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Take Charge of Your Meetings!

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Meetings are essential for any business. They give everyone an opportunity to share ideas and be kept up-to-date on important information. However, all too often, poor communication can turn a meeting into a drawn-out, ineffective waste of time. There are several techniques that you can master to transform your communication skills and conduct your meetings like the effective business leader you are. Here are five tips to help you transform your meetings from a waste of time to an effective meeting of the minds:

  1. Speech skills matter! It doesn’t matter how intelligent or innovative your ideas are if no one can understand you. Many people speak more quickly when they’re excited or nervous, which decreases the clarity of their speech. Keep tabs on your rate of speech and make sure you’re not running your words together. Also, enunciate all of the letters in each word, especially the sounds at the ends of words. Missing the final sound of a word can change the meaning entirely and cause confusion.
  2. Speak up: One of the biggest issues in a group setting is miscommunication. If you don’t fully understand someone’s point or miss part of what has been said, speak up and ask questions. Even if it doesn’t seem critical at the time, misunderstandings can be a big waste of time and energy in the long run, and odds are if you are confused, so is someone else. Asking questions and requesting clarification can go a long way towards avoiding long-term misunderstandings.
  3. Remember the two ‘C’s: When speaking in a business meeting, don’t forget to be clear and concise. Remember that the main point of a meeting is communicating information, not trying to impress your colleagues with your oratory skills or large vocabulary. Before you speak, think about what you are going to say and make sure you’re making your point in the shortest, most direct way possible.
  4. Make sure no one dominates the conversation: Everyone has different communication styles and different levels of comfort about talking in a meeting environment. Unfortunately, this can often lead to one or two outspoken individuals dominating the meeting, causing an imbalance in the conversation. While you don’t want to discourage open speech, it’s important to maintain some balance for an effective flow of communication and ideas. If you feel someone has dominated a topic, politely move the conversation along by saying something like, “It sounds like you have some great ideas, and I’d love to chat about them later, but unfortunately we’re a bit short on time right now so we need to move on.”
  5. Be a good listener: Often people are so focused on how they can contribute to the conversation and sound intelligent, they spend their time internally planning what they want to say instead of listening to the person who is actually speaking. This can result in missing key information and misunderstandings. Not only is it essential to really listen, but also to visually communicate to the speaker that you’re listening. Sit up straight, look directly at the speaker, and maintain eye contact. Never fiddle with your phone or check your e-mail or messages; this is not only rude, but gives the impression you’re mentally checked out of the meeting. Now and then, nod to show that you understand. These are all ways to let the speaker know that you are really listening. Remember, you listen with your whole body, not just your ears!

About the Author

Jayne LatzJayne Latz is an expert in communication and CEO of Corporate Speech Solutions, LLC. She has worked as a speech trainer, coach, professional speaker, and has co-authored two books titled, Talking Business: A Guide to Professional Communication and Talking Business: When English is Your Second Language. She was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal and on The TODAY Show.

If you are interested in learning more ways to improve your business communication skills, contact Jayne at [email protected] or visit www.corporatespeechsolutions.com.

Are you the ‘Toast’ of your meetings?

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I’m giving a 10-minute talk at Toastmasters in NYC tomorrow night. Subject? Humor – what it is, how to create it, and how to use it.

I am challenged to help the club members (who all have humor as the basis of their speaking) find new ways and new ideas to make their audience laugh and engage.

MAJOR CLUE: At the end of humor is the height of listening. If you’re at a comedy club, and the comedian tells a joke, and you’re laughing so hard that your drink is coming out your nose, as soon as the comedian starts to talk again, you immediately stop laughing and start listening. You don’t want to miss what’s next. At the end of humor is the height of listening. Got it?

Presentation skills are one fifth of the sales process. The other four being your selling skills, your product knowledge, knowledge of the customer, and your attitude.

Most salespeople study presentation skills and positive attitude skills THE LEAST. When in fact, if you weigh the five elements, those two are at the top of the list. Why then are you not studying presentation skills?

If I ask everyone reading this column to put your hand in the air if you are a member of Toastmasters, not many hands would go up. (Yours included.)

Finding your voice, and combining it with your courage equals speaking in public. Speaking in public is arguably your best networking, notoriety, brand building, and confidence building opportunity in existence. And a great place to learn is Toastmasters.

Got speech?
Got courage?
Got (meaningful) subject matter?

If you’re in sales, speaking in public is critical to your success.

  • Learn the science of speaking and presenting.
  • Join and practice at Toastmasters.
  • Graduate to speaking at civic organizations.
  • THEN look for opportunities within your market.

Topics? Speak about something the audience will value and respect you for.

  • After ownership, how do I use…
  • Maximum productivity
  • Memorable service
  • New ideas
  • Morale in the workplace
  • Profit

BEWARE and be aware. The experts are not experts. Most “expert” advice about public speaking is weak and generalized. Here are a few examples (IN BOLD) of what NOT to do:

  • It’s ok to be nervous. If you go into a presentation and you’re nervous, in my book that’s NOT okay. You have to go into a presentation or sales presentation wreaking of confidence. The reason you’re nervous is because you’re unprepared. And being unprepared is one of the best ways to lose a sale or an audience.
  • You don’t need to be perfect. Really? When I see a rule like “don’t try to be perfect,” I always think to myself “exactly where would you like me to screw up?” When I am building rapport, when I am presenting my product, when I am trying to understand customer’s needs, when I am talking about my value proposition? Or maybe when I am trying to complete the transaction? (AKA: close the sale)
     
    NOTE WELL: Heck, if there is someone I want not to be perfect—it’s my competition. Let them screw up. Let them blow the sale.
  • Know your subject. DUH! When you’re giving a presentation ‘knowing your subject’ is a given. The rule should be “know what your audience doesn’t know, and talk about that.” What you need to know is how your customer uses, benefits from, and profits by owning your product.
  • Practice, practice, practice. When an expert tells me to ‘practice, practice, practice,’ the first question I want to know is, ‘practice what?’ What it should say is build your presentation skills daily by giving presentations and recording them. When you’ve done the recording, play it back immediately. If you’ve ever wanted a dose of reality, I promise you that playing back your presentation will be the funniest, most pathetic thing you have ever seen or heard. For most people, it’s the grimmest dose of reality.

THE VALUE OF RECORDING YOUR PRESENTATION: When you record yourself, it’s the exact evidence of what you said and how you said it. How impactful it was. How transferable it was. How persuasive it was. How convincing it was. And ultimately, how successful it was. Recording your presentation will reveal every blemish, every error, every weakness, and give you a report card on your effectiveness.

The average salesperson (not you of course) is presentation-weak. This is predominantly caused by lack of study, lack of creativity, lack of belief, lack of preparation, and lack of recording.

Wouldn’t you think with all this at stake, that presentation skills would be one of the highest priorities in a salesperson’s life? Well, luckily for you, the average sales person doesn’t feel that way. The average salesperson is home right after work hunting around for the TV remote instead of hunting up new facts for their presentation tomorrow. They’re hunting for a can of beer instead of hunting for a Toastmasters meeting.

Hunt for a speech. When you find it, there’s money attached.

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey GitomerJeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

Getting To Agreement

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We all theoretically recognize that everyone has the right to their own beliefs. But in situations where we have great passion (or the moral high ground, as we would like to believe) we have difficulty being generous with those who disagree with us. Wouldn’t it be nice to persuade others to see the world as we see it? What’s causing the disparity between ideas, goals and convictions?

Beliefs

People’s viewpoints, values, and world view come from their core beliefs, acquired through the experiences of our lives: from parents and education; religion and what we do for a living; what our parents taught us (implicitly and explicitly) and what we learned from friends. The conglomeration of these experiences create our political views, who we marry, how we raise our children, how we view the world, how we behave in relationships and where we live. I remember in 2000 I called my then-28-year-old son – living in the swing state of Colorado – on election day. I casually asked him what he was doing that day. He replied:

“You wouldn’t be calling me to ask who I’m voting for, would you?”

“Um, well, maybe.”

“Mom: You dragged me to rallies and marches, made me hold signs and go to sit-ins, and had activists over for dinner who became our friends. How could I vote differently than you?”

Our beliefs become the foundation of how we decide/act/live/socialize daily, making it so endemic that it’s hard to fathom that anyone would think differently. As a result of our orientation, anything said outside our beliefs gets runs the risk of being disrespected, disregarded, and discounted, and we often disenfranchise those who don’t believe or act as we do. Those of us who have strong beliefs about the environment, for example, may become angry when others don’t believe we are harming the earth. But if it were so obvious to everyone, if everyone shared the same beliefs, we would all be in agreement.

And so we attempt to persuade those who haven’t yet ‘seen the light’ to agree with us. But getting into agreement with folks whose ideas run counter to our beliefs is difficult: regardless of how rational our argument or the source of data we share, we are heard through biased ears.

Hearing Agreement

It’s possible that by pushing our own agendas and not focusing on what might be common values and consensus, we are perpetuating harm and causing others to defend their beliefs. Isn’t there a middle road to agreement?

Change needs consensus: win-win is key (we know there is no such thing as win/lose). To enable change and facilitate agreement, we must discover common beliefs. NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) does this by ‘chunking up’ – looking at a broader view beyond biases to more generic beliefs. So instead of focusing on Global Warming, for instance, a chunk up might be discussing ways to diminish natural disasters so less people will be harmed.

A key elements to facilitating agreement is hearing without bias. I’ve just published a book called What? Did you really say what I think I heard? that explains how difficult it is to effectively hear others without the filters, biases, assumptions, and triggers that maintain our world view.

What if we enter conversations listening for common values instead of the typical focus on differences? What if we live with Ands and not Buts? What if we listen for words or ideas that would enable working collaboratively, or finding win/wins? If all we change is how we can hear each other to enable agreement somewhere, we might just be able to discover places of agreement and help us all make the world a better place.

But listening without bias isn’t natural or easy. Hence I’ve made What? free to enable everyone to share the material and begin discussing how we can disengage from our listening biases and wend our way to agreement. Get the book on www.didihearyou.com. For a more robust solution, contact me at [email protected] and we can discuss how to use the learning tools I’ve developed to both assess and guide you and your colleagues through change and choice.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

To contact Sharon Drew at [email protected] or go to www.didihearyou.com to choose your favorite digital site to download your free book.

Avoiding Resistance

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Every year, with the best will in the world, we make New Year’s resolutions to make some sort of change, like exercising more or eating healthier. We start off with great gusto and determination, yet by February we begin making excuses to avoid the gym, or convince ourselves pizza would be great for dinner. What happens? We’re approaching change in the wrong way. But we can easily make it right.

Beliefs Define Behaviors

Here’s the problem. Within each of us are long-held rules and principles, created and maintained by our idiosyncratic belief structure. I call this internal, unconscious collection our system, and (as explained in my new book What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), this system determines our behaviors (including how we respond to/hear others, how we choose friends, our politics and religion) and our behaviors are our beliefs in action. We rarely behave, communicate, or decide in ways that offend our beliefs because we would then be incongruent.

It all operates effortlessly until we attempt to drive a behavior that runs counter to our beliefs – and then we get resistance as our system attempts to maintain balance. [I’ve written about it exhaustively in Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.] This is why people and teams won’t execute good decisions, users don’t use new software, and why implementations fail: we are ignoring our accepted practice and pushing unapproved behaviors into a system that must resist to maintain it’s status quo and balance.

Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail

New Year’s resolutions seek behavior change with no accompanying belief change, potentially causing their own resistance. When my coaching clients seek change, we begin by understanding the systemic baseline beliefs and getting agreement from the system to add acceptable behaviors that will match those beliefs. Here’s a personal example: I’m a healthy person and strongly believe one of my modalities toward health is exercise. But I hate hate hate the gym (Did I say I hate the gym?). I hate it so much I count the steps backward from my house to the gym, and backward again until I’m eventually home. Thankfully I found several classes that are somewhat non-objectionable, and do sweaty country-swing dancing a few times a week. So I get 10 hours a week of exercise and remain congruent with my beliefs: I am a fit, healthy person. And when I find myself making excuses for going to the gym, I remind myself that if I don’t go I won’t be a healthy person. I decide from my beliefs, and act from my behaviors.

I’m aware that there are many models that show how to work with resistance, or behavior change. Yet it’s possible to avoid resistance altogether by first enabling agreement from our beliefs and only then adding behaviors – working from within first, and avoiding ‘push’ from the outside. Then we can maintain our New Year’s resolutions.

If you want some personal or team coaching to manage congruent change, or wish to work with clients in a way that avoids resistance (for sellers, coaches, consultants, negotiators, and decision scientists) contact me at [email protected] to set up a time to pursue possibilities.

To learn more about What? Did you really say what I think I heard? and how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, go to www.didihearyou.com where the digital book is available for free.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

To contact Sharon Drew at [email protected] or go to www.didihearyou.com to choose your favorite digital site to download your free book.

Confident Communication

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In a professional setting, projecting confidence can make or break an interaction and have a significant impact on how others perceive your character and professional abilities. Those who appear confident are often assumed to be more capable in their jobs and more worthy of trust and respect.

Your communication style can play a significant role in projecting confidence. Changing the way you speak is one of the first and most important steps in achieving an air of confidence and success. Your tone of voice, rate of speech, and other non-verbal cues often say more about your message than your words themselves. Subtle changes in your voice and presentation create a significant difference in how your message is received.

One key aspect of speech that can be modified to project confidence is how quickly you speak. Many people, when nervous or excited, tend to speak too quickly. Rushing through your words not only makes it difficult for others to understand you, but also makes it seem as though you are nervous and trying to get speaking over with as quickly as possible. Be aware of this pitfall, and concentrate on using a controlled, even rate of speech. This will help you to appear confident and knowledgeable about the topic on which you’re speaking and give your listener the impression that what you have to say is worth taking the time to listen to.

Intonation can also play a role in projecting confidence. One intonation pattern that can be particularly damaging is upspeak or high-rising intonation. Upspeak, made famous by the 1980s “Valley girl” accent, is characterized by raising your pitch at the end of a sentence so that statements sound like questions. This pattern gives off an air of insecurity and makes it seem that you are unsure of yourself and seeking your listener’s approval. Take care to avoid this pattern, and end each sentence authoritatively.

Another speech habit that can be fatal to projecting confidence is the use of ‘filler’ words. People often pepper their speech with words such as “um”, “uh”, “like” or “you know” which contain no content, add nothing to the message, and interrupt the flow of speech. For example, many people find themselves in the habit of ending sentences with, question words like “okay?” “right?” “see?” or “you know what I mean?” Others use “um” at the beginning of sentences or when transitioning from one thought to another. In order to reduce your reliance on filler words, try identifying where you most commonly use fillers, and briefly pause instead. Many people avoid pauses because they are uncomfortable with silence, but a brief pause will give you a moment to collect your thoughts, allow your listeners to absorb your message, and will sound much more confident and professional than needless fillers.

Finally, take note of your volume when speaking. A strong, well-projected voice makes you sound authoritative and like a natural leader. While you don’t want to shout, speaking with a strong volume gives others the impression that you are saying something worth listening to. Speaking too quietly can make it seem as though you’re not fully sure of what it is you’re saying, or that you don’t feel it’s really important.

Strong professional communication skills are critical to projecting confidence and achieving success in the workplace. By following the strategies above, you can change your communication style to one that tells clients and colleagues that you are a confident leader with a message worth listening too. If you’d like to make more significant changes in your communication style, you may want to enlist the help of a corporate speech-language pathologist who can provide communication training to target your specific needs. Learn to communicate with clarity and confidence, and take your career to the next level!

About the Author

Jayne LatzJayne Latz is an expert in communication and CEO of Corporate Speech Solutions, LLC. She has worked as a speech trainer, coach, professional speaker, and has co-authored two books titled, Talking Business: A Guide to Professional Communication and Talking Business: When English is Your Second Language. She was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal and on The TODAY Show.

If you are interested in learning more ways to improve your business communication skills, contact Jayne at [email protected] or visit www.corporatespeechsolutions.com.