A lot of people flounder at starting conversations with strangers.  They don’t know where to start or what to say – god knows they don’t want to offend someone. 

Here are a few simple rules to keep in mind.

1: Instead of throwing out your hand and diving straight into your life story, a better way to start a conversation with someone is to ask simple but pertinent questions ; getting the person you are talking with to talk about their work, family or their hobbies is a safe and reliable way to make a personal connection.

Further, simple questions are especially good since compound questions confuse the other party and they’ll generally only answer one piece of your multi-part question.

With these questions, a thing to keep in mind is that you want to keep your questions broad without narrowing their options. For example, narrowing their options in a business setting might sound like, “What are you struggling with? Is it time to market? Is it low productivity? Is it loss of market share?” It tends to skew the results and you are less likely to get an accurate or comprehensive response. Once asked, shut-up and make sure you really listen to what the other person is saying.

2: When asking these questions, it is important to remember that physical cues are just as important as your questions. If you are stone-faced, this is not going to be remembered well by who you are interacting with. Be animated! Smile and nod your head slightly to show you have heard them when they are finished. Maintain eye contact with them when they are speaking to you.

3: Along these lines comes a powerful technique called smiling while probing. I find that much of the time, people will only provide surface details unless I probe with follow up questions. This works in social situations when you do it with warmth and genuine curiosity. Smile, tease, coax them, charm and cajole. You can get away with murder … as long as you smile and project good humor and empathy.  

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The ability to both give and receive candid performance feedback is critical in highly dynamic, fast-moving organizations. "Too-nice bosses often make workplace worse" is the title of Jared Sandberg’s recent Wall Street Journal article. "By avoiding confrontation, not giving unpleasant feedback, a hands-off manager can allow problems to ferment."

Lowrie Beacham, manager of a fitness company, disliked confronting people or making decisions that favored one staffer over another, especially when two employees were vying to be in charge of the new fitness center.

"Instead of having one bad day and getting over it, it went on for literally years." What resulted was a dysfunctional workplace, so he gave up his management role. Instead of avoiding confrontations and decisions or giving up your position altogether, here are some simple guidelines for giving and receiving feedback effectively.

1. Focus on actions, not attitude. When you say to an employee, "Your attitude is not very professional," it’s like saying, "I don’t like your height." Don’t be personal. An attitude is more like a personality trait. You’re on much safer ground if you focus on actions instead. People are much less likely to resist the critique or defend themselves.
2. Be specific. Prepare your feedback with the journalist’s formula: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. Who was involved, what happened, where did it happen, when did it happen, how did it affect others? You might not know the Why until the feedback; in fact, you might not ever know, so you need to be as specific as possible with the facts you have.
3. Be accurate and have documentation. When you’re giving feedback, be sure your facts are right. Write them down. All those dates and numbers, what people said, it all needs to be accurately noted. "The palest ink is better than the best memory," according to the ancient Chinese, so document your feedback and have on hand any documentation relevant to the critique.
4. Be inquiring. Before giving feedback, you need to learn everything you can about the situation. During the feedback, keep asking questions. Questions asked, both ways, during the critique help to develop plans for future action.
5. Deliver in a timely manner. Be sure you give feedback before both your memories have faded. Doug Larson, an English racer, said, "A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience." You lose impact if you delay.

More on It Pays to Be Candid: 10 Tips on Business Communication

"Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment." Robert Benchley

Procrastination. We are all guilty of that particular vice. Don’t do it. Take the first step in preparing your presentation. Force yourself onto the chair and get ready. Preparation may not be the most exciting aspect of your project, but it can be the single most important ingredient in your presentation. You may be able to charm anyone on the spot or possess the charisma of the most dynamic person in the world, but without preparation for a speech or meeting, you can still stumble and fall. How to prepare then?

First, imagine your audience. Who they are. What their expectations are. How you will connect with them. What you want to tell them. What you hope to accomplish. The specifics: Where you will be when you give your presentation – the facilities, the lighting. You need to know specifically what type of presentation you’re going to give. Are you motivating an audience? Giving valuable and/or timely information? Trying to sell something? How are you going to do it? What are you going to say?

Ideas, ideas, ideas. You have so many. Random or specific, write all these ideas down. Even if they don’t seem to relate to each other. Take three minutes and scribble ideas for your presentation on a sheet of paper. Don’t over-think this process. Ideas that may sound ridiculous at first can spur other more sensible and/or practical ideas; they can create unusual associations that lead to unique insights. Don’t stop writing. Don’t edit or go back and cross out any words. Let your thoughts flow like a river. As in visual art, make thumbnail sketches but with words rather than pictures.

All right. Now what?  More on Preparing and Practicing Your Presentation

When an eager young person, perhaps a recent college graduate, applies for a job, will they mention their MySpace page? Or their Facebook entry? Probably not, but those sites can be checked, regardless of whether or not they’ve added them to their resume, application or(for some reason) are discussing them during their job interview.

Employers engaged in the hiring process today often consider their candidate’s online pictures and pages, which are quickly and easily accessible on the internet. More than ever, a reputation gained (or lost) by these sites may be an important aspect of whether or not that eager young person is one who wins the job.

NY Times columnist, Thom Friedman, reminds us that, "When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cell phone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is a filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer – and each of us so much more transparent."

Since the word transparency is defined as seeing through an object, in discussing individual reputations, it also defines seeing the faults and missteps caught and recorded — now instantly available to the world.

More on Transparency and Reputation: Communication

This blog post from MindTools.com on active listening is extremely pertinent, thoughtful and well written. So much so that I don't have anything to add. I recommend that you read it for yourself:

http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/ActiveListening.htm

This last Saturday, June 21, I finished reading "What is the What" by Dave Eggars. It is billed as a novel but is essentially a biography of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan who fled a civil war in Sudan.

Thousands of boys died during their 1,000- mile walk to Ethiopia, most from starvation and dehydration, some from man-eating lions, and others from attack by the murahaleen; Sudanese government-armed Arab militias. The boys live for a time in relative peace in a refugee camp - Pinyudo.

Then, Valentino and all refugees at Pinyudo are forced to leave Ethiopia when that country's dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, is overthrown. They were run out of the country at gunpoint and forced to swim the Gilo River where two thousand lives were claimed by shooting, drowning or crocodiles.

They ended up in a huge refugee camp - Kakuma in Kenya. Eventually, Valentino made it to the United States where he met Dave Eggars, a Bay Area writer who agreed to write his story. Valentino has created a foundation and uses his web site to tell the story of his efforts to rebuild his village (Marial Bai) in Sudan.

The setting: In the vast camp of Kakuma which houses 72,000 refugees from all over Africa, Valentino has achieved a position of leadership. He's been a model student in the camp's schools gaining an education he never would have had in his village in Sudan. He's participated in the camp's drama program and even performed plays in the other-worldly, bustling metropolis of Nairobi. He's gained the lofty status of coordinator for the Youth and Culture Program, a paying job with an office, unheard of for a Sudanese boy without any family.

More on Public Speaking enhances leadership of famous African refugee, Valentino Achak Deng

We're excited to announce (and join the ranks of) Guy Kawasaki's latest venture Alltop! 

Inspired by popurls, Alltop helps you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web.  You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet.

Be sure to check out the top public speaking sites page: http://speaking.alltop.com/

More on Low Tech Presentation: Paper or Electronics?

“Stump the Chump” refers to an audience member who may be disruptive or hostile; often expressed through repeated questioning meant to challenge a speaker’s authority and possibly steal the spotlight.  Here are some tips on dealing with this demanding dynamic:

1) Keep a very warm, friendly "interface". This allows you to maintain control over your state of being and will keep the rest of the audience on your side.

2) Play the role of "helpful facilitator." 
"I am just trying to be as helpful as I can be."

3) Let the person trying to stump you be "the expert". 
"Wow, you really know a lot about this!"

4) Engage them with humor and have fun with them.  
"Maybe you should be up here delivering this presentation."
"Let's check with Bob.  He IS the expert, after all."

5) When the expert starts to take you down into the weeds, get the group to help you out.
"Gee, I'd love to talk more about this.  At the same time, I want to make sure that others in the group get what they need from our time together.  (To the group)  Do we want to dive deeper into this topic right now?"  Then the group can be the bad guy, saying no, while you remain the "helpful facilitator."
"Bob, I want to make sure that you get what you need.  How about you and I can take this offline?"

6) Operate from the assumption that there is no conflict.  My experience has been that conflict will not survive if not given oxygen.  By assuming there is conflict, we tend to get into a debate-based mode of communication and thought.  That tends to exacerbate the situation. 

7) Seek out areas of agreement.  Work with the group to outline key ways in which you all agree.  “What can we all agree on?”  Write down those areas of agreement.  At minimum, you will gain a clearer understanding of where your perspectives diverge.

8 ) Let go of the need to be right.  After all, do you want to be “right” or do you want to get what you want?

More on How to deal with the "Stump the Chump" dynamic in Public Speaking

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. Albert Einstein

A nurse in an intensive care unit for neonatal babies notices something wrong with one of the babies. She can’t pinpoint it exactly, but she immediately urges the doctors to prescribe a course of antibiotics.

The next day, tests show that her recommendation was correct when they revealed a potentially fatal condition.

She doesn’t know exactly how she knew, but her intuition – or her emotional decision — saved the baby.

"The theorists say decision-making is a logical process," writes Jeremy Hardie, former chairman of WH Smith Group, "but new research shows emotion is just as important."

Decision-making is a cognitive process, one which gives us a subconscious choice between logic and emotion. It might not seem that way in the middle of a heated argument or when faced with sudden danger, but the feelings that arise when we make an emotional decision from our "adaptive unconscious" are a subtle and sophisticated form of pattern recognition. These gut reactions, in other words, are a form of thought, and not just a knee-jerk reaction.

What does this emotional decision-making have to do with sales? How important is it for a sales person to pay attention to the first response from a customer? It is crucial for sales people to understand emotional decision-making simply because it explains how the brain works and how decisions (particularly buying decisions) are made. When a young woman walks into a car dealership and sees the shiny red convertible (even though she’d planned on a mid-size sedan), which decision-making process will operate in her mind first?

More on Emotion In Decision-making: Sales