C-Suite Network™

Menu

Month: May 2017

Categories
Best Practices Marketing Skills Women In Business

How Strategic Pauses Will Engage Your Listeners

Power Speaking Skills: Strategies to Improve Pacing with the Power of the Pause:

Maria Guida, president of Successful Speaker, Inc. helps you speak with the poise, passion, and persuasive power of a Broadway actor. In this video, Maria tells you how to use the Power of the Pause when you speak. (This is Part 3 in the series called, “Engage Your Listeners by Allowing You Ideas to Land”).

The Successful Speaker, Inc. video series provides speaking strategies that will help you enhance your leadership presence when you give business presentations, speak with senior management, make sales calls, network, and more. The video series addresses every aspect of successful speaking, including how to sound authoritative, speak with credibility, master active listening, and engage your listeners. The videos also provide speaking strategies rooted in theatrical performance, because actors know how to move audiences. The result: you will become a more authoritative and successful speaker!

The Successful Speaker, Inc. videos will help you project star quality and get more YES’s in the workplace and on the speaking platform. Learn how to enhance your credibility: speak with stage presence, confidence, authority, and authenticity. Discover ways to engage your listeners: use vocal dynamics with impact, to make your communication sing. You will learn how acting improvisation can help you develop the ability to think quickly on your feet. You will also discover how to rehearse strategically with techniques that focus the mind and help you appear completely spontaneous.

There are many other videos about communication, public speaking and presentation skills hosted by Maria Guida and Successful Speaker, Inc. All of these videos are available free of charge on YouTube at Youtube.com/SuccessfulSpeaker

and also at www.successfulspeakerinc.com/blog.
And if you’d like to learn more about how to speak successfully for business, log onto our website and join our mailing list, to download additional, free tips for successful speaking. Visit www.successfulspeakerinc.com.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development

Grow Your Business With Powerful Online Marketing Funnels

Drive More Traffic and Gain High Value Clients

Discover how automated marketing funnels and data capture strategies will up your marketing to increase your online sales. Learn how Facebook ads, Webinars, Landing Pages and Video Marketing will move you ahead of the competition as the go-to expert.
Uncover innovative and strategic action steps to move you to the next level of online exposure. Get motivational with up-to-date business marketing strategies and solid business advice from a Global Marketing Expert with over two decades of experience.
Learn How To:

  • Activate automated marketing funnels that grow your database
  • Develop innovative marketing strategies to increase sales
  • Utilize online marketing funnels to up your competitive game
  • Take strategic action steps to move to the next level

Categories
Growth Personal Development

BIG VISION for Small Business

Exceed Your Goals and Grow a Wealthy Business

 

Learn how forward thinking and a bigger vision will solidify your focus and persistence toward achieving and exceeding your goals. Discover how to shift your business to massive growth and expansion with a step-by-step, proven strategy for growth.

During this presentation, you will discover how to create a tangible, easy-to-follow, one-page business plan. And you will also uncover the insights on how to take your passion and drive and turn them into lasting results despite any challenge. You’ll get motivational, real world entrepreneurial business strategies and solid business advice from a highly successful entrepreneur for over 3 decades.

Learn How To:

 

  • Turn your Big Vision into a focused step-by-step business plan
  • Easily eliminate overwhelm and remain focused on your goals
  • Overcome any business challenge and keep moving forward
  • Embrace change and reinvent to thrive in your business

Categories
Best Practices Human Resources Management Marketing Personal Development Women In Business

Looking Confident – Even When You’re Not

Over the last several posts, I’ve been sharing strategies on delivering a great performance in front of the camera – and by extension, when in front of a live audience even without a camera. If you haven’t seen them yet, here’s the link to my series of video shorts, “Capturing Your Confidence on Camera.”

This time, I want to share a couple of other great resources for delivering a confident, compelling, engaging performance, as both demonstrated and explained in two of my favorite TED Talks.

The first is more likely to appeal to the part of your brain that likes to read inspiring self-help psychology related books that explain why you do what you do and how to control your own destiny.

It’s your friendly neighborhood Harvard psychologist, Dr. Amy Cuddy, in her TED talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.”

This video had two big take-aways. First are the very-real effects that your posture has on your hormonal balance, which subsequently can influence your psyche and sense of self-efficacy and confidence. If you knew that taking two minutes to yourself to hold a certain pose before giving a presentation or speaking on camera could change the quality of your delivery, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?

Second, her story of needing to project confidence at a time when she didn’t feel it, suffering from what some might call “the imposter syndrome,” (long before she was “THE” Amy Cuddy,) is something everyone can relate to. The way she managed to perform despite that fear, until she had beaten it, is inspiring..

It’s also humbling. After realizing everything she was up against – including severe cognitive damage from a car accident – you have to admit: if she can overcome that, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to overcome your fears too, and learn to speak with true confidence.

In contrast, the second video will appeal to the other side of your brain. The part that doesn’t want to have think too hard. Actually, it kind of reminds me of a Seinfeld episode. Why? Because it’s a whole talk about nothing.

It’s a talk about what academics might call “meta-strategies”… but we won’t call it that, because that sort of sucks all the fun out of it, which shouldn’t be allowed to happen after a perfectly good Seinfeld nod.

In “How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk,” Will Stephen steals the show at TEDxNewYork. He paces the stage and talks as if giving a real talk on some specific topic, all the while really just pointing out all the of his own little gestures, mannerisms, and vocal modulations as he does them, explaining why they make his talk engaging… or at least why they would if his talk actually had a more specific point.

It’s six minutes you’ll need to watch twice. The first time you’ll follow along with each point nodding, smiling, and thinking “oh my gosh, that’s so true!” Then at the end, you’ll realize, “oh my gosh, that IS true… wait a minute, I need to look at that again…”

As he uses each little gesture, and explains its value and its likely effect on you right at that moment, take note. The strategies are so simple, but each one engages, endears, and compels. His talk is entertaining and semi-facetious, but every one of his points is relevant, and easily applicable in any presentation preparation and delivery.

Ultimately, just remember that in any situation, you have control over much more than you realize, including how confident you feel, and how confident you look. Strike your pose. Emulate the characteristics you wish you had (i.e. “fake it ‘til you make it”.) Consider the little gestures and vocal cues that connect with the audience in different ways, and deliver them like you mean it.

Once you put it all together, the confidence will flow outward, and when you see how the audience responds to it, you’ll feed off that response and the confidence will become genuine. And there’s no better feeling than that!

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development

What do you want to be when you grow up?

What do you want to be when you grow up? That is a question most, if not everyone heard when they were kids. Now as adults have you ever asked yourself that question again? Most likely if you have it’s for one of two reasons. Either you found yourself in a career that does not align with who you are at your core or you have reached a level of success that has you feeling “now what”? If you have many days where you are just going through the motions, not feeling engaged or satisfied it sounds like you may no longer be enjoying your work.

Gallup continues to report numbers like 30% for employee engagement and it seems that it is only a rare few who are excited about their work.

If you are part of the 70% who are disengaged at work, you might feel that the other 30% just got lucky and maybe you even feel that it’s not fair. Let me put your mind at ease a bit: it’s not your fault. You can only blame yourself if you continue to do work you don’t like once you understand the paradigm I’m going to share.

A quick caveat, this is not about the people you work with. If you love the type of work you do, but don’t like the people you do it with or the company you work for, that is different from not liking or being disengaged from the work itself. What I’m talking about are those people who are disengaged from the work because of the work itself or the way the work is carried out.

Now let’s get to the new way of looking at the problem and discuss the solution. Most likely, you picked your field of study based on external conditions or pressures vs. an internal understanding of how you are wired. What I mean is that many people go to school and study what they are told to study, what their parents encourage them to do, what teachers encouraged them to do, or in a field that they believe is practical so they can find work after school. That’s what I did, I was told I had to go to college and I picked business and accounting because that meant I would find a decent paying job when I finished, plus at the time it meant that I didn’t have to write many papers. That was a decision that took over 15 years to correct and a lot of disengagement along the way. I won’t call that choice a mistake because I did the best with the tools and knowledge I had when I was 17, but let me tell you, if I knew then what I know now about how I’m wired I sure would have gone in a very different direction.

What do I mean by how I am wired or who you are at your core? What I mean is that you are a unique recipe that makes you like and dislike certain activities, excel or flounder with different skills, and makes up who you truly are. It’s like what Maslow discusses with his hierarchy of needs and self-actualization. Human beings have an inner bent – the innate unchanging part of us that gives us a sense of fulfillment and contribution. Another way to say this is that people have an innate unchanging nature that predisposes them to want to make a certain contribution in a certain way. When you are not working or living in a manner that allows you to contribute in the way you were born to contribute, that can lead to disengagement.

The good news is that regardless of how grown up you are, it is never too late to discover what you are meant do or how you are wired, as long as you want something different. Instead of continuing to live based on chance or what other people think you should or shouldn’t do, you can design the life and career you want.

What would be different for you if you jumped out of bed every morning because the work you do is aligned with who you are at your core? What would be different if you were really excited about your job, your company, and what you contribute?

The first step is to really know who you are and how your innate nature drives you. Are you someone who loves building relationships and teams, and is driven by ideas, but not so much by details? Or are you someone who loves numbers, budgets, research, and all the details? Do you go a little crazy when someone else just wants to wing it? Maybe you like to invent, create, lead, and build; or maybe you like to listen, gather information, and work on creating solutions. These are all valuable, we all have different combinations of these types of energies, and when you get to use the energies that you are wired for, the magic starts to happen.

My personal experience with this comes from the fact that it took over 15 years to align who I am with what I do. I was a very successful information security consultant and I was very good at my job, but it made me miserable. I dreaded Monday and definitely had the Sunday night blues. I had anxiety at times about the work because I knew how much I did not want to write that next report or nit-pick the smallest details with the QA department. The part of the job I liked the most, was the part I got to do the least. When I would get to help my clients actually solve problems and when I got to spend time really getting to understand their businesses and how things work. I did not enjoy the repetitive questions I had to ask every client and the same report that I had to write over and over. I enjoy being creative and fluid, not systematic and sequential. I also know that people assume that I am an extrovert because I am not shy and can talk a lot, but in reality I am really quite introverted. I get drained when spending days on end talking to people and that part of the old job exhausted me. However there were lots of other folks who thrived in that role because they liked and were wired for the tasks and roles that I was not.

It took a lot of trial and error for me to figure this out, but there are lots of tools and ways to go about assessing who you are to better determine what you should be doing. This is not something I can go through in this article. I am writing this for you to start thinking about who you are and the work you do. This is a paradigm shift where you start to understand why you have been disengaged for so long. I want you to know that it’s never too late to do something different, something that lights you up.

So if you are like many people (previously this included me) who wound up in a career where there is little to no satisfaction, then it’s time to discover who you are and make a change to the work that aligns with you. I like to remember that the pain of discipline (or the pain of change) is much better than the pain of regret.

This is one of the services I offer my clients and If I can help support you in making a change or identifying your core values and strengths please reach out to me at sharon@c-suiteresults.com or visit c-suiteresults.com

Categories
Growth Human Resources Leadership Personal Development

Can Diversity Go Too Far?

What are we wanting to accomplish with our diversity programs? Do we want to simply reflect the proportion of races in our organization to match those in our culture? Do we want to avoid discrimination law suits? Are we wanting to generate innovative thought? Do we expect improved productivity? According to Harvard Business Review, most diversity programs fail to accomplish their stated objectives of increasing diversity. (Kalev, 2016)

Biodiversity boosts natural sustainability for all life forms. Each species, no matter how small, plays an important role in this goal. The greater the number of plant species means a greater variety of crops leading to robust sustainable survival of all. Isn’t this the main reason we want to have diversity in our organizations as well? We want sustainable survival in a high change environment.

How can an organization optimize sustainable productivity improvement and continuous innovation? One factor must be its ability to attract and retain employees with diverse skills, ideas, and methods of improvement. But diversity programs are often seen as a strategy avoid the appearance of bias and racism. In my opinion this seems unfortunate and unproductive. Is it fair to say all African American’s do not think alike? How about Caucasians? They don’t all think alike either, correct? For me this is what diversity programs can go too far astray and miss opportunities to contribute to sustainable healthy growth in profitability, revenue, and customer experience.

To avoid letting your diversity selection programs go too far, three key criteria should be keep in mind and implemented to create a culture which will contribute to healthy sustainability. First, clarify how everyone must behave to always be respectful. One pitfall with diversity is the danger of disrespect. A good example in nature is the destruction of many native species of plants caused by feral pigs in Hawaii. European domestic pigs bred with the smaller Polynesian pigs. The feral pigs today damage many indigenous plant life and require hunters to control the population. The pigs are a good example of diversity gone too far.

People from different backgrounds can have different definitions (demonstrations of respect) of respect and therefore different expectations. By clarifying how to achieve respect in every interaction and providing everyone with the right and obligation to give feedback, leaders can manage the variation in respectful behavior. This avoids unnecessary damage to the working environment in the form of negative emotional conflicts.

A second pitfall is a lack of appreciation of different communication styles. By adopting insights from a style instrument like DiSC and/or Meyers Briggs, showing how different styles can complement each other and showing how everyone can demonstrate an appreciation for different styles, employees can avoid interpreting differences in styles from demonstrations of disrespect.

A third pitfall is a lack of appreciation for why the organization exists. When the purpose of the organization (mission and/or vision) is clearly stated and reinforced, employees are willing to more easily work through differences in opinion and align on what is best for the organization. This is another reason to avoid rewards for individual performance and to instead reward team or total organization performance. When employees can see how everyone will benefit from cooperative effort (avoiding competitive behaviors) they are more willing to compromise and implement others’ ideas because they know rewards will be coming when the entire organization wins.

The embrace of the typical performance appraisal is a barrier to cooperation because it often rewards individual performance above organizational performance.

We all want sustainable performance, profitability and customer experience. Having diverse ideas, methods, and styles can help achieve a culture which can adapt quickly to change. However, managing the variation in respect, an understanding of why the organization exists, and rewarding team effort will help prevent a diversity program from getting of track.

Wally Hauck, PhD has a cure for the “deadly disease” known as the typical performance appraisal. Wally holds a doctorate in organizational leadership from Warren National University, a Master of Business Administration in finance from Iona College, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. Wally is a Certified Speaking Professional or CSP. Wally has a passion for helping leaders let go of the old and embrace new thinking to improve leadership skills, employee engagement, and performance.

OptimumleadershipTV