Are you listening?

Audience, Tactics

Want to speak? Be prepared to listen. Really skilled communicators, really dynamic and engaging speakers  actively and intimately listen to and observe their audience.  By giving his audience his full attention, a speaker is able to figure out what the audience needs to perceive, needs to feel, needs to hear in order to adopt the…

Resolutions, resolutions

Skill development

Note: This is a longer post than usual, but it will give you a jump start on making your 2016 “Become a better speaker” resolution reality!    Whether you love or hate New Year’s Resolutions, they have most certainly filtered past your field of awareness at least once over the past few weeks. And most…

Say it out loud

Creating, Performance

Yes, you sound different when you speak than when you write. The carefully massaged sentence, paragraph, or turn of phrase is unlikely to come out of your mouth in the same way that it reads on paper. Writing, reading, and unscripted speaking are all different mental processes. You can create a consistency between your spoken…

Conference Terror part 1: Permission

Presenting

Note: I haven’t decided how many instalments of this topic I’m going to do, but I do know that there’s a part 2 and 3 on the way… Finding a venue to broadcast your message is easy; what’s scary is actually doing it.  There are lots of ways you can practice speaking in front of groups or…