Tag: communication

A story for your career

Fabrizio2 Comments

Owning the narrative to your career (and life) has a double positive effect.

First, you get to control how people look at your profile, see you professionally, and eventually what they hire you for. There are many marketing experts, MBAs, sales reps, customer success managers. When you differentiate from the bulk and stress what makes you unique, you make a statement. People will listen if you are consistent enough.

Second, it is a great way to remember what is good and tune down what is bad. Every role, every task, every project has ups and downs, risks and opportunities. If you frame what you did within a narrative that is your own, the good will naturally emerge, and it will serve an higher purpose. Your own.

No solution

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Caring about others, about a situation, about an outcome it’s not finding an immediate solution.

It is more about persistence.

Asking how someone is, inquiring about the status of a project, ensuring people who come to you with issues, fears, troubles, complaints feel heard and respected, coming up with ways to help and continuing doing that when help is rejected, truly listening and deeply caring. Doing this over a period of time, regularly, without waiting for others to ask, without missing an opportunity to show that it matters to you, without assuming that having nothing new to say is having nothing to say at all.

We are all very good at offering our support. We are also equally good at finding any possible way to escape from having to actually give it.

Connection

Fabrizio3 Comments

We underestimate the importance of talking with somebody when things are bad.

We tend to close, fantasize, make assumptions, build on our own emotions, point fingers, second guess, and in general spiral down in a hole we can’t get ourselves out of.

There is always somebody to talk to. Sometimes that is your partner, a friend, your boss, the quiet colleague who barely talks in meetings, a mentor, a person you think highly of.

When things are bad, we need connection much more than a solution. And connection is all around us, we just need to be brave enough to reach out and start building it.

Templates

Fabrizio1 Comment

I used to start working on presentations by opening PowerPoint (or Google Slide). Now I start on a piece of paper, perhaps with the aid of some post-its.

The reason is simple. When I started planning my presentation on a set of slides, or on a template, I always ended up twisting the message to make it fit. Of course, I could always change the slide or the template, but the reality is that by approaching presentations this way I would always always tend to have the visual dictate what I would say.

If you start on a piece of paper, instead, you have the freedom to choose the topics you want to cover, the points you want to make, the pace you want to sustain. You can jot down ideas, scratch them, link them, expand on them, and already come up with a pretty solid backbone for what your telling is going to feel like.

From there on, it is all details. And that is when templates, slides, pictures, styles, animations should come into the scene.

The outcome of your presentation will depend a lot on your audience, your message, and the change you seek to make. None of that is accounted for in any PowerPoint template.

Silence

Fabrizio1 Comment

Silence makes us uncomfortable. Yet without silence there is no listening.

We spend entire conversations just waiting for out turn to speak, trying to cut the others short because our idea, our understanding, our experience is better, talking over each other, filling reflective pauses with jokes or irrelevant thoughts, getting annoyed because everyone is taking too long to get to the point. While indeed we should give silence more space.

Silence is a beautiful pause. It is thought, reflection, clarification. Sometimes, when talking to somebody and allowing for some silence to happen, you can see that something clicks, you can clearly grasp the moment they are getting an insight, a new perspective, a better way to approach the issue.

Learn how to be silent, and how to give others the space to be silent.

Talking is power only when we have something to say. And we often do not.