyone agrees on the same thing and you can save hours of unnecessary banter time.


• Creating ideas is a totally separate process from making judgments on ideas. If you do both at the same time, it steals the energy away from the creation process and it inadvertently stunts the effectiveness of the judgments.

These systems are designed to help groups make better decisions AND to make the decision making process shorter and more effective (better ideas, more ideas, cleaner ideas, opinions from everyone, parliamentary procedure style discussion, etc.). These systems also help strip away these two meeting crasher dynamics...

"The ideas that get discussed come primarily from the biggest personality in the room..."

and

"The people with the most prior experience in the room have better ideas than others..."

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Masterful Communication: The Visual Anchor

Any time you need and/or want a message you are communicating to stick with your audience, build in one or two strong visual anchors. Anymore than that and they will get lost. Any fewer than that and your message will get lost. Just think Sesame Street. Ten bucks says you are thinking of a large yellow bird right now...

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Masterful Communication: Note From Boss To Employees

Get ready to hit print after you visit this post at Execupundit.com....

Note From Boss To Employees

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Masterful Communication: Rhett's Speaking Blog

Since 15% of my training time is spent just doing presentation coaching with corporate and student leaders, I thought it valuable to start up a blog just focused on helping people give better presentations. Subscribe to it, read it, learn from it and speak better...

Rhett's Speaking Blog

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