This week I had fun listening to Nigel Marsh’s talk How to Make Work-life Balance Work. Nigel is an author of Fat, Forty, and Fired and Overworked and Underlaid. He talks about the cliche “work-life” balance and how we can actually make that happen.
How to Talk More Interesting and be Memorable
This week I watched the talk by Dan Gilbert called The Surprising Science of Happiness. I learned that the happiness was not what people usually think it was. Dan explains that when people don’t get what they want, we make up our own “synthetic” kind of happiness.
Public Speaking Skills for Academics
My birthday is this week and it’s hard for me to believe that I started delivering public speaking program for academics (engineering, biotechnology, and medicine) in 1992 — over 20 years ago! When I first started all of the faculty and even the students were older than me, now, as much as it pains me to admit this, I am older than the postdocs and even sometimes even older than the faculty!
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Can Brain Training Reverse Aging ?
I think I may need some brain training! Some mornings it feels like my body gets out of bed, but my brain slept in. I’ve gotten dressed with my shirt on backwards, I’ve worn two different shoes to delver a presentation (in my defense they were very similar), and I’ve forgotten to take my phone with me –so many times, I can’t count.
How to Listen Better
Listening is of the most important skills we need to develop as a leader. Accurate and careful listening to others and quiet, listening to ourselves. It’s funny we teach speaking skills, but we usually don’t actively teach listening skills, well at least most people don’t. In our house, listening was an emphasized skill.
Growing up, family dinners were the norm.
How to take the hell out of hello!
Is introducing yourself something you’re not quite sure how to do? Would you like to take the hello out of hello! Here’s my first attempt at a haiku deck. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Transition Words
I wrote a document for a client of mine many years ago about transition words. Transitions are the key to an excellent presentation. It’s what ties together the elements into a complete story.
I’m killing myself because I can’t find the file or the blog post. It got lost somehow. So I am trying to recreate the document.
How Fast Do I Speak? (Update)
I answered a Quora Question:
For the average person speaking at a normal pace, what is the typical number of words they can say in one minute?
I am a professional speaker and podcast host and I speak at approximately 145-160 words per minute (wpm), while many sources state that average American English speaker engaged in a friendly conversation speaks at a rate of approximately 110–150 wpm
Michael Bay Meltdown Teaches What Not To Do
Oh my gosh, I was stunned. What happened to Michael Bay? A very well respected communication professional, director Michael Bay, was thrown off when the teleprompter failed during a live presentation at CES 2014 in Las Vegas. He was there to promote a new television from Samsung and unbelievably he chose to leave the stage leaving behind the executive from Samsung alone on stage.
10 Ways to Annoy Your Colleagues with Email
An episode of The Public Speaker that I wrote was posted to Ragen.com today. I was told it “did well” – I’m not quite sure what that means. This was one of those episodes that I wrote because I really was annoyed. I had just received an email from someone with a red emergency flag. Why do people do that?
Here’s a screen print.
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