My heart goes out to everyone affected by coronavirus & COVID19. During times of crisis and uncertainty, it’s easy for anxiety about one area of work or life to affect our communication across the board. In this Communication Q&A, Robert wants some pointers for keeping conversation and communication in his workplace more positive and productive…
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…
“Fearless,” “bold,” “brave,” and other variations are descriptions lots of people assign to professional speakers. People have called me those things, and I’ve heard lots of other speakers described that way. I’ve just come off the rush of the most incredible conference I’ve ever attended, the annual Canadian Association of Professional Speakers convention. I…
“Well, yes, the talk was rough. I needed all those notes, and I had to read from them because I thought of a much better thing to talk about at the last minute and changed the whole presentation. I didn’t have time to practice the new material.” No, no, no, no, NO! Naughty speaker!…
There are two ways of dealing with a fear: either by plunging in whole-body or dipping in your toes and gradually getting in deeper. One way isn’t better than the other, and neither method is going to apply to one person all of the time. That being said, I find that when it comes to…
Much like any other skill, we need to practice talking to be good at it. You don’t need to sweat buckets over complex presentations or formal speeches to become a good talker. You just need to talk with people. Lots of people. Different people. I know some great presenters who are surprisingly poor at just talking with…
Actually, things rarely go according to plan. Take today, for instance. Take this very post. I had planned to re-launch my blog today after months of inactivity. I had temporarily suspended active posting while I re-vamped my website and created a raft of new content ready for regular publication. Planning, writing, designing, building – for a…
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…
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,…
It is remarkably easy to get out of a solid groove. The groove you lost may have been one centred around a good habit you had, or one for a skill you built up and were maintaining. Either way, we can break out of these with surprising rapidity, losing the characteristic we worked so hard…
