I’ve just finished coaching a group making a pitch for a very large grant.  The pitches were virtual – the entire team was spread out over multiple locations and continents.  While everyone agreed that an in-person presentation would be preferred, that opportunity was...

I’ve been quoted by students and clients as saying I hate PowerPoint.  That’s not true.  I hate BAD PowerPoint.  Which is, sadly, almost the same thing since it’s rare that I see slides and visuals that are effective, or even necessary.   In the last month I’ve...

After years of procrastination and adaptation, I recently had my second total hip replacement this year.  THR is a radical one-way street—there’s no going back.  The surgeon sawed off my femoral head, cleaned out the hip socket (with a chisel and drill), and replaced...

The central model of our training methodology (adapted from Aristotle’s work a few millennia ago), says that great communication lives at the intersection of what you say, how you say it, and the relationship that exists between the speaker and the listener.  On an...

An oft-quoted statistic estimates about 65% of an audience are visual learners (I tend to side more with this being fiction, but the actual number is irrelevant to our discussion today).  Visual learners prefer to take in information through sight over any other input...

The first Christmas break of my college career, my high school friends and I decided to go snow skiing.  Our excited troupe from Florida loaded up in four cars and headed north towards the North Carolina mountains.  After stopping for gas at an exit in Georgia, one of...

When COVID shut us all down three years ago, the first online courses we were asked to teach focused on communication for leaders.  Whether the programs were touted as leadership or not, the idea was to create skills for people leading teams and the need to bridge the...

It fell on a weekend, so you may have missed it.  April Fools’ Day was my kids’ favorite day of the year.  They could tell me wild things – some call that lying – and not get punished for it by simply yelling “April Fools!” when I caught them in the untruth.  It was...

Instead of our usual format of tips to make you a better communicator, we took a break this month to collect some of the more noteworthy developments and products in the speaking world.  Here’s what we found…     Online Heavyweight Partnership   In a...

Most presentation remotes made in the modern era come with a laser pointer built in (even mine, put as the center button!). My guess is that the engineers who design such things think anything with a laser is cool. Plus, they don’t take much power (battery), and are...

Over the last month, I’ve taken in an unusual amount of “culture”.  The Night before Christmas as a live play.  The Nutcracker with full symphony accompaniment.  An Irish Christmas concert, with one of the most talented bands I’ve ever seen live.  A Christmas...