Three Better Questions than “So what do you do?”
“So what do you do?” Recently, I read an article by 99u’s Sarah Kathleen Peck called, “Answering the Dreaded ‘So what do you do?’ Question.” Amazing. For nearly a decade, Kurt Heinrich and I have pioneered a micro-social-engineering initiative designed…
Enhancing Potential in the Canadian Workplace
Enhancing Potential Earlier this year, the Canadian Education and Research Institute for Counselling (CERIC) released its Career Development in the Workplace: National Business Survey, which describes strategies for enhancing potential in the Canadian workplace. In addition to there being a…
Three Tips for Engaging Elevator Conversations
Engaging Elevator Conversations Conversations in elevators can be some of the most uncomfortable and awkward examples of human communication. This article will provide you with three tips for engaging elevator conversations. Three months ago I joined the legions of human…
Tips for Successful Communication in the Digital Age
Consumers, not producers, dictate their media diet these days, which means that consumption of your product or message must be the consumer’s choice. The key to ensuring that they choose your product or listen to your message is to build…
Five Tips for Engaging Online Communities
After a month of intense campaigning, The Potentiality earned the third most votes in CERIC’s National Career Challenge. Our submission, Career Swap, finished ahead of a university, several college career centres as well as a number of community-based organizations. Of…
How to Give an Awesome Compliment
People often tell me that I’m generous with praise. Hey, you’re doing an absolutely fantastic job of reading this blog post, by the way. See, I know how to give an awesome compliment! People’s assessment of my complimenting nature is…
Kick it Old School with Phone Calls, Not Email
We live in a world of emails and text messages. And frequently our electronic correspondence can ignite conflict due to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of linguistic and non-verbal signs that have evolved in cultures over thousands of years. It’s an issue…
How to Make Awesome Introductions
Being introduced to people is one of the best ways to become part of a community. As a career practitioner, I’m in the business of making hundreds of human connections every year and this article will explore how to make…
How to Write Emails that Inspire Action
Email is the preferred communication tool in the world of work. Emails provides a digital footprint – a threaded record – of ideas, requests, stories, and all the rest of it. Unfortunately, most of us really, really suck at writing…
How to Communicate: Stories, Focus and Listening
The Potentiality’s Cartoonist in Residence, Phil Skipper, has an interesting take on communication. Here is how Phil captured our personal and collective definitions of communication: “Communicating means speaking and writing with simplicity, clarity and influence. This is the most sought-after…