It’s often the last thing on your mind and the final thing you do (if you do it at all).  The holiday time can be a frenetic build up to the last day in the office and suddenly it’s handover time.   It’s really easy to either leave this important piece completely and ‘hope for the best’ or to do it in 30 seconds and think it’ll be good enough.

The ‘important piece’ I’m referring to is this.  How you decide (or if you decide) to manage your emails and inbox whilst you’re on holiday.

You’ll notice I said ‘how you decide’ because it is a decision you make and it’s one that affects the quality of your holiday and the ease of your ‘re-entry’ after your holiday.

If you’re travelling on business it’s different.  Keeping in touch via your phone/remote email is easy enough now and a gap in timezones is usually manageable.  There are still some steps you can take to make that easier and these are steps which buy you a huge amount of credit from those who are emailing you.

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It’s important to be able to be direct.  There are times when it’s crucial to be direct.  There you are, I’m being direct with you.  It’s got your attention, you know what I’m saying and it’s a key piece to being a clear, confident communicator.

We’ll start with the ‘Why’ of being direct first.  I’ll be direct with you.  I promise – and before we start, being direct is very different from being rude.  That’s the key.

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It’s often the difference between success and failure, or ‘yes please’ and ‘no thanks’ – naming a product, naming a project, naming a team, naming whatever. Giving something a name which is compelling, inviting, something that people either want, want to aim for or find interesting.

Advertisers and marketing specialists are constantly looking for, and listening for, words that compel, persuade, attract and interest us.  You only have to think about how ads draw us in, give us the ‘why’ and the ‘what’s in it for us’ as they persuade us to buy:

• Coca Cola – the real thing;
• Adidas – right here, right now;
• Levis – Freedom to move

Multi-billion pound industries thrive on finding exactly the words to motivate us into action.

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“Oh, it’s so obvious, what you want to do is, blah blah.”  “Well, what you should do is xyz.”  We’ve all done it, said it and been told it, haven’t we?  “What you need to do is” or “What you should do is” etc.  Well, in fact, what we should do most of the time is ask a question vs tell our friends/colleagues/family what it is they should do.

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Kay White is a Communication Specialist and Trainer and in this extract she talks about how things that actually make us who we are and – if we recognise them – become an “unfair” advantage to us. . . .

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Kay White is a successful Specialist and Trainer and in this extract she talks about how to use effective communication in the workplace using NLP techniques.

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Kay White is a successful Specialist and Trainer and in this extract she talks about how to be confident and clear when talking about yourself and the sort of person you are.

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