employee-engagement

To call certain people, such as your boss, teachers, professors, doctors, your parent__ friends, etc. by their first names might be considered disrespectful. It is best to err on the side of caution until you know what is appropriate.

The space between meeting a stranger and making a new friend can be a short distance or a gaping chasm. By understanding how to open a conversation well, you will be better able to bridge the gaps and build rapport more successfully.

Being grounded in your lifelong culture and your personal perspective, you are comfortable with the way you see things and may believe it is the best and only way.

Situational awareness enables you to observe your periphery with a clear vision and emotional foresight, which may inevitably keep you socially, physically, or professionally out of harm's way. Connect the dots.

Conversation starters. Icebreakers. Openers. However you choose to label them, that moment when the first words come out of your mouth can make or break the outcome of your entire conversation. Been there, done that, right?

How do you know when to advance the conversation or when there's something still unresolved? When you are situationally aware, you watch the body language and notice the cues that are given to you. Listening and observing are being mindful in the best sense of the word.

This deliberate focus and sensitivity allow you to "put yourself in another person__ shoes and walk around a while" to better understand where they are coming from and what they are all about.

As a professional speaker, I speak rather quickly with enthusiastic energy and emotion. This doesn__ always sit well with people who like to speak at a slower pace and need more time to process. What I have learned through years in this profession is that to be more effective I must adapt my pace to the comfort level of my audience. When I am speaking to academics, engineers, and doctors, I speak with a slower pace than the one which I use with sales people, customer services teams, or teenagers.

How do you minimize the awkwardness in that moment? What are some of the conversations starters you've used to open, encourage, and support enjoyable and beneficial conversations?

We will judge others based on their behaviors with little to no understanding or regard for their beliefs or values__tandards we may not know, nor typically see. When we do this, things can be taken completely out of context because we are assessing their behavior against our expectations, which are produced from our own personal value system.

Your tone of voice is less about what you say and more about how you say it. It enhances or diminishes the language you use, how you construct your sentences, and the way your words sound. It represents the emotional expressions of your thoughts, feelings, and attitude.

Your tone of voice can be conveyed in both the words you speak and in the words you write.

It is generally believed that nearly 40 percent of your first impression will be set from the tone of your voice. Your vocal thermometer can be more impactful than the actual words you use.

It is never an idea, technology, market forces, or access to capital that makes a company innovative. What differentiates an innovative company from an average company is the people working inside the company.