Skills | Brenda Eckstein International

Get your message across – creatively!

Communication Skills Training Tagged with: communication, Productivity, Skills, Tree, Word Cloud

Apr 102012

Poor communication is often stated as a major problem in business and prevents progress. This applies to both the organisation’s internal and external communication.

In ‘Brenda Eckstein International’s’ training programmes, we help individuals to enhance their competence in this field. By improving their personal effectiveness, productivity increases. The ripple effect can be enormous.

I usually consolidate participants’ input after each session and reflect on what I can learn from it. That way I can ‘continuously improve’ on my own performance as a trainer and also explore ways to ‘self-generate’.

Recently after one of our most popular EYES (Enhance Your Executive Skills) Communication Skills Workshops in which we cover ‘effective delegation’, ‘giving instructions’ and ‘how to be more assertive’ I was updating the input from ‘Lessons from the Tree’. In this exercise, participants observe and then instruct their partners to draw a specific tree. There are many lessons to be learnt from this simple exercise. And the CEO’s in the group learn as much as those in less senior positions! Improving their communication skills through these concepts enable them to generate more time to spend on strategic issues.

What fascinated me after this particular workshop was that I copied-and-pasted the participants’ combined input into a ‘Word Cloud’. Have a look at the picture! It came out looking like a tree. What a co-incidence!

Yes, creativity adds energy and can help to broaden our perspectives. We constantly need to find new ways of ‘getting our message across’. Different people vary in the way they of absorb information. So, use a range of ways of providing information and you have more chance of closing the gap between your intention in sending your message and the recipient’s perception of your message.

Most of our training is ‘in house’ and specially tailored for companies. However we do run occasional ‘public’ workshops on this topic. The next will be held in KwaZulu-Natal in May 2012 - Pietermaritzburg on Thursday, May 10 2012 and Mooi River on Thursday, May 17 2012.

For more information on our training sessions on this topic please contact me – Phone: +27 33 3425432, Mobile: + 27 82 4993311, brenda@strategy-leadership.com

Using models for our business and private lives

Strategy Tagged with: Business, Model, Skills

Mar 062012

A business model which has a huge impact on my thinking emphasises that your likelihood of success in a specific type of business is linked to your:

Passion
Skill, knowledge, experience or ‘feel’
Ability to generate the right amount of money in that field.

Some of the questions asked are:

How much does the topic or that aspect of the business energise you?
What is the extent of your skills in this area? What is the depth of your knowledge? How much ‘tacit’ knowledge have you built up?
Will your involvement in this enterprise be able to generate the right amount of money for you in proportion to 1 and 2 above?

These three aspects must be ‘in sync’. Let me give you two examples of what can happen where there is lack of balance.

A friend of ours was an expert in the field of intricate cake icing and specialised in wedding cakes. When she immigrated to another country, she decided to set up a business in this field. When we test her intention against the above model, she had the passion and the skills and experience. However, number 3 was lacking. The hours taken to craft the icing were out of proportion to the monetary amount she could charge for the cakes. Hence, the demand at that price was limited and she could not generate proportionate income to align with 1 and 2.

Another friend used to run an office administration business in our city. But she lost interest after many years. Her passion (1) was gone. She had the skills, the knowledge and experience (2) to continue running a very successful business and it brought in the right amount of money (3). But she did not feel successful because 1 was missing. So, she sold the business and moved to something that brought her success through 1, 2 and 3 being ‘in sync’.

I believe that being aware of the importance of these three factors (and their combined impact) can help us to make wiser decision in our business or professional lives. We can also look at factors similar to this in our private lives. Questions to ask ourselves are:

Are we engaged in those activities which make us feel ‘whole’?
How can we incorporate more of those sights, sounds, smells and kinaesthetic experiences that bring out the best in us?
In what way are we building, conserving and spending our personal energy?
What are we doing to use our existing skills to better advantage?
How are we continuously improving our skills?
What are we doing to ensure that our financial rewards are in proportion to our expectations?
How fair is our monetary compensation in relation to our enthusiasm, knowledge and experience?

So, applying business models can help us to make decisions that are more likely to lead to success. Some models can also be adapted to enhance our private lives. Reflection can help us align and build a stronger future. So, how can you take the above ideas and use to build a stronger future?