8 Tips for Controlling Stage Fright
Speech anxiety should never go away. However, you do want to keep it under control, so you’ll look and feel like the confident, professional, expert that you are.
When was the last time you sent someone a handwritten note?
Whether an actual letter, a card, or even a short sentiment written on a piece of scrap paper, there’s something very personal and meaningful about taking the time to communicate with someone using pen and paper. First, a handwritten note takes time to produce. There’s no spell check and no backspace key. You’ve got to get […]
Dealing with Difficult People is All About Choices
I probably lead a difficult people workshop at least once a month. For some reason, a lot of people seem to have difficulty dealing with the different personality types in their lives. Go figure! One of the things I like to do when I kick off a workshop is to have people take a selfie […]
It’s Time to Say “YES”
I’ve written many articles and blog posts about when and how to say, “no.” I even have a chapter in my book, Practical Communication, on the subject. I’ve written extensively about saying “no” because too many people don’t know how to say “no” to things that are bad for them and people who don’t have […]
Is This All You Need?
I wrote my first blog post on May 31, 2011. The title of the post was “What Everyone Ought to Know About Communicating Successfully.” In it, I stated that my goal for the blog was for all of us to grow our communication skills and that I needed you, my readers, to help with that. After I’d published […]
Is it Time to Change The Channel?
When it comes to communicating a message, we have a lot of channels to choose from: Face-to-face Phone Text messaging Email Skype/Facetime/GoToMeeting And more! With so many options, we sometimes choose the wrong channel for our message, resulting in miscommunication and sometimes conflict. In fact, we’ve become so reliant on written forms of communication, such […]
Technology is No Excuse for Sloppy Writing
Whether we blame it on auto complete, or we cover ourselves with an automatic disclaimer on text messages and emails, such as, “This message was sent from my phone, so ignore my sloppy writing,” we need to stop blaming our communication devices for the poor messages we send. A recent survey found that spell check and […]
7 Signs that Your Interpersonal Skills May Need a Tuneup
Interpersonal Skills are the emotional, verbal, and nonverbal skills necessary to successfully interact with others and build one-on-one relationships. Since interpersonal skills aren’t generally taught in school, we take what we learned in childhood from our parents, and go forth into our lives doing the best we can. However, sometimes our best isn’t good enough […]
8 Reasons Regular Staff Meetings Are a Must
Imagine if you worked in an organization where staff members have no idea what other staff members are doing, management has no idea what staff is doing, standard operating procedures aren’t followed, important things often “fall through the cracks,” there’s a lot of redundancy of effort and communication, and any improvements implemented quickly go by […]
3 Ways to Tell a Coworker to Stop Sharing Personal Business at Work
In the almost 30 years I’ve been in the adult working world, I’ve found that people vary greatly in their ability to keep from sharing personal business at work. There are some people who have all types of personal problems or issues going on in their lives and no one at work ever hears about […]