Authentic Communication Training » Coaching

How will you learn to be a great speaker?

Michael Gardner — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:28:40 +0000

You want to be a better communicator?

But how? Time is short. Money is tight. Job demands are increasing. And yet…

Increasing your communication and presentation skills is something you know you need to do, for yourself and for your career.

Take a look at this video, an Edutopia interview with James Paul Gee.

In a just a few minutes he shows how you can learn more from peers than experts and how new digital technologies promise to revolutionize how education happens. It’s pretty cool, if not radical thinking, and it’s made me think about education, teachers and the online video games my kids play in a whole new light.

By the way, we just started a new service offering online peer and expert video presentation coaching and training. If you’d like to give this a try for free, please let me know. (This is a limited offer.)

Young Start Ups: Communicate Your Mantra!

Howard Stableford — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:59:24 +0000

I recently returned from a wonderful trip to Russia where I was invited to teach a course on executive presence as well as presentation and communication techniques at the brand new Skolkovo Moscow School of Management.

The students are an extremely lively and, of course, incredibly bright collection of talent from around the world. Although most are Russian, citizens from Brazil, India, Finland, Australia, USA and Kazakhstan are also represented. They are not a shy bunch either.

A vision of Moscow

One exercise I introduced them to was how to develop and communicate a compelling vision for an organization. We discussed the differences between mission statements and vision statements and then I gave them free reign to invent their own company profiles and develop vision statements for them. Company products ranged from a pill that could make you instantly sober to a weapons factory designed as far as I could tell to eradicate all other weapons! (you had to be there I guess).

They did pretty well with the vision statements too, but it was at this point that Sergey Pavlovskiy from Russia, who is seriously into creating start up companies, suggested that mission and vision statements should be replaced with a “mantra.” He pointed to the book by Guy Kawasaki called The Art of the Start in which Kawasaki says “forget mission statements, they’re long, boring and irrelevant. No-one can even remember them much less implement them. Instead, take your meaning and make a mantra out of it.”

In fact, Kawasaki’s mantra idea is the vision statement. Vision statements should conjure up the values and philosophy of a company succinctly and memorably. They are not about how to achieve the bottom line but are externally focused and express why customers will want to work with your organization. Kawasaki uses these examples of good “Mantras”:

Authentic Athletic Performance – Nike

Fun Family Entertainment – Disney

Rewarding Everyday Moments – Starbucks

They are all great vision statements as well as Mantras. Each conjures up a clear image of the organization’s goals and aspirations. They are called vision statements for good reason - they paint powerful pictures in our minds.

So thanks Sergey for introducing me to Mr. Kawasaki. No pressure or anything but I think we should all watch out for a really powerful “vision/ mantra” statement coming out of a start up company in Russia soon!

Why Online Presentation Coaching Works

Howard Stableford — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:18:24 +0000

Practice makes presentations more palatable

The short answer is because today’s technology allows for easy and secure ways to get better at presentation speaking through communication training courses. Which can now be taken online.

But I prefer long answers so……

My favorite meal in all the world is Chicken Tikka Masala. Seriously.

When I travel abroad I test the local Indian restaurants looking for the perfect combinations of spices aromas and viscosity of sauce.

I once tried to make it myself from a cookbook. I found the mouthwatering recipe I was looking for, gathered the right ingredients and followed the instructions to the letter. After two full hours of preparation and creation, I presented it triumphantly to my family.

We ate out that night. It was so bad even the dog turned up it’s nose.

The lesson I learned was that the most important ingredient of all was missing. Practice! Oh, and a coach, or chef to give me pointers would have been nice too.

To be more precise, I needed practice, repetition and refinement of my culinary skills from family feedback. Great chefs are not born. They work very hard at it, they constantly practice and tweak their recipes until they work consistently every time.

The same is equally true for great speakers. The problem can be that as we prepare presentations we don’t have access to a “family” to provide truly helpful and objective presentation feedback.

Well, that used to be the case, but today websites like this one can help speakers all over the world prepare tasty, flavorful presentations by providing an online family to listen to and assess presentations in a totally safe and encouraging environment.

The way we coach clients online is to invite them into a secure online communication training conference room. The client sometimes records their performance and emails their PowerPoint slides beforehand but the whole thing can be totally live as long as they have a simple webcam pointing at them. We can even provide a camera.

We find it beneficial to have a small group of clients doing this at the same time because feedback from others in the same boat complements the pointers my colleague Michael Gardner and I might make.

The beauty of this simple recipe is that participants can be anywhere in the world and in any time zone. It’s also very economical to do. So if you have an important presentation coming up and would like to pass it by the ACT family, just belly up to the table and click here for more information.

While we’ve been doing this collectively for over 20 years in other venues our blog is quite new and so if you are one of the first 7 to respond we’ll give you an extraordinary discount in exchange for your feedback!

Meanwhile, although we know it is impossible to become truly skillful at anything just by reading a manual, I have just picked up this little book called “How to Play Golf”. This just might be the exception to the rule. It seems all you have to do is hit a small ball with a stick until it falls down a hole. Hmm. Now how difficult can that be? I’ll let you know.