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…

So you are not outspoken…

Confidence

There are people who come to me for help because they love speaking and want to get better at it. There are people who come to me for help because they are terrified of speaking, because they are desperately uncomfortable being heard and raising their voice, or because their shyness has started to get in…

When tone is more important than content

Funny Stuff

I interrupt our series on communicating with intimacy to bring you a long overdue bit of Friday Silliness. In today’s lesson, Toby Turner – also known as the YouTube personality Tobuscus – demonstrates how tone can completely contradict content.  Alliteration aside, it is a useful lesson. Tobuscus: Dramatic Song   Does your chorus sound like Coldplay?

The bandwagon of uncertainty

Funny Stuff

You know, like, totally whatever? That aggravating upwards lilt of the voice makes you sound like an non-confident teen girl.  I will be merciless when it comes to stripping you of that most wretches of speaking habits! I will also make you watch Taylor Mali’s brilliant freestyle poetry on that very topic. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGAMd-tT6fQ&w=420&h=315] Y’know.

Fully Present

Famous speakers

This past weekend was the Canadian thanksgiving holiday, which I spent happily cocooned in a triptophan-induced semi-coma.  Thankfully, I had the American presidential debates to giggle over while recovering from the turkey binge. Political debates are quite possibly the best fora to observe the spectrum of speaking and rhetorical competency.  The unpredictability of the politicians’…

I can has poker face?

Funny Stuff

Control over your facial expressiveness is a boon.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the ability to let your face show people what you want when you want is worth many, many hours of embarrassing practice in front of your bathroom mirror. The importance of this skill is demonstrated beautifully by Denver…

Charisma matters

Business behaviour

I’ve spent most of the past week flat on my back fighting a vicious sinus infection.  Unable to string together a single coherent sentence in written or spoken word, I settled for laying on the couch watching lousy television and feeling sorry for myself. Much of that layabout time was spent watching old episodes of the…

Smile, damn you, smile!

Performance

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…