Early to rise, first to speak

Confidence, Discipline

I am an early riser.  Or rather, I pretend to be an early riser.   My alarm goes off at 5:05 a.m. I start drag myself out of bed with varying degrees of success. This morning I assiduously avoided hitting the snooze button, immediately hauled myself up, and staggered straight into the wall on the…

Experts of Everything

Audience, Confidence

Don’t be intimidated by the level of prestige of your audience members. Just because a room is filled with C-level execs doesn’t mean they are collectively CEO of Everything. Speaking to a crowd of academics and researchers? Don’t cower before their gigantic brains.  I’ve met plenty of PhDs that couldn’t find their backsides with both…

In praise of flexibilty

Discipline

We need to exercise a fair amount of flexibility if we are going to get our message out there. I’m not just talking about flexibility in terms of how you express yourself, or to who you direct your art, or even the content of the art (whatever your art may be).  I’m talking about flexibility…

White Space

Performance, Style

You may have noticed a shift in the way documents and emails have been formatted. Once upon a time, the mighty indent ruled the start of every paragraph. Now the indent has been largely supplanted by an empty line. I am not entirely sure where or why this trend began. At first, it seemed confined…

Guest Post: Accent Modification

Techniques

Today I’m bringing you a new feature of my blog: special posts written by guests with unique communication expertise. This post was written by Lynda Katz Wilner of Successfully Speaking. Lynda’s full bio and links to her work can be found at the end of this post.  Enjoy!   When is an Accent a Problem? Most…

Pages from kid’s books

Performance, Tactics, Uncategorized

Reading out loud is one of the best ways to get in speaking practice. Whether you’re working on diction, expression, breath work, or something else, grabbing some reading material makes practice a lot easier than taxing your brain trying to come up with original content.   Just about anything can be fodder for your speaking…

Headspace / Workspace

Creating

For years, my primary workspace was a desk in an office.  For a few brief, shining months, I even had my own office with a door!   At all of these jobs, I had quite a bit of time to twiddle my thumbs and work on my own projects. It should have been perfect: I…