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Presenting Without Panicking

§ May 4th, 2011 § Filed under communication, marketing, small business, training, Uncategorized § Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , § No Comments

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”  – Jerry Seinfeld

Does the very idea of presenting to a group of people strike terror in your heart? What is it about a group presentation that makes most people so nervous?

Most business people have no problem talking to one or two people at a time. At networking gatherings, only the shyest among us will do what I call “hovering over the hors d’oeuvres.” We tend to feel comfortable soon after engaging even complete strangers.

Add a few people to the audience and our blood pressure starts to rise.  It turns out that Seinfeld was wrong; public speaking is not the number one fear, but for anyone who is nervous about presenting, the fear certainly is in the top ten.

Why are we so afraid? Usually, the anxiety goes back to childhood. Something happened, usually early in life, that made us feel judged and embarrassed, and we have carried that forward to our adult lives. When we can pinpoint that first event, we usually can work through the fear.

I know this is true for me. I was at a dance recital as an “overdeveloped” 11 year old. I won’t go into the details here, but I heard people in the audience laughing at me. I had my suspicions confirmed when one of my neighborhood friends told me, “Crystal, they were laughing at you.” I swore that I would never get up in front of a group of people again.

In school, I dreaded anytime I had to deliver a report in front of the class. In college, the panic was worse. It took a long time to work through my worry. At one point, I remember my knees actually knocking.

Once the belief about yourself takes hold, especially if it happened in childhood, you align with that belief. Your experience becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Your current experience does not cause the emotion. It is just the opposite – the feeling causes the current situation.

Think about that first event. What were your feelings at the time? Was it really the event itself that caused the fear? Or was it something that happened during the event that you now have control over? If that had not happened, would you have been embarrassed?

If you can look honestly at the root cause and understand the difference between then and now, you’ll be well on your way to overcoming your nerves.

If you need more help getting over the fear or simply want to refine your presentation skills, please join me at Presenting without Panicking. (See Lunchbox Workshop.)

Decide What You Want

§ April 3rd, 2011 § Filed under communication, marketing, small business, training, writing § Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , § No Comments

The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want. – Ben Stein

If you find that you are not receiving responses to your email messages, I may have discovered one of the problems.

I recently met a man who is in charge of volunteers at a local non-profit. I had been planning to volunteer with this organization for the last few months, so this meeting presented the perfect opportunity to offer my training services. I handed him my business card and wrote on the back what I wanted to provide.

Two days later, I received an email from the volunteer director. He said he was glad to have met me and appreciated my interest in the organization. He provided some details about the volunteer opportunities with this non-profit and finished his email by saying that he looked forward to discussing my involvement.

It was obviously a canned response, and although it would have been nice to have received something that responded to my particular offering of providing training, the template aspect did not bother me. What bothered me was that there was no call-to-action. There was no “next step” for me to take. He could have said, “please contact me at your earliest convenience” or “please fill in the volunteer form on our website” or “I will call you next week to set up an appointment.” Instead I was left feeling like we would have to run into each other on the street to move this relationship forward. I wonder how many volunteers are lost because of this missing request.

I shouldn’t give this guy too hard a time. He is not alone. We all send out emails all the time without thinking about what we want to accomplish.

If you want to create email messages that get a response, the most important step you can take is to decide what you want the outcome to be when the recipient reads the email. If you don’t provide your readers with the next step, the email will sit in their in-boxes, unanswered, largely because there was no question to answer.

Look back over some of the emails you have sent. Were you clear in your purpose? Did you ask for the sale? Did you move the process forward? How could you have ended the message that would have made it easy for the recipient to take action?

If you want to learn additional ways to create messages that deliver results, come to this month’s Lunchbox Workshop.

Texting and Writing

§ March 1st, 2011 § Filed under communication, small business, training, writing § Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , § No Comments

“The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.” – Joseph Priestley

In response to my request for communication pet peeves, one of my readers emailed, “I dislike the fact that kids, with texting, are using “shortcut” language.  This definitely will not help their spelling & written skills.”

Texting! Just like my reader, I worry about the writing skills of our youth. I teach writing classes on the college level, and I see omitted punctuation, lack of capitalization, and words that I have to read aloud to decipher the meaning.

Is texting ruining the writing skills of an entire generation? To be honest, probably. But the problem may not the obvious one.

English teachers throughout history have had to help students understand the difference between formal and informal language. (Growing up in Texas, we all had to learn that “ya’ll” was not an acceptable pronoun when writing a school paper, but then neither was any second person pronoun.) Texting adds a layer to that concern, but with some training, students can move between the formal and informal writing easily. Research shows that students, especially those with some college, tend to understand the difference in requirements when writing formally.  If you are interested in how teens perceive their writing skills, the Pew Research Center has done a fascinating study on teen writing and technology.

The bigger problem may be that texting requires quick, to-the-point, no-nuanced writing.  Conversely, good writing requires supporting detail, more explanation, and additional depth.  One of the concerns pointed out in the Pew study is that most writing assignments in high school are short – a few paragraphs at the most. The combination of texting, Tweeting, and sharing short messages on Facebook, plus a lack of opportunity to learn how to write lengthier and more in-depth prose may be hurting our students’ writing skills much more than the abbreviations and shortcuts.

I have my pet peeves when it comes to spelling and grammar, but I can usually decipher those mistakes easily. The harder task is sorting out writing that is illogical and unsupported, and I seem to find a higher frequency of poorly thought-out writing these days whether in my classes or in the marketing materials of businesses. We need to teach students to think critically and write fully thought-out papers. Businesses need to learn to communicate from the reader’s viewpoint, answering questions before they are asked. I love the idea of communicating quickly through text messages or 140 character Tweets, but to be decent writers, we have to be able to provide detailed, coherent information.

As we embrace our new forms of communication, there will probably come a time when “your” will become “ur.” I can’t find a good argument against the shortening of some words, leaving out letters that serve no meaning except to confuse non-native speakers and to point obscurely to the mongrel history of our language. The only argument that I can fall back on is that we have rules for the way we have always written, and I know that is a miserable excuse. So I won’t be surprised, and I won’t fight the inevitable. I won’t completely give in just yet, either. So, instead of “thx 4 rdg,” I’ll say, “Thanks for reading all of my letters, even the unnecessary ones.”

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