How to Think on Your Feet in Meetings and Presentations: 3 Mental Hacks

how to think on your feet

How to Think on Your Feet: Strategies We’ve explored impromptu speaking skills and how to respond to unexpected comments or questions. Key tactics include: keeping your comments concise, listening closely to the conversation and to others’ comments, developing a strong worldview, and other strategies. Now let’s look at how to develop a mindset that enables … Read more

Professional Presence: The Role of Culture and Context

professional presence and culture

What is Professional Presence? A person has professional presence if they conduct themselves in a confident and professional way. Being “professional” typically means keeping your conversations focused on work, and avoiding personal or potentially sensitive matters. However, professionalism also can mean many different things depending on your work environment and office culture. Some offices are … Read more

Enthusiasm When Presenting “Boring” Information: 3 Simple Tactics

presentation and communication coaching

What Does it Mean to be Enthusiastic When Public Speaking? Enthusiasm demonstrates your passion and excitement for the content that you’re presenting. Enthusiasm shows that you believe in your content. You have conviction in what you are saying. Enthusiastic and passionate presenters are more impactful and more persuasive. But there’s a challenge: genuine enthusiasm is … Read more

The Difference Between In-Person vs Zoom Meetings

zoom meetings

Zoom Meetings Have Unique Challenges On a recent live webinar, we got a question from an attendee: Is there anything we need to do more or less of for video conversations compared to in-person conversations? A lot of the principles of influence and audience connection are universal. These are things like: Identifying major themes that … Read more

6 Ways to Improve Your Social Intuition

social intuition

How Can You Increase Your Social Intuition? First and foremost, remember that social intuition is something that can only be developed organically. Reading is not enough. You can’t watch videos about it and magically become more socially intuitive. You have to actually get out there into the world, interact with people, try things, succeed, and … Read more

Personal Influence: Increase Your Impact with These 2 Strategies

Leverage Communication Variety to Increase Your Personal Influence Let’s explore two major ways for you to strengthen your personal influence. First, variety in your communication style and second, variety in your knowledge and content. Variety in Communication Style Variety in your communication style means the ability to communicate in different ways. It means you can … Read more

Impromptu Speaking: 7 Tactics to Communicate in Unexpected Situations

One of the most common challenges our clients and students face is impromptu speaking. In most offices, you will need to speak off-the-cuff at various points: meetings, brainstorming sessions, or Q&A after a presentation. But we often fail to perform when caught off-guard. Our boss turns to us and says “So, what do you think … Read more

How to Facilitate a Meeting: Run a Meeting with Powerful People (5 Lessons)

Lessons in How to Facilitate a Meeting from the 2020 Presidential Debates On October 22nd, 2020 Kristen Welker taught a masterclass in how to moderate a debate, and in doing so, taught us how to run a meeting with powerful personalities. What was fascinating though, was the difference between her debate and the previous presidential … Read more

How to Deal with Difficult Coworkers

dealing with difficult coworkers

Challenging people are a fact of working life. Learning how to deal with difficult coworkers and still get things done will make a big difference in your success. And it will be key for your sanity. Tips for How to Deal with Difficult Coworkers These lessons are based on my own experience of working with … Read more