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Top Ten Interpersonal Skills – 9 – Keep Your Wits About You

August 24, 2009

Humor attracts interest, puts people on common footing, and creates an atmosphere of goodwill that is conducive to meaningful communication. Humor has such a positive impact on people that more and more businesses (not the dead-serious ones though!) use it to train and retain employees.

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Life Skills – Quick! Think Fast!

June 1, 2009

Sometimes, a situation requires that you ‘think fast.’ More often than not, people tell me that they can never figure out what to say in time, yet in retrospect, it’s incredibly obvious. How does that work? How is that possible?

I think there are at least two things you can start doing right now to increase your speed of thought. The first is do-overs, and the second is rehearsing a new question at every opportunity.

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Persuasive Communication and the Drive To Discredit – How They Do It, and What You Can Do About It

May 20, 2009

There are the standard negative means of persuasion, such as name calling and casting aspersions, character assassination, negative labeling; presupposition (speaking as if the foundation of their argument is already proven to be true, therefore what they say based on it must also be true);

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The Drive To Discredit – Who Gains?

May 18, 2009

I’ve witnessed numerous campaigns that have discredit rather than social good as their objective. They use wild accusations, name calling, fake or biased data and specious linkage to influence how people think about a person, an idea or a group they find threatening.

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Persuasive Communication and The Drive To Discredit

May 15, 2009

You’ve seen it before. No doubt, you will see it again. I’m talking how a persuasion campaign begins to undermine and discredit an individual, a group, an idea, or a set of choices that is gaining in popularity, or whose existence and success threatens another individual, idea or group.

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Dealing With Difficult People – Direct Your Meddling Meddler

April 20, 2009

Continuing on about dealing with the difficult behavior of meddling, today’s idea is that if someone insists on getting involved in your business, give them something to be in charge of or ask them to be responsible for some result.

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How To Defend Against The Guilt By Association Tactic

October 6, 2008

In my previous post, I talked about the power of association and its use in the ‘Guilt By Association’ tactic. In this post, we’ll explore how it works and how to defend yourself from its use. However, there is such a thing as actual guilt by association. If you sit in a room and hear people conspire to break the law, and do not take action, you are complicit.

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