Writing long documents like reports and client proposals can be an awful chore for people who don’t do it regularly. So I’d like to give you one of the best tips ever to make this more of a breeze – and to make your writing clearer and more to the point. And this is so…
If I promised to show you one of the easiest ways to get people going along with your thinking, you’d be curious, wouldn’t you? And if I said you don’t have to learn anything new because the technique is already part of your language, you’d be even more interested. Right? And even further, if I told…
Sometimes an occasional change of word in our vocabulary can catapult us out of a fossilized thinking state by forcing us to look at things from a fresh perspective. Here’s one than can have definite consequences for your personal motivation. Whenever you’d normally use the word ‘try’ in your internal dialogue, swap it with the…
We all tend to have a lot of cop-out excuses for procrastination – anxiety, fear of failure, task overwhelm, fuzzy goals, perfectionism. But here’s something that may surprise you. Behind all those things there’s often an inner rebel who’s a throwback to the time when you were going through that obstinate period of development known…
We’ve all experienced this from time to time. You’re at a social function or business networking meeting, talking with someone interesting, or maybe even on a date, when you suddenly can’t think of anything to say. Panic. So you fumble around for a bit, then desperately grab at any mundane subject just to fill in…
You spend hours wrestling with a problem or searching for an idea, and find you’re getting nowhere. Then you wake up next morning and the perfect solution pops magically into your mind. Wouldn’t it be great if you could make this happen whenever you wanted? Actually there’s a simple little trick that can turn this…
Ever get fed up with all that rubbish going around and around in your mind – mental pantomimes and replays of old arguments, the song that won’t stop, that endless, nagging internal dialogue. Here’s a fun way to clear the space and give the back of your mind a chance to do get some work…
When Aristotle wrote his works on Rhetoric, he became the first person to introduce the concept of art into oratory. We ought to be grateful because he gave us quite a few useful linguistic devices we can use to add persuasive power to our conversation. Perhaps the most commonly used of the tools of rhetoric…
The language we use doesn’t always get people’s full attention. Listeners will often drift away, following their own train of thought, almost as though they’d mentally turned down the volume to pay more attention to their own musings. But sometimes a word or a gesture will jolt them from their daydreaming and bring their full…
Here’s a cunning idea you can add to your repertoire of creative tools. It will help you increase your output of ideas whenever you’re doing any sort of brainstorming, or even just kicking a few thoughts around with colleagues. Make a huge movie screen in your mind and start creating vivid mental imagery of things…
Management gurus tell us how important it is to clearly visualize our goals. (And it’s just as true for short-term projects as it is for long-term career ambitions.) This is because the human mind is a target-driven mechanism. When your target is solidly embedded in your thinking, your unconscious mind will work away in the…
When you’re making a speech or presentation, is it better to read from notes or try to memorise your script? Well, here’s an idea than might help with the answer, and it comes all the way from ancient Greece. Demosthenes was one of the most famous of the Greek orators. He was also renowned for making…
JOHN CLIFF Behavioural Engineer, Writer 