Rae Cook & Associates, Inc. - Courses
Fast Forward Your Business Impact

For business success, we offer specific courses with:

• An effective amount of practice of new skills
• Very specific feedback
• Courses taught at higher intensity and greater depth than most

Our clients are primarily organization heads, managers and technical professionals.  Our courses for individual coaching and groups, available in-person or by telephone, are:

1. How to Brief Executives: Advanced Presentation Skills
2. Voice and Diction Improvement
3. Accent Modification
4. Facilitation Skills and Solutions
5. Communication Effectiveness

If you are interested in any of our courses, just contact us.

Course #1: How to Brief Executives: Advanced Presentation Skills
Communicating with senior executives requires special skills. To be effective when proposing new ideas and updates, business heads must know how to prepare and deliver high energy briefings that are succinct, persuasive, strong, and engaging.  Very concise, to-the-point communications and "spontaneous flexibility" can make or break a crucial presentation. The main reason why executive briefings are very difficult is that they often are presented under very tight time constraints and need to be shortened with little to no notice. For example, at the last minute, a half hour briefing might be reduced to ten minutes.

This course achieves 4 objectives:

Objective 1: Choose Outcomes and Strategies for Effective Communications

• Choosing the outcome: one-way (persuade), two-way (need feedback), and decision-making (feedback + progress on an issue)
• Understanding the 8 Executive Principles
• Knowing and using sixteen persuasive approaches
• Creating presentations that meet desired outcomes
• Knowing and controlling the use of "hot buttons:" words or phrases that trigger positive or negative reactions
• Senior executive style for overheads (slides), handouts (quantity, quality, and timing), and preparation (how much detail, background, research, and pre-surveying and pre-briefing)
• Delivery strategies: standing versus sitting, animated tone, and displaying energy and commitment

Objective 2: Maximize impact by being concise and very clear

• Staying focused on topics and desired outcomes
• Verbalizing a concise step-by-step approach without excessive detail
• Communicating strategically versus tactically
• Minimizing jargon and "buzz words"
• Word choice and wording for maximum recall and impact
• 5 Basic organizing strategies
• 3 Advanced organizing strategies
• Reducing ideas to "sound bites" vs. (over)telling the complete story

Objective 3: Have effective, efficient conversations with executives

• Applying the 8 Executive Principles to conversations
• Calibrating your conversation continually to match listeners’ criteria for value
• The "cryptic approach" to garner full attention
• Timing of speaking and listening
• Signifying high energy and commitment for your ideas to executives
• How to demonstrate leadership potential during executive conversations
• Interpreting and reacting to negativity
• Forming provocative and timely questions (fifteen types)

 Objective 4: Coping with difficult questions and "thinking on your feet"

• Anticipating and preparing for questions
• Listening openly to criticism
• Using strategies to buy thinking time
• Dealing with communication and thinking style differences
• Diplomatic strategies for managing conflict               Course list

Course #2:  Voice and Diction Improvement
Participants learn how to:

Objectives include:

Voice Quality

Use appropriate loudness: improving voice projection or reducing excessive loudness

Re-aligning vocal pitch: lowering excessively high-pitched ("boyish" or "girlish") speaking or lowering pitch to make voice quality clearer and more authoritative and pleasant, eliminating monotone

Enhancing vocal resonance: improving the depth and warmth of a voice to convey warmth, maturity, middle and upper class status, and calm, and to be appealing and interesting to listen to

Improving social appropriateness: improving ability to use voice quality that conveys interpersonal warmth, intelligence, status, and amiability

Correcting voicing defects: eliminating voice squeaking, quaking, fading at the ends of sentences, excessive tension or tightness, thinness, harshness, hoarseness, breathiness, breathlessness, and lack of support

 

Diction

Pronunciation: Correcting US regional accents and reducing errors related to English as a foreign language, including sound substitutions and distortions such as saying "r" for "l" as in "retter," for "letter" and "tooalk" for "talk" (New York accent)

Reducing speech imprecision such as omitting word endings ("talkin'" for "talking"), mumbling, rushing, or using pressured speech

Compensating for physical and neurological problems with speech, such as slurring secondary to multiple sclerosis, learning disability, or other forms of muscular weakness or lack of coordination

Correcting dialectical variation in speaking such as saying "Youz" for "you"

Correcting grammatical errors such as saying "he don't", other verb tense errors, foreign-born errors such as omitting "a" and "the" as in "Report on table", and sentence level errors such as not matching subjects and verbs accurately as in "Many people in this company has a problem with speaking"

Expanding sentence structuring skill to express complex and conceptual ideas clearly and coherently for speaking and writing

Improving conciseness and the ability to get to the point efficiently

Enhancing vocabulary to allow the individual to find his or her words more quickly and accurately, to convey meaning more exactly, and to use sophisticated, subtle, and diplomatic wording

Correcting problems with speaking rate such as speaking too quickly

 Image and Style

Being able to switch tone of speaking to convey deference, caring, formality, informality, and amiability

Conveying professionalism verbally and nonverbally by using voice and posture that convey authority, confidence, calm, status, and interest

Using appropriate language, tone, and style with people from diverse backgrounds: conveying respect, courtesy, and warmth with people from different backgrounds and genders

Correcting style defects such as abrasiveness, brusqueness, cold or distanced style, invisibility (not being perceived as a participant or leader)

Conveying leadership: using voice and body patterns that signify presence, status, high intelligence, and polish

 

             Course list

Course #3:  Accent Modification
Participants learn how to:

The course format is a fast-paced, highly interactive series of exercises, simulations, and authentic meetings and presentations. Incidental feedback on persuasion, conciseness, and organization of ideas is included. Also, the course includes long-term follow-up to reinforce new skills.               Course list

Course #4:  Facilitation Skills and Solutions
This one day course will cover best practices in facilitation skills. Presented as well-organized and practical techniques and solutions, the instructors will model and clarify the newest information on facilitation and communication. Topics will include:

• Dealing with difficult people
• Managing resistance
• Listening for implied meanings
• Increasing collaboration
• Developing relationships
• Handling emotions
• Being persuasive
• Focusing attention
• Asking provocative questions
• Improving presentations

Participants will build their personal skills in persuasion, authority, influence, and confidence when confronted with group process issues and with individual difficulties. They will also learn how to think and react quickly to correct problems during their meetings and facilitated sessions.               Course list

Course #5:  Communication Effectiveness
To improve your abilities to communicate clearly, concisely, and persuasively with a wide range of listeners; to be able to “think on your feet” and express your ideas more successfully, especially under pressure (such as answering questions in public)

 The course will cover the following in a one-day intensive session:

1.        Adjusting to audience needs: strategies and systems for "reading" their concerns, needs, questions, and decisions to make and building information on those needs

2.        Organizing information: 5 easy-to-remember patterns for organizing information, being concise and to-the-point, mind-mapping for rapid organization of ideas, persuasion strategies, reducing excessive (technical) detail, and making discussions and presentations more interactive

3.        Listening skills: hearing implied meanings, psycholinguistic research on how to make your information more memorable, reducing interrupting, and paying more attention to what people are saying in discussions

4.        Poise and professionalism: up-to-date strategies for calming "nerves" and conveying confidence via body language and facial expression; what to do with your hands, being expressive without being excessive or naïve-looking; conveying enthusiasm, openness, humor, and genuineness; relating to people from different backgrounds, and polish for interacting with senior executives

5.        Speaking well: being concise and correct, making key points stand out verbally and vocally, projecting positive qualities using professional voice and speech patterns, having time to think while speaking by controlling speaking rate, projecting confidence and calm using your voice

6.        Spontaneous speaking, including success with question and answer sessions: strategies for handling questions and comments diplomatically, concisely, and authoritatively; creating a final impression that is positive, welcoming questions and comments, buying thinking time by switching from concrete to conceptual answers, diffusing tension and destructive challenges using humor and audience re-focusing.

1-800-510-2122
1-302-368-3377
www.gorin.com