Introduction
At the risk of sounding pretentious, it’s actually and genuinely one of the greatest privileges of my life to work with very smart people. If I were to order the privileges of my life, of which there are many, being a mum would probably top the list, but having the benefit of a solid education, being born in an era and country of great freedom particularly for women, having the luck of good health and working with people like you would round out the top 5 though I’m sure I’ll think of others after I’ve finished the blog.
And it’s the intelligence of the people I get to meet through my training, that has inspired this series because it seems to me that the value of any training is what’s offered beyond the text book. It’s the attention to detail, the application to real life, the eliciting and leveraging of the wealth of knowledge and experience among the group, and the consideration of the participant, their world and their needs when answering questions.
My objective therefore with this series, which I intend to roll out over the year, is a kind of behind the scenes look at business communication and presentation and their components, because with deeper understanding of the tools, their intention and their power, comes an increased desire and capacity to apply them with the end result of course, of improved interactions, impact and influence.
In terms of the approach, the idea is to take 13 major topics of communication, break them down into four weekly sub-components and thereby offer you 52 weeks of bite-sized but considered ideas, designed to provoke thought, insight, interest and experimentation.
So without further ado, let me introduce the first topic: