Paul is a member of the NSA/NC Pro-Track class who is fascinated by the idea that listening can became a societal phenomenon.

He has partnered with Stanford PhD Dr. Eran Magen to create a powerful system for connecting with others called Supportive Listening.

With Supportive Listening, a listener can help a friend, family member, client, or colleague relax, gain clarity, and find their own answers to challenges. Paul reports that workshop participants are often surprised at the effectiveness of the technique.

In the past year Paul and Eran have facilitated over a dozen Supportive Listening workshops in the Bay Area. Paul is currently working with a group at Stanford to develop a comprehensive listening skills program.

Going forward, Paul and Eran are looking to introduce Supportive Listening into Healthcare environments. They believe that it can help doctors and nurses work more effectively with patients, as well as helping them build trust with colleagues.

Would you like to be a better listener? Subscribe to the Supportive Listening Newsletter to get innovative listening tips and news of the latest workshops and products.

If you have ideas for Supportive Listening, Paul would love to hear from you. Contact him at paul@supportivelistening.org.

Listen supportively as Paul discusses his ideas by clicking on the podcast icon below.

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Paul has an excellent post about the lack of coverage of the current economic crisis in many corporate blogs.

Corporate blogs blather while markets tumble shows just how unresponsive many in corporate communications are to the real news in the world. After reviewing a wide range of Fortune 100 company blogs for comments on the current crisis, he concludes:

My point isn’t to ridicule these companies as much as it is to demonstrate how far we still have to go in achieving the culture of openness that new media enables. Here was an opportunity for some of America’s most respected corporations to offer guidance and thought leadership to frightened consumers. Instead, most have chosen to serve up the same old happy-talk mush they’ve delivered for years. That’s their right, but that isn’t leadership.

These are historic times that offer businesses the chance to break through the noise and do something daring and different. So far, corporate America has fumbled the opportunity. Perhaps, as the economic picture becomes clearer, some will start talking with their customers instead of marketing at them.

Has anyone seena Fortune 100 company blog which does cover the crisis?

Interesting article on how to drop the Powerpoint crutch and win people over from the heart of industrial America – Reliable Plant magazine.

Quotes Paul LeRoux, the co-author (along with Peg Corwin) of Visual Selling: Capture the Eye and the Customer Will Follow

LeRoux counsels using images not text to connect with the audience.

A nice quick overview of podcasting from Justin Allen at Ragan Communications. Check it out.

Members of the National Speakers Association (NSA) have long admired professional speaking coach Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE – one of the premier executive speech coaches in the world. She has teamed with her equally famous brother, Robert Fripp – the founding and on-going member of rock legends King Crimson. He has collaborated with, and contributed to, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Blonde, and Brian Eno. In fact, Rolling Stone magazine named Robert Fripp 42 among the top 100 guitarists of all time. As much as Robert is internationally-known for his brilliance with the guitar…he is a superb and entertaining speaker. Robert is as eloquent a speaker as he is a master performer.

Patricia and Robert have developed a wonderful program ‘How to Be a Hero on and off the Platform, from Beginner to Mastery in Business, Performance, and Life’ which teaches:

• Differences between the reliable professional and an exceptional professional
• How to learn your instrument and performing simultaneously
• Why Universal Principles beat rules and laws
• Specific steps to accomplish your goals
• Habits to develop for personal and career success
• Communication styles to model for your own conversations and presentations.

The Fripp’s are taking their show on the road, to Seattle on November 8, Los Angeles on November 9 and Phoenix on November 11.

Well worth registering if you are in the area.

The Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association (NSA/NC) hosted our annual Open House this evening. Over 35 people turned up on the night when much of the rest of the nation was tuning in to the Palin/Biden debate.

The audience heard from a bevvy of professional speakers about what it takes to make a living in this profession.

Among the visitors, I met Nicole Bachelor, who was born in the UK, but now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works for one of the big technology companies in Silicon Valley and has many years experience as a telecommuter.

Nicole has parlayed her expertise into a website and e-book which reveals essential advice and tools for negotiating a telecommuting arrangement in your existing or new job. Then helps make sure you telecommute successfully and keep your career at peak performance. She provides tips, tricks, and techniques for making telecommuting as simple, and easy as going into the office, without all the extra hassle.

Having enjoyed the benefits of telecommuting as an environmentally responsible, low-stress, productivity-enhancing option I was curious to ask Nicole some of the secrets she shares in her book.

To hear what she had to say, click on the podcast icon below.

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A vast majority of employees in high-tech companies are Subject Matter Experts. In the training world they are known as ‘SMEs” (rhymes with please). They are engineering and technical staff with a deep, hard-won, specialist knowledge of one aspect of technology. Without SMEs there would be no high-tech. They are, for many companies, “the noble sinews of our power” (as Shakespeare’s Henry V termed the soldiers he marshaled at Agincourt). They are Archilochus’s quintessential Hedgehog’s who know one big thing better than anyone else.

The challenge for the communications professional is to:

a) Get them to summarize their vast body of knowledge into a sound-bite or elevator pitch which can be included with the data from a dozen other Hedgehog’s into a few remarks by the CEO.

b) Encourage them to talk to each other and share their specialist views of the world with colleagues in different disciplines. Only connect. Develop synergies between them.

One approach to these tasks is discussed in a useful article by Liz Ryan in the September 16 Business Week. She counsels that the communications professional with the ear of the CEO can synthesize the input of multiple SMEs and, by encouraging communication between them, “create an informal in-house council of thought leaders”.

In career terms the person who functions as the nexus must be sure to give full credit to everyone who contributes.

Light relief from the inane world of corporate PowerPoint in this delightful European satire on graphics gone wild:

The video is inspired by Jessica Hagy’s wonderful Indexed blog.

Media trainer and speaker, TJ Walker, warns against cramming too many points into a speech. “The bigger a corporation or organization you are in, the harder the pull will be on you to add more and more points to your presentation. There won’t be anyone advocating for you to have fewer message points. Everyone will be making a forceful and compelling case to add more messages. There is only one little flaw with this strategy—it doesn’t work on audience members.”

Walker advocates no more than 5 points in a speech, which means the writer has to learn how to decline the request from the marketing director for 15 points, the sales director asking for 10 points and legal wanting some other clauses or conditionals added. Adding points to a speech is the easy option. No tough decisions to make. Pleases everyone in manamgement, but puts the audience to sleep.

TJ outlines the way a professional should approach this:

“Instead of setting yourself up for failure, you need to list all of your message points in a numbered fashion and then go though them all and put them in priority. Isolate your top five ideas. Those are the ideas you should speak about. All of the other ideas you can give in a handout, email people in a slide format, give them a t-shirt with the bullet points on it—whatever! Just don’t talk about more than five in your actual spoke presentation.”

Sound advice. Read the full article.

Lauren Mayer is a humorist and songwriter who started piano lessons at 3 and started writing song parodies and funny songs shortly thereafter. (She needed to do something – she was a liberal Jewish kid in Orange County!) A die-hard high school debater, she graduated from Yale intending to go into politics via law school, but after taking a year off to explore theater writing in New York, she found her calling in cabaret and comedy music. She eventually moved to San Francisco to meet straight men, got involved in the once-thriving cabaret scene here (where her biggest challenge was convincing audiences she was a real woman, not a minimalist drag queen), and began writing special material for other singers, then private parties and corporate events.

Lauren worked for over 15 years with a partner, writing, producing and performing corporate theater for clients including Hewlett Packard, Wells Fargo, the California Funeral Directors and a convention of gynecologists, among others. When 9-11 wiped out most of their travel incentive business and her partner left the industry, Lauren worked as a vocal/performance coach and songwriter, releasing a comedy album, until her album led to a couple of gigs as a solo humorist, and voila, another speaker was born.

Pro-Track Profile

Lauren signed up for the the Northern California National Speakers Association (NSA) Pro-Track training this year to learn about the marketing and business end of promoting herself as a humorist – last time she did any marketing was before the internet, so it’s definitely a new world.

When Lauren isn’t at Pro-Track or entertainin audiences, she is a frazzled, sleep-deprived mom of 3 boys, ages 12, 15 and 42 (okay, one is her husband), and she recently released her second comedy album, “Return Of Psycho Super Mom.”

You can reach Lauren (and hear her songs and read her comedy blog) at www.laurenmayer.com.

To hear her tips on how to be funny on the platform, and what not to say to a bald CEO, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:57 — 1.6MB)

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