Herein lies the conundrum that every professional inevitably faces–how to provide the most useful and efficient project update possible in a fraction of the time you want.
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“Like” has gotten a bad rap.
“Like” has become a pariah of the English language.
But don’t be too quick to entirely discard it from your vocabulary. It’s often the gateway to engaging and persuasive content.
While personal New Year’s resolutions are wonderful, consider adding a professional resolution, as well. And if you do, consider resolving to enhance your communication skills.
The recommendation has a chorus of support:
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Imagine you’re at a Thanksgiving festival and a helicopter is circling above. Suddenly little slips of paper start to fall from the sky. On them are single words and small phrases. You race around furiously trying to grab as many slips of paper as you can to decipher the code.
What’s the message?
Ultimately, if your audience doesn’t remember what you said, it’s the same as if they never attended your presentation in the first place.
Given the fragility of human memory, you need to design your presentations to pass the “Water Cooler Test.”
Our attention span is less than a goldfish (8 seconds, by the way)…
With our ability to pay attention going in the wrong direction, you must partition your content into bite-sized portions if you want people to retain the information you’re presenting.
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Ten-time NCAA Championship coach John Wooden famously remarked,
“The true test of a [person’s] character is what [s]he does when no one is watching.”
When it comes to your professional conduct, someone is always watching.
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No news is not good news
In times of uncertainly, the old adage of ‘no news is good news,’ couldn’t be further from the truth. More apt is, ‘Silence is deadly.’
According to a 2019 Dynamic Signal study, 80% of U.S. workers were stressed as a result of ineffective company communication.[1] That was in 2019 when the economy was rolling and there was no such thing as COVID-19.
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