How are your emails doing?

Has anyone ever told you “don’t take this the wrong way, but…” Where did your head immediately go upon hearing that statement? I’m willing to bet is was not to a place of productive objectivity. Email seems to require the “don’t take this the wrong way” disclaimer more than any other form of communication. For…

Read more

Confidence Isn’t Dominance

This post is an excerpt from a project I’m currently working on: The Little Book of Big Confidence     Here’s a pernicious myth about confidence:  Confident people are dominant. Utter hogwash. It’s easy to think that dominance indicates confidence. After all, people who speak louder than others, or take up all the space, or…

Read more

The Twin Killers of Business Communication

Managers, business owners, and professionals of all stripes take note – there are killers lurking in your communications. They undermine your words, cast doubt on your trustworthiness, and make people question your judgement. They can create breakdowns in communication between team members, between departments, and most certainly between your business and your customers. The killers’…

Read more

How do you define confidence?

Confidence is a subject I get asked about a lot. I’m currently working on a mini-book about that very topic – this blog post is an excerpt from the book draft.   Nearly everybody I work with believes that confidence is something other people have and they do not. When they try to define confidence,…

Read more

Are you ‘Authentic’?

Have you ever wondered what people mean when they say ‘be authentic?’ Lord knows I have. Authenticity is a pretty popular buzzword when it comes to speaking and content creation. It comes up over and over as a magic sauce of connection and persuasion (and sales). If you want your audience to like you, to…

Read more

The Top 5 Public Speaking Sins

  I know you’ve been there – sitting in an audience listening to a speaker and wondering “Why am I listening to this and when is it going to end?” Such is the agony of sitting through a terrible speech.  But what makes a speech terrible? This is something I get asked a lot. Differences…

Read more

The Royal We: Trump’s Inauguration Speech

  “L’état, c’est moi.”  -Louis XIV    In my blog a couple weeks ago I alluded to writing a post exploring Trump’s use of the Royal “We” in his inauguration speech. And even though we’re all exhausted from the non-stop flurry of news over his every tweet, phone call, and administrative faux-pas, I’ve finally rallied…

Read more

Your secret weapon: Power up!

  Bet you thought I’d be going over the presidential inauguration speeches, eh? Not today! I’ll do a post about it later, as there was some interesting stuff going on. I was live tweeting during the inauguration, though – click here to see my in-the-moment thoughts regarding the rhetoric. Check my tweets from January 20th.   Communication…

Read more

This resolution is pure fun!

Happy 2017, everyone! My New Year’s Eve was relatively sedate. We spent the afternoon with a group of our friends, and after dinner I bundled my little ones home to get them to bed on time, and then sent my husband back to our friends’ place to continue the festivities (he definitely deserved a night…

Read more