Public Speaking Success: Why You Shouldn’t Practice Your Speech in Front of a Mirror

Public Speaking Success: Why You Shouldn't Practice Your Speech in Front of a MirrorYou’ve been tasked to give a speech and you want to do a good job. So you ask for advice (or advice is given to you) on how to best prepare for a speech and someone tells you to practice your speech in front of a mirror. On the surface, it sounds like a great idea – after all you can see how your body movies and what you look like when you speak. But in reality, speaking in front of a mirror can actually cause you to develop bad habits and can add to your discomfort if you already find speaking to groups difficult.

How to Get Your Resume Read

How to Get Your Resume ReadIn today’s competitive job market, hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people are applying for the same job. To add make things even more challenging, many of the people submitting resumes meet only a fraction of the qualifications (if any) which makes the job of the person scanning the resumes even more challenging. But that doesn’t matter to you, the job seeker. What does matter is how you can stand out from the crowd so that your resume is actually read. Here’s how.

Resumes are not one-size-fits-all:

How to Get the Most Out of a Speed Networking Event

Photo by Evangeline Shaw on Unsplash

whicPhoto by Evangeline Shaw on UnsplashSpeed networking has to be one of the coolest trends for business events in recent years. It’s not only good for experienced networkers, but it’s the best thing to happen to nervous networkers. Even if you have no clue what to do at a networking event, you can walk away from a speed networking event with dozens of connects.

Speed networking is an event format that allows you to meet a lot of folks in a fixed amount of time (usually 30-90 minutes). You usually have two or three minutes to talk to your networking partner and then a whistle blows and it’s time to switch.

Public Speaking Success: Scared of Taking That First Step? Here’s How to Do it

Public Speaking Success: Scared of Taking That First Step? Here's How to Do itSo you’ve heard (or read) me say it over and over again that the only way to overcome your fear of public speaking is to get up there and speak. Like telling someone not to rub their eyes, it’s easy to say but not so easy to do. Just keep in mind that the hardest step to take (and the most terrifying one) is that first step. After that step, everything gets easier.

Taking that first step:

Have a Communication Fear? Here’s What To Do About it

Have a Communication Fear?  Here's What To Do About itIf you’re like most people, you probably feel some sort of discomfort speaking to groups or going up to someone you don’t know and introducing yourself. As you can imagine, you’re certainly not alone as you’d be surprised at how many people are deathly afraid of either of these situations. But the good news is that there are things that you can do to deal with your fears — and they’re not as scary as you might expect them to be.

Practice makes perfect:

Career Success: How to Prepare When a Layoff is Imminent

Career Success: How to Prepare When a Layoff is ImminentUnemployment is sky high and the talking heads on TV can barely conceal their pleasure when they share the latest bad economic news. So it’s no wonder people are panicked which means they spend less money which means businesses take in less money. This then means that businesses need to let people go and those folks will certainly spend less money…. The bottom line is that anyone with a job has a chance of losing it.

Networking Success: Three Reasons People Fail at Networking Events

Networking Success: Three Reasons People Fail at Networking EventsNetworking is something that’s both easy and natural for us to do. We network with people practically every day (and most of the time, we don’t realize it). Yet when we’re at a formal networking event, something as basic as starting a conversation seems like a big challenge and many people walk away from networking events feeling like they accomplished nothing.

Part of the problem is that many people just don’t understand how to network. I’ve been going to networking events for about a decade and some of the things that haven’t seemed to change are the mistakes people make. Here are some of the big ones that you should try to avoid: