1. Media Trainers know that the more you say the less control you have over your message or what’s being heard. So don’t leave it to your audience to figure what’s most important. If you do, assume they will get it wrong. Determine the beginning, middle and end of your storyline or argument before you speak. As you lead, your audience will follow because there is power in speaking well.
2. Learn to hear yourself as others do. Use a recording device rather than a notebook at meetings and other interactive …

A show of vulnerability in an interview speaks to authenticity.
No one ever accused Muhammad Ali of being soft. Eight months after becoming the World Heavyweight Champion, Ali sat down with Alex Haley on assignment for Playboy magazine. The twenty-two-year-old boxer [born Cassius Clay] opened up. He dared to be himself, here we see the essence of the man being mourned today.
Playboy: There was another controversy about the honesty
of your failure to pass the three Army preinduction qualification
tests that you took shortly after the fight. Any comment?
Clay: The truth don’t hurt nobody. …

Roger Ailes, the wizard of Fox News knows what sells. And it seems that Sarah Palin isn’t a hot commodity any more.  She was the GOP’s distaff voice of “no,” railing against the “lame stream media,” President Barack Obama and just about everything that happened since she and John McCain lost in 2008.  But the hockey mom didn’t turn on the red light for audiences and so she and Fox called it quits.
The problem? Palin never learned how to carry a conversation. Whether she was on the Q side or the A …

Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney is a case study of how leaders lead, or don’t, when speaking on the record.
Every public outing is an opportunity to make friends—or enemies. To avoid the latter, resist cheap shots, put downs and self-serving comparisons while evoking the names of others.
Romney was waving a red flag with every sneering reference he made about former democratic president, Jimmy Carter. He was using Carter to take aim at Barack Obama, who Romney wants badly to make another one-term president. It was mean-spirited and unnecessary. Carter has spent …

On Friday, Mitt Romney appeared on Fox News with Bret Baier to talk about President Obama’s convention speech.  Another interview and more evidence that Romney may be short on emotional intelligence.
Psychologists John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey describe emotional intelligence as “the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.”
Romney has chastised Obama for failing to provide specifics to fix the economy. In his convention speech, Romney focused on the economy, but he forgot to …