Articles
Inhabit Your Voice
Most public speakers talk faster than their audiences can fully take in, and nearly everyone who shows up at one of my classes for the first time tends to be speedy. Even among professional speakers there is anxiety about stopping regularly for a full breath and...
The Slow Speech Movement: Hold Forth at the Pace of Listening
Time continues to speed up for so many of us and it shows up in how we communicate and I'm not here to suggest you slow down and take a pause between what should be shorter sentences because you've got so much to do and so do I and we don't have control anyway of the...
Speaking in Pleasure
Pleasure is not a feeling commonly associated with public speaking for many, and brain science research published recently gets to the very heart of why this is so. This column about pleasure emerged from great pain evoked in me by the new findings, which made me...
Relational Presence: Transforming Relational Trauma
A Crucible for the Repair and Transformation of Traumatic Mis-Attunement As well as being a Speaking Circles® Facilitator and certified coach I have also been practising as a relational psychoanalytic psychotherapist since 1997 with children, adolescents and adults....
Speaking Circles® Applied to Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD)
What is Attention Deficit Disorder? ADD is a neuro-biological disorder with a triad of symptoms: inattention, impulsivity and, sometimes, motor hyperactivity. Primarily genetically transmitted, symptoms usually become apparent by age seven. Five percent of the...
Authentic Eye Contact
These words by Doreen Hamilton hang on the wall at our San Anselmo training center: "The confidence to speak in any public situation transforms your ability to be yourself in all areas of your life." Relational Presence is key to this wide-ranging confidence to be...
The Biological Basis of Relational Presence
Many perspectives are available on the alchemy of Relational Presence from the realms of creativity, philosophy, and science. Creativity I believe that every human mind presents a unique landscape, an essentially foreign universe to every other mind. (To survive and...
Public Speaking and Healing the Father Gaze
In another article I reported that modern brain science explains the potency of Relational Presence practice in healing the deficit in the "gaze of attunement" that infants ideally shared with a mother figure starting around age 4 months. (See article.) Having missed...
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