In January of this year, I first met Tinkerbell. At the time, her name wasn’t even Tinkerbell, she was just “Female, black, Chihuahua, stray,” at the animal shelter where I volunteer. After adopting her, I took her to her first vet appointment. The first question they asked was her name, and “Tinkerbell,” came out of […]
The 25/5 rule is simple. It has two parts: 1. Don’t say something in 25 words when 5 will do. 2. Don’t use a 25-cent word when a 5-cent word will do. If you’re anything like me, when you receive a long text, doctoral-dissertation-length email, or a voicemail that drones on and on, you tune […]
Every year around this time I post communication tips for talking with your child’s teacher. However, these tips are about more than talking with the teacher. They’re about creating open communication and building an effective parent-teacher relationship that will serve you when things are going well and when your child hits some inevitable bumps along […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
