There are times to take risks and times to play it safe. I write frequently about taking risks with your content. Experiment. Try something new. Put yourself out there. If it doesn’t work, do a quick post-mortem, figure out what happened, then try again before the fear monster takes over and chokes you. A caveat…
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…
I was at a convention this weekend, and while in the venue’s public bathroom I heard someone say something really familiar: “I don’t know what I’m going to stay on the panel. I don’t know why I said I’d do this. I’m going to start babbling and everyone there will think I’m an idiot.” So…
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…
In my talks on communication and public speaking, I commonly address the flight-or-fight response that difficult speaking situations trigger. While I do train people on how to physically manage their distress symptoms (such as shallow breathing, elevated blood pressure, and the like), the way you perceive the stress response matters hugely. As McGonigal points out,…
The other day I was working with a client, and I gave him a section from a political commentary article to read aloud. He glanced over the article, which was about Justin Trudeau and the recent Liberal Party leadership race. We briefly chatted about Trudeau’s famous father and the current buzz around the newly elected Liberal…
I took a couple of weeks away from blogging, speaking, computers, and just about everything else communication. This was a refreshing, if unplanned break. As my wee boy was in a major growth spurt, I needed time to make up for a lot of broken, unsettled sleep and dial down my daily activities a little.…
“Hey, we need you to fill a space in our program. This speaker just backed out, see, and it’s too late to find someone outside the organization to fill their space. The presentation needs to be related to Topic XYZ. Don’t worry, you’ll do fine – you’re so good at winging it.” I shuddered every…
I have and will always maintain that a weapon every speaker should carry around in their arsenal is the ability to fire up a genuine beaming smile on demand. Actually, scratch that statement. Everyone, speaker or no, should learn how to smile on cue. And by smile, I mean the sort of eye-crinkling, cheek raising…
Acting is part of life. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we spent a significant portion of our day in one performance or another. Life demands all of us to be a bit of an actor, and most people are remarkably adept at this. We perform in front of our spouses and friends. We act…
