I guess I am a bit of a TED fan. I have seen many TED talks online and have been to several independently organized TEDx events here in Belgium. I am always filled with a sense of wonder at the talks and the speakers who get up there on stage to talk about their ‘ideas…
In our last two Tips & Tricks articles, we talked about speaking and body language skills. This time, let’s look at how we can improve our listening. Be engaged – focus on the speaker alone (if needed, isolate yourselves; keep eye contact, listen without preconceptions and prejudice) Quiet please – instead of interrupting or completing…
In our last Tips and tricks, we gave you some tips on how to clarify your speech. This time, we’re putting the spotlight on body language. Why? Body language accounts for 80-90% of our communication, and even when we don’t speak, we are communicating. If you use your body language well, it can really enhance…
Recently my little brother resumed his desk-thumping exam revision routine, “I don’t care if I fail,” he muttered defiantly. I offered him words of encouragement about the impending break from school, with no luck. Over time I realized I’ve been hitting my head against a brick wall. How do you manage someone’s response to change…
Social media is a great way to engage with customers and employees, rather than simply ‘talk at’ them. But there are many pitfalls. A thought-provoking event at IABC last November got me reflecting further on this topic and ways to avoid some of the common pitfalls. One of these is to have a social media…
Manufacturing solar cells traditionally involves complex and costly vacuum-based processes. Now, some industry specialists believe new approaches can cut costs and bring ‘grid parity’ within reach. They urge producers to discover how thermal processes and electro-deposition enable cost-effective high volume thin-film PV production. Sunlight may be free, but generating electricity with PV cells remains expensive.…
More thoughts on presentations? Well, it’s true, if you google “presentations” you get over 57 million results! Lots of them mention probably things like ‘don’t just read the slides’, ‘keep the word count on each slide to a minimum’, ‘use a sufficiently large font’ – we haven’t counted them all. But it is tricky to…
Sherlock Holmes, Chief Inspector Barnaby, Dalziel and Pascoe, Miss Marple. We all love reading and watching detectives. But why exactly is that, what makes a detective successful? To find this out, I recently attended a crime fiction writing workshop in Oxford, England. With great enthusiasm, I dived into the world of suspense, betrayal and murder,…
I signed up for Twitter a while ago and then didn’t really do anything with it. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. However, I recently started using Twitter again and this time I am getting more out of it and also putting more into it. So I thought it…
A good story is a simple story: for instance: “EU bans harmful pesticides”. As a headline, it’s clear, direct, and for a lifelong environmentalist like me, it sounds like a good thing. The trouble is, there is another side to the story, one with serious consequences for climate change. This shows that telling a simple…