3 Speaking, Training and Meetings Tips

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3 Speaking, Training and Meetings Tips! Speaking, training and meetings need not be hard nor should they ever be dry or boring to the participants. Here are 3 quick tips to make each one easier for you to deliver and a LOT easier on your participants.

1) Speak to individuals, never to the group. Even if I have an audience of 2000+, I only speak to one person at a time. Mother Theresa once said, “One never cares for a crowd, only for an individual. If I visualized a crowd, I’d never get started. The important thing is, the individual.” People get nervous speaking to crowds but rarely to their closest friend…an individual. By the way, it is far easier to look at a face in the crowd smiling at you rather than a hostile face. The smile feeds you energy and confidence while the frown or scowl takes it away.

2) Training is more about influencing behaviour than conveying words. Remember that. Why give them 10,000 words if they change nothing? Instead share what you would like them to DO, get their buy in by having them say it makes sense. Then have them practice it, rewarding them (praise, monetary, feed them, etc.) for successful completion. Now you have ‘trained’ your people.

3) Meetings are for a ‘meeting of minds’, not for attendance. You attend a funeral. You should not simply ‘attend meetings.’ If you are not going to speak, share, challenge or participate, you should not be there. If the meeting is simply to give information, skip the meeting and post the information on a Web site. Everyone at EVERY meeting should be sharing. Design your meetings to be true meetings, not passive ‘information dumps’.

Amazingly simple yet so profound…speaking, training and meetings need to be geared to involved individuals who take action.

If you’d like to know simple techniques for getting people to Open - Up and share their ideas in a meeting or a training session? Check out my “Mining For Gold! Facilitation Skills to Unearth a Wealth of Ideas From Your Team” Package.

I wrote this “Mining For Gold!” to help managers on facilitating meetings; trainers on running coaching sessions and how to extract great ideas from your participants.

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“Wow! “Mining For Gold! is a must read if you are in business it makes child’s play of turning a meeting with your people into a meeting of minds… and, when minds meet, action is the result.”

- Winston Marsh
Australian Marketing Guru