As speakers and speaker coaches, we spend a lot of time crafting talks—both for ourselves and with our clients. It’s an obvious exploration, therefore, for us to look into how we can leverage AI to craft these talks more quickly (and ideally, effectively). Recently, Stephanie started giving a talk entitled Stories That Sell. In the past several weeks, Stephanie has delivered this talk three times and here are the things she learned while leaning into AI as a tool to help her.
Read MoreExecutive coaching is a soft skill. Yes, there are some technical frameworks you can be trained on, but at the end of the day, a good executive coach is proficient in what are generally considered soft skills: conversations, intuition, active listening, appreciative inquiry, etc. Soft skills are those less tangible skills that are more dependent on our ability to be human and interact with other humans than hard skills like accounting or even project management.
As AI takes more and more center stage in our collective awareness, and our ability to leverage and access AI-powered tools becomes commonplace, we have begun to wonder, Could AI be an effective executive coach?
Read MoreNine times out of ten, feedback conversations turn into difficult conversations because we build them up in our heads to be way bigger and more complicated than they really have to be. Here’s some of the advice that Stephanie gave Sara. What else would you offer?
Read MoreMaybe it’s cutesy to say that time management is an evergreen challenge… but it’s true. It ebbs and flows as our work lives and personal lives change. The busier we are, or the more important the task in front of us is, the harder it is to successfully and gracefully manage our time. And the crazy thing is, it’s in these moments of high stress and overwhelm where we most need to be able to trust and rely on our time management skills.
Depending on your situation, there are several ways you can better manage your time. Time management is an ongoing and continuous process of assessing, organizing, and executing.
Read MoreQuestions don’t have to be either leading or random. You can ask questions thoughtfully, in a way that encourages open discussion, collaboration AND you can ask questions that move people to action.
Here are some suggestions for questions anyone can use at several key moments within a consultative conversation, from kicking off the conversation to forwarding the action.
Read MoreAround this time of year, people are planning large-scale and high-stakes gatherings, and they want to make sure the time and money invested in these events are well spent. Nine times out of ten, that means folks are putting pen to paper and coming up with an agenda. If you’re in the early stages of doing just that, here are some tips to make sure your agenda (and the resulting gathering) are designed with outcomes, engagement and a thoughtful flow in mind.
Read MoreThe definition of the term “coaching” matters because it’s the substance of the engagement. Inherent in the definition is an understanding of the desired outcome, and a notion of why an executive coach is the right partner to get you there.
At Wolf & Heron, we think of coaching the same way The International Coaching Federation (ICF) does. The ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.
Read MorePresenters want to include stories in their presentation, but have no idea where the stories should go or what they should be about. Here are a few moments in your presentation where leveraging a story is particularly effective.
Read MoreGiving constructive feedback is tough. Once a manager has mustered up the willingness to prepare for and deliver feedback, it requires attention, time and curiosity to work through. For many managers, these difficult conversations cause additional mental load because they are accompanied by fear and anxiety.
Read MoreCrafting an influential story is tough. Where do you start? What do you do along the way? How do you know if and when you’re ready to share your story? We thought it would be fun to try to lay out our process from beginning to end. During our Influential Storytelling program, we take participants through the entire process of crafting an influential story, but it’s something else to see it laid out on a page. Let’s see if we can do it!
Read MoreWe have identified some common mis-steps when it comes to planning interactive sessions, so we thought we’d bring them to you. If you’re looking to leave the presentation behind and design a more engaging session for your audience, here are 5 tips to consider.
Read MorePresentations aren’t always the best idea. Unless a presenter is phenomenally dynamic and engaging in her own right, audience members are going to have to consciously choose to pay attention and process the information. This takes effort, and it’s almost guaranteed that more interesting distractions will find their way into the space. If the presenter is presenting information that is remotely complex, dry, or worse, poorly organized, the audience is surely checked out.
Most of the time, when working with clients, the belief is that “net new” information needs to be presented first, and the only opportunity for interactivity is in the application of that knowledge. This is simply not true.
Read MoreAs executive coaches, we’re trained in conversation strategies that can unlock our client’s potential. What’s interesting in our coaching conversations is that we’re often talking to leaders about how THEY can unlock the potential of their employees or team members.
Here are a few scripts that can get you started if you’re also trying to achieve the same thing.
Read MoreWe are firm believers in the value of empowering leaders (and people) to be compelling communicators who can inspire and persuade others with stories. Now that we’re almost a decade into delivering our flagship program, Influential Storytelling, we’ve partnered with clients ranging from Google to the University of Michigan, Uber to McGraw Hill. In that time, we have developed a strong point of view about what it takes to create an effective storytelling learning journey.
If you’re designing a storytelling learning journey for your employees, here are a few guiding principles we recommend you keep in mind…
Read MoreFeeling a sense of belonging as part of a team at work has become a bit of a hot topic in the past few years. This is no surprise given the rapid globalization and distributed nature of teams. Managers used to be able to rely on the office and the daily proximity of team members as a relationship-building accelerator. Now that many teams are almost exclusively virtual, the approach has to be different. It’s still possible to create a sense of belonging in a virtual and distributed workplace, but it requires more intentionality; with fewer ad hoc moments of connection, relationship-building has to become a workstream rather than something that just happens by itself. The benefit is that the focused effort can lead to even stronger and purposeful connections.
Here are some ideas you can leverage to create a sense of belonging for your virtual team members…
Read MoreAll too often, weekly (or monthly) status updates end up being a verbal report-out by team members to the team lead. The team members feel like the time is wasted and the information could have been better communicated in an email. The team leader struggles to get anyone to participate outside of their own report. Now that many of these calls are happening in the virtual space, it’s no wonder that everyone on these calls is multitasking and disengaged.
But what can you do? As a manager or project lead, you need to get updates from the team to make sure all the work streams are on track. How can you rethink—and hopefully reinvigorate—the status update meeting?
Read MoreAfter coaching many individuals as they prepare for a talk, keynote, panel, interview, etc, we think we have figured out why it’s hard to see your own strengths and opportunities in this space; public speaking is not just about the moment on the stage. Great public speaking begins weeks before the actual event, when you figure out what you’re going to say. Then, in the moment, it’s about knowing how to say it just right.
Check out these guiding principles to prepare and deliver a masterful presentation.
Read MoreHere are a few questions to consider for your next Manager/Employee check-in. If you’re a manager, try a few out on your employees. If you’re an employee, try to answer them ahead of your check-in and see if they inspire a different kind of touchpoint.
Read MoreVoices have rhythm, beats, texture, and timbre… all qualities of music. By thinking about our vocal chords as if they’re instruments to practice playing, we can open up an entire world of vocal delivery techniques that are both learnable and measurable in their impact.
Read MoreSince check-ins are so important, we wanted to make sure managers are empowered with a diagnostic tool to evaluate the quality of the one-on-one conversations they’re having with the employees. This tool is a simple diagnostic that managers can complete after a touch point to evaluate how well they’re doing in leading these critical meetings.
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