PROFESSIONAL IMAGE
Business Casual: What it Is, What it’s Not
The 90's ushered in a new look in business attire and the trend is firmly in place in the 21st century. Many organizations have adopted a more casual approach to business wear for employees on “Casual Friday's", or even for regular dress throughout the week. With casual clothing now an important facet of business dress, adapting to these changes poses new challenges for both men and women. This workshop sheds light on this difficult-to-gage attire requirement. What’s too casual? Are jeans okay? What if I like dressing more formally? You will not only learn what’s expected and acceptable, but you’ll learn the intricacies of colour theory, grooming, and assembling the right wardrobe.
Business Professional: Promoting Your Best Self
What to wear? What’s the right look? Does this even fit? Is this right for the weather? What you wear, how you look, and how you carry yourself makes a bigger difference than most people realize. Over half of the impression you convey to others is based on appearance. Be sure to convey the appropriate message by presenting your best professional self. The four major image appearance components; hair care, skin care, colour analysis, and wardrobe development are reviewed in depth. Both men and women will learn the “must knows” and the “never do’s” in this informative, entertaining, and interactive seminar.
Dining Etiquette: Maintaining a Positive Impression
In this fun and interactive workshop you will be given tips on putting your best foot forward with the non-verbal communication, effective introductions, table small talk, serving yourself at a buffet, dining demeanour and behaviours that will make you confident in any business social situation. You’ll learn the differences of attending larger group buffet venues and smaller dining situations.
Conversing with your clients at the dinner table is always an opportunity to create and strengthen the relationship, or to inadvertently weaken it. Understanding the ingredients of good conversation, knowing what to say and when, directing and redirecting the interaction, and being capable when it becomes difficult, are the hallmarks of excellent dining etiquette.
Grace Under Pressure: Professional Protocols
We all need to be aware of how our behaviour is being viewed by others, especially clients. It’s no secret that clients and colleagues are using the behaviour they see to form their lasting impressions of you. Feel comfortable in conveying your best self by learning the why, when, where, and how of professional protocols. These “rules” of office behaviour are not restrictive; in fact quite the opposite is true. Knowing what the expectations are, and knowing how to meet them provides a foundation of confidence and composure that enables personal expression without the worry of: “am I doing this right.”
Professional Presence: Communicating Confidence
To be self-confident in professional and social situations is a feeling of freedom- freedom to be you. To be encumbered by concerns of how you look, how you act, what to say, how to say it, etc. constrains your willingness to get involved, to be creative, to be assertive, ultimately to be yourself. This workshop takes the pressure off by giving you the easy to implement strategies of looking your best, conversing with confidence, and dining with grace. Learn how to network for results, listen to create goodwill, and make introductions with flair. Knowing you’re making the right impression with ease and comfort provides you with the psychological and emotional space to be yourself. This workshop is designed by choosing elements from our other full day workshops to create a customized experience for participants.
PERFORMANCE COMMUNICATIONS
Art of One Way Communication: From E-mail to Voice Mail
How are you being perceived through email, text messaging or voice mail?
Learn the simple to implement skills of organizing a one-way transmission to motivate another to pay full attention to your message. The organisational structure (when to say what) assists tremendously with comprehension and retention of even the most complex of ideas. Impress all with your ability to simplify the complex, get to the heart of the matter, and motivate receivers to want to pay attention.
Attitude: The Power of Choice in Your Life
Take charge of your attitude and take charge of your life with new strategies for beating negativity, eliminating doubts, and setting positive goals. Understand the power of thought, and its impact on prompting emotion. Recognize that thoughts are a choice, and that the right choice leads to better decisions and better outcomes.
Being Effective through Assertive Communication
Are you submissive, aggressive or assertive? Find out where you fit and why assertiveness is the best way to achieve your goals. Learn the words to use, the secrets of body language, and how to interpret other’s behaviour to make positive assertiveness a productive force in your life.
Being Your Best: Dealing with Difficult Situations
Interactions at work with colleagues, supervisors, and technicians don’t always go as smoothly as we’d like. One’s ability to maintain control in difficult to control situations is the hallmark of excellent communication’s ability. Learn to communicate via email and telephone to promote cooperation and effectively resolve issues that are deemed difficult. Recognize that conflicts will happen in the workplace, our goal therefore is to be at our best when it’s most required of us. Learn to use your voice and rapport building skills to reduce tension, deal with emotion, and make for a more stress free professional life.
To be at our best when we most need to be requires having the confidence and competence at recognizing potential problems and circumventing them before they escalate. Being assertive in clarifying expectations early in the engagement is essential.
This highly regarded course uncovers the often hidden motivations of why we act the way we do, and provides practical, easy to implement, strategies to turn negatives into positives and strengthen interpersonal relationships. We’ll explore the typical difficult interactions of your workplace and role play approaches that lead to improved outcomes.
Communicating with Clients: Questioning and Listening to Achieve Results
Learn to achieve your conversational goals with clients by asking the right questions and actively listening to the answers. Use closed and open questions strategically to move client conversations in the right direction. Learn to lead by involving people in a way that galvanizes their support in the short and long term. Practice one of the most important skills of career success: empathy. Learn to see agendas from the client’s perspective to enhance your own understanding, to build your credibility (and likeability), and to enhance your persuasive influence.
Conversation Management: Attaining Goals Protecting Climates
Conversing with your clients at the office, a conference, the golf club, or any other venue is always an opportunity to create and strengthen the relationship, or to inadvertently weaken it. It’s the conversations we have that build relationships. Understanding the ingredients of good conversation, knowing what to say and when, directing and redirecting the interaction, and being capable when it becomes difficult, are the hallmarks of excellent conversation management. In this entertaining and interactive session we’ll explore a pragmatic model of interpersonal effectiveness. We’ll increase our self-awareness, capitalize on the perceptual tendencies of others, and appreciate talk that includes and excludes. We’ll delve into the important elements of the conversational process: attitude, attendance and contribution. You’ll be given tips on putting your best foot forward, preventing conversational problems, and repairing interactions that do go astray.
Customer Service: Making the Most of Interactions
You provide superior customer service when you can identify your customers' wants and then exceed them. But the question is; how do you identify your customers' wants? You do this by watching for, identifying, and maximizing moments of truth. Once you see these windows of opportunity, you look for and analyse your customers' meta-messages - the real messages they are sending. This is done by using such strategic communication techniques as active questioning and kinesic analysis. When you are able to identify, and then exceed your customers' needs and/or wants, you have the tools for building and enhancing solid customer relationships. Inevitably though, some customers can be more challenging than others. We'll also discuss ways to identify potential customer service problems before they turn into conflicts, and identify strategies that can effectively defuse difficult situations.
Difficult Clients: Thriving in Difficult Situations
Client negotiations can sometimes leave us feeling frustrated when we feel the client is being unreasonable. Our responses in these situations will have an impact on the present negotiations, engagement with the file, future business, and so on. Dealing with difficult clients requires that we be at our best under pressure. To engage clients with tact, diplomacy, skill, and compassion are the hallmarks of learned communication competence.
Our responses to these clients must be based on professional integrity and assertive communication while still maintaining a supportive communication climate.
We need to explore the underpinnings of unreasonable requests and behaviours in order to understand them and move ahead with supportive professionalism.
Emotional Intelligence: “Most Predictive Trait of Success”
Join us for an illuminating program to view with new eyes the essentials of intercultural communication. Find out what the Harvard Business Review cited as the single most significant skill leading to career success. Leave with a new appreciation for generational differences and how we can thrive by tapping into our strengths.
Listening: The Emotional Power of Being Good
Learn how to expand your listening capabilities and become a more effective communicator. Listening is a learned skill that typically has been ignored as such; consequently, it’s our worst communication skill. Learn to take in greater amount of information, hear what’s not being said, and build relationships in this powerful session.
Presentations: Develop and Deliver like a Pro
Do your presentations have the impact you intend? Are you unsure what information should be included in, or omitted from, your presentations? Does your delivery grab and hold your audience's attention? Do your words motivate audiences to action? Your executive image can be either built or undermined by your presentation abilities. This highly successful workshop will enhance your presentation skills and give you the insights you need to project a confident executive image in any speaking circumstance. We'll cover everything you need to know to deliver any presentation with clarity, persuasiveness, and confidence. This course is designed for professionals with an emphasis on organizing your thoughts and data for maximum impact, developing visuals to enhance your message, and projecting competence through body language and voice.
Social Styles: Relational Communication Skills for Professionals
This highly successful seminar brings participants to new insights about themselves, their colleagues, and their customers. Learn to assess the interpersonal style of others, and learn how to maximize your communication approach to enhance effectiveness and persuasiveness.
Workplace Writing Made Easy: Organization and Clarity
Anyone who works at a desk knows the importance of good writing skills. This course is just what you need to write clear, concise business letters, memos, emails and reports. Professionally relevant activities and basic do’s and don’ts will have you writing like a pro as you discover the secrets to well-written sentences and learn how to quickly organize your thoughts.
Too much writing and too little time is the recurring challenge of the busy professional. Learning how to focus your main message and bring it to your readers’ immediate attention are the keys to fast and effective business writing.
