In addition to being a trainer for Turpin, I’ve spent many years teaching communication to undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. In the course of teaching everything from Composition 101 to complex ideas, I finally hit on one simple goal that can act as a guiding light for everything from emails to keynotes: Make It Easy....
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A crucial but often neglected part of successful business communication is making it easy for your audience to understand what you are communicating. The use of jargon or acronyms with no explanation is a frequent error that really works against the idea of making it easy. Too often, we assume people will understand us because...
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In this video, produced by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), Greg Owen-Boger, Turpin’s VP, discusses making learning easy for learners. Greg here with Turpin Communication. Learning can sometimes be difficult, but participating in the learning event should be easy. What that means is we need to create a safe, supportive environment for fruitful learning to...
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We spend a lot of time helping people succeed as trainers, meeting facilitators, and presenters. That work focuses on helping people initiate and manage the conversation that takes place in each of these settings. What we rarely focus on is the role of the people receiving the training, participating in the meeting, or listening to...
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Something we can all relate to is being confused when sitting through a presentation. The presenter is talking in circles, and the slide on the screen is a jumbled mess. We struggle to make sense of the information on the slide, and then we realize we haven’t heard a thing the person has said. Sound...
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Sometimes in workshops, we discover that our learners are working with slides or whole decks they didn’t create, and some of these slides are not only unnatural to deliver but also confusing in their layout, organization, or even in the information they include. If you’re confused by a slide, your audience is not going to...
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This article is about what you can do to make business meetings better. I don’t need to spend much time talking about why meetings need to be improved. A simple Google search will show you that people think there are too many. They are overwhelming. They drain energy. And the coffee-mug meme declaring that this...
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Resonance is One of the Fifteen Facets of Executive Presence This article is one in a series focusing on Executive Presence and how leaders can meet their potential through improved communication. Executive Presence is defined by Suzanne Bates in her book “All the Leader You Can Be: The Science of Achieving Extraordinary Executive Presence” as...
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We shot a few videos recently focusing on some of the fundamental aspects of our work. Here are two that define meetings and presentations as Orderly Conversations. Understanding the consequences of that definition helps facilitators plan and run more effective meetings. Meetings and Presentations are Not Speeches Transcript: “When it comes to improving face-to-face communication,...
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Anyone in the position of having to deliver similar content on a repeat basis faces the problem of how to keep things fresh. Maybe you’re in sales and have to talk about the same information in every sales call. Maybe you deliver the same presentation at different conferences. Maybe when rolling out an HR initiative,...
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