Today, I want to give you strategies to improve your verbal communication skills - specifically, with an eye to enhancing your promotability. I’m giving you an assessment of your verbal communication skills, as well as four areas of communication where people tend to struggle, and strategies to help improve each area.

Today, we’re covering interview etiquette — what to do, and what not to do. I’ve talked about several of these points on previous episodes, so I’m including links to those here.

Body language, or nonverbal communication, can make or break your interview. No matter what is coming out of your mouth, a trained interviewer will pay attention to what you are saying with your facial expressions, arms, posture, and general demeanor. If what you are saying is at odds with your body language, a trained interviewer will believe your body language. The caveat here: Be yourself. Here then, are 11 tips for conveying appropriate body language during a job interview.

When it comes to networking, it’s not about introverts being socially awkward. It’s about the drain on their energy. It’s about having to initiate a conversation (they generally DON’T want to do this). It’s about small talk, which seems pointless to them. I’d like to offer the flip side of networking for introverts, followed by 13 tips for you introverts to…if not love networking, at least not hate it so much. Maybe even enjoy it a little.

The reason I’m doing this episode today is because of the horror stories I have heard about bosses who are supposed to be “coaching” their employees but are doing something else entirely. As a Certified Executive and Leadership Development Coach (CELDC), I wanted to talk about a few of the coaching competencies as laid out by the International Coaching Federation or ICF. ICF is considered the premier coaching credential organization in the world. Many people in leadership positions have gotten a coaching certification, but it may not be appropriate for everyone. So here’s a crash course on eight coaching competencies you can put to use today without a coaching certification.

Today, I’m focusing on Active Listening. I think we can all agree that it is important to really listen at work, but maybe you haven’t given much thought to why it’s important. That will be just one of the topics we discuss today.

Last week’s episode was on Active Listening, so today I’ll cover Effective Communication. There are four steps to the communication process; at any point in that process something can go wrong: the words you speak, what you meant by those words, the words the listener heard, and what the listener makes those words mean.

Today, we’ll talk about how you can have difficult work conversations in a way that doesn’t leave one or both parties feeling like you’ve been run over and left for road kill. The purpose of this exercise is to move the relationship forward, not to convince the other person that you’re right and they are wrong. There is no upside to having a winner and a loser. Be willing to be wrong…or at least not right.