Articles
The Synergy of the Brain
On October of 2011, Dr. Doreen Hamilton and I completed our annual certification training for new Speaking Circle facilitators. Our eight participants included two from UK and one each from New Zealand and Canada, so the international flavor was strong. In four days...
Brain Research and Relational Presence
Current brain research points to why Relational Presence is so elegantly transformational. Relative to other animals, the human brain is immature at birth and grows four times larger in the first 2 years. You had about 100 billion brain cells when you were born. Now...
Curing Stage Fright: Don’t Look For Approval
Next time you are in the audience of a magnificent speaker, steal a look around you and notice the faces. You might be surprised to see that almost all appear neutral, even somber, rather than in lively rapt attention as you might have assumed. You see, an authentic...
Easygoing in the Not Knowing
Imagine standing in front of an expectant audience and not knowing where your next sentence is coming from. This common nightmare leads to epidemic anxiety around public speaking, as well as to over-preparation and over-thinking. And not just for newbies but for...
Curing Stage Fright: Lessons From Horse Whisperers
"Buck," a documentary about a man who inspired Robert Redford's 1998 movie "The Horse Whisperer," is a movie that moved me deeply. Buck Brannaman holds that there is no reason ever to "break" a horse; that a horse's fears and mental processes can be gently listened...
Public Speaking: Keep it Simple and Personal
Once I presented at a regional conference of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) on how to use public speaking to educate the public and promote their practices. I guided these masters of clutter liberation in de-cluttering and simplifying their...
The Art of Being Nobody
At a Leadership Presence Training, Elizabeth Bader, Bay Area mediator, author, and mediation trainer, shared with us her radical approach to training professional mediators. Her talk let me see with new eyes the real world benefits of Relational Presence. Early in her...
How to Evoke the Conscious Listening Field
When you stand in front of a group, your first task is to activate the Conscious Listening Field in the room. If you deliver information or chatter before they are ready to truly be there for you, or at a pace too rapid to breathe with, you will fight an uphill battle...
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