A friend recently showed me a neat little trick, and in so doing reminded me of some fundamentals of effective teaching. “Do you know how to add all the numbers from one to a hundred in less than a minute?” he asked. I knew that adding 1+2+3+4+5…….+98+99+100 would take much more than a minute, so…
If you want to be a winning athlete, you must focus on your core strength. If you want to be a winning communicator, you must focus on your core strength. What does this mean? There are three elements. First, you need to know what drives you, what excites you, what wakes you up at night…
Uncle Remus stories were very popular when I was a boy. We were taught many a valuable lesson through stories about animals such as Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. Brer Fox spent his life trying to catch and eat Brer Rabbit, never with success. On one occasion he managed to seize Brer Rabbit who then…
What has become of us? The “Leader of the Free World” (among many others) peppers his remarks with these expressions: — “You can trust me on this…” — “Well, if you really want to know the truth…” — “I’m not gonna lie to you…” — “You can believe me, …” — “To be absolutely frank…”…
Author and humourist Dave Meurer has said that a great marriage is not when the ‘perfect couple’ comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences. Clearly, Dave was writing about Karen and me. Now, let’s get this straight: in our case, “imperfect couple” refers mostly to the male side of…
This article doesn’t have much to do with communication. Or maybe it has everything to do with communication. In any event, allow me me one last rant as a practicing lawyer. Last Friday, while most Americans were focused on Hurricane Harvey, the Donald quietly pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio– his only presidential pardon to that point….
Gordon Henderson is one of my heroes of the legal world. Kindly and humble, he was also fiercely brilliant and a force of nature. He was well known for opening his arguments thus, “Your Honour, I am well aware that the law is against our position. Today we are going to change that.” You can…
The effective communicator would do well to study bridges. After all, bridges are about getting from where you are, across the void, to where you need to be. Communication is simply about transporting meaning from your heart and mind to the heart and mind of the listener. The degree of sophistication of a bridge will…
So many scientific breakthroughs occur by accident, or at least by serendipity. A bright person, being in the right place at the right time, notices some oddity and asks, “Hmm, I wonder if that would apply to ….?” Robert Foulis was a Scottish immigrant in Saint John, New Brunswick. I exaggerate but little to say…
Who would ever have thought that helicopter pilots would be wanting for work? Well, it’s come to that. Most things that helicopters can do, drones can do just as well, or maybe better, and much more cheaply. And drones can operate in places which would be too dangerous for humans. You might argue that drones…