relationships

Roast Writing For The Sarcasm Impaired – Persuasive Communication and Life Skills

June 10, 2009

In this series of blog posts, I’ve been talking with you about how to roast a friend. In this post, I’ll talk about preparing your material.

When you roast a friend, you use a combination of what you know PLUS what you know ain’t so. For example, you can use exaggeration to take familiar things people know about the roastee to the extreme, because exaggeration has humor power.

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Life Skills – Getting In The Roasting Frame Of Mind

June 8, 2009

Assuming you’ve done the logistical prep and understood the gist of the roast, it’s time to set your mind in the right direction about your material. SHOULD you ever be invited to speak at a roast – and at this point, it’s only a matter of time – here are some pointers to appropriately pay tribute to the honoree (and keep the other roasters from unleashing a malicious verbal assault upon you)

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Life Skills – How To Set Up Your Roast

June 5, 2009

We’re building up to a summer of fun with a blog series on how to roast a friend. In my last post, I talked about what a roast is and shared my own experience. In this post, I’ll give you some logistical guidelines to help you increase the painful pleasure of a well done roast.

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Life Skills – How To Roast A Friend

June 3, 2009

June has arrived. It’s a season for weddings and bachelor parties and summer gatherings of friends. And in the spirit of summer fun, I’ve decided to explore the topic of how to roast a friend. I’ve been contemplating doing this for awhile. Roasting comes naturally to some people, but for others it’s a difficult stretch. Having good resources is essential.

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Dealing With Difficult People – Turning The Table On Meddlers

April 17, 2009

We’re talking about meddling meddlers and the people they meddle with. And in this post, we’ll consider options for dealing with these difficult people that stand a chance of bringing about positive change.

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Can You Read Too Much Into Facial Expressions?

April 6, 2009

I’ve thought for a very long time that body language generalizations aren’t all that valid because they take too little into account. I’ve known some good liars and bad in my day, and I don’t believe these ‘reading’ methods actually work, unless you are highly trained in reading microexpressions as Dr. Ekman is, for anything except the most rudimentary and obvious emotions…happy, mad, sad, glad, contempt and disgust.

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How To Stop An Ex from Further Breaking A Broken Home pt2

December 12, 2008

There’s something I learned about parenting many years ago that might actually apply to her childish behavior. It has to do with consequences, of which there are two kinds: Natural, and Logical. Natural consequences are the inevitable results of our actions.

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How To Stop An Ex From Further Breaking A Broken Home pt1

December 10, 2008

When there are children involved, divorce is hard on everyone concerned. I have a standing invitation hidden away on one of my older websites associated with my coauthored book Dealing With People You Can’t Stand, for people to post their most pressing interpersonal problems. Recently…

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