Category: self improvement

business, career, culture, emotional intelligence, job; career; money; raise; pay; increase, relationships, self improvement, society

How to get a ‘radio voice’

bruceandholly

I am with Education Secretary Lucy Powell when it comes to teaching young people how to be better communicators.

How you speak defines who you are. It defines how everyone else in the world will react to you. I’m sorry if I’m sounding a little old-fashioned. Perhaps a little too much of the ‘My Fair Lady’. But it’s the truth.

Yes I know that it’s cool to speak like Ali G. 20 years ago every young person in the UK aspired to speak like Ali G. Even some radio and TV presenters spoke like Ali G. But I’m sorry to tell you that Ali G is a pretend character. Sacha Baron Cohen doesn’t talk like Ali G when he is speaking to his agent. And speaking like Ali G is never going to get you that job in the City

It’s also why being ‘well spoken’ was so important to my parents when I was growing up in Essex. Particularly to Lilian, my late mother. Perhaps it was something to do with London’s East End, where she grew up and where any affected accent was deemed ‘la di da’. It was all to do with social mobility. But being well spoken isn’t about being la di da. It is about being clear, articulate and grammatically correct. Pronouncing the ends of your words. Not the Tony Blair glottal stop. In other words ‘sounding educated’.

Many years ago, a former line manager told me that my accent was ‘neutral’. He said it as a compliment. That it would be accepted anywhere. Years later, someone commented that I had a ‘radio voice’. Again, it was said as a compliment. So how do you get that elusive ‘radio voice’. Here are my tips:

  • Listen to yourself. I guarantee you’ll be shocked. I certainly was when I heard my 999 telephone call to the police being broadcast to Uxbridge Magistrates, when I was appearing as I witness for the prosecution in a case where I had seen a woman being attacked in the street. Did I really sound like that?
  • Get in the habit of using voice dictation in your work. Just as I am using voice dictation in the writing of this article. Voice dictation is fickle. If it can’t understand what you are sayng, it will just refuse to transcribe. It might even respond to you with a mouthful of abuse. When you use voice dictation you have to emphasize every vowel and consonant.
  • Look for every opportunity to speak in public. Learn the art of public speaking. Read my article ‘How to be a Great Speaker’. Join a speaker’s club where you can practice your skill week in and week out. Learn to think on your feet. Not like Trump’s new press secretary. If you can communicate well you will gain self-confidence. It will change your life
emotional intelligence, interview, politics, self improvement, Uncategorized

How to become a great public speaker

bruceandholly
Three British politicians speaking at separate public events, including Green Party and Greater Manchester signs
A three-panel collage presents prominent British politicians speaking at public events.

With so much rubbish on the freeview channels, I have taken to watching the recent party conferences. I’d much rather be entertained by a great speaker than bore myself watching celebrity game shows. And aren’t there too many of those? Where gameshows and Eastenders’ become the ‘news’. Even though it’s all pretend. Talk about dumbing down! I’ve shown Farage; Polanski and Burnham in the picture because they are the political leaders I most enjoy watching. I don’t have to agree with them to like hearing them speak.

When it comes to presentation, party politics, for me, has never been better. A move away from the complacency of the past. New ideas. New faces. Though for me, some of Andy Burnham’s shine is beginning to wear off. It’s one thing to talk about growth in the economy. But he doesn’t seem to be doing anything to make it happen. Instead there is hesitancy even over the Heathrow Airport expansion, not to mention the Jackdaw and Rosebank oil and gasfields. all of which are supported by the main unions, including the TUC, because of the jobs they will create. When I attended a recent Back Heathrow Airport Event at Hounslow’s Gymkhana Club. I was impressed by the turnout from the Unite and GMB unions. Andy – please listen to them – instead of wittering about Britain rejoining the EU. Kemi Badenoch is for me still the unknown quantity and I look forward to seeing her speak at the forthcoming Conservative party conference. But her promise has for me being marred by her recent support for Joshua Bonehill-Paine becoming a Conservative councillor. Why? What was that all about? Bonehill-Paine might be a reformed character but none of us can erase our past. The damage has been done. But I’ll listen to what Kemi has to say. I hope that she can come up with some real ideas. Gimmicks like abolishing inheritance tax just don’t cut it for me. And wasn’t her predecessor, David Cameron, all about gimmicks? Like ‘localism’. And as leader of the opposition, she has to do more than just ‘oppose’. And as for Ed Davey? Well? What can I say? Falling out of boats is never going to win my vote. I need to know what he stands for. So what is it that makes the three-party leaders shown in the picture so engaging? And what can we learn from them? Here are some suggestions:

  • Be genuinely passionate about your subject. If you are passionate, you don’t have to worry about what you are going to say. The words will just come. A passionate speaker sells emotion.
  • Have you noticed that none of these speakers ever use notes.? Burnham doesn’t even stand behing a rostrum. Glancing at notes means that you break eye contact with your audience. And it is the eye contact which creates the power in a good speech.
  • Structure your speech. Not just a beginning, middle and an end. Remember the salesmans’ acronym AIDA. Say something to get the audience attention. Summarize the theme. Back it up with facts and argument. And finally the call to action.
  • Don’t ramble. You are not a lay preacher. Know what you want to say. Say it. Summarise it. Sit down. Learn to read your audience. When you see them fidgeting. Whispering to each other. Looking up their phones. Have the courtesy to shut up. Don’t wait for people to start walking out.
  • Be heard. You don’t need to tap a microphone if you can throw your voice to the end of the room.
  • Actively look for opportunities to speak. Maybe through your work or special interests. Or join a speakers club.
  • Buy a copy of Dale Carnegie’s ‘The quick and easy guide to Effective Speaking’ [my call to action]
career, culture, jobs, medical, mens health, relationships, self improvement, society

Signs of Getting Old

bruceandholly
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com
  1. When every time you make eye-contact with someone, they offer you their seat.
  2. When you celebrate every birthday with another tablet.
  3. When you eat less but put on weight. Like the 70’s rock band who decided to reform, looking like they’d just walked off a building site.

Things to Do When you are getting old.

  1. Make a will. It goes without saying.
  2. Make that extra effort to keep in touch with friends and family – especially the younger generation.
  3. Make a Living Will or Advance Direction, so you are in control of your own destiny, when it’s time to say goodbye.

Things not to do.

If you love your job and are at the top of your game, whatever you do, don’t retire, even if you’ve reached state pension age. Yes – take your company pension. You’ve worked for it and paid in to it. But don’t let it stop you working. And you don’t have to. Go freelance if you need to. You may also discover that your earning potential has never been higher. Because you will be getting your pension – PLUS – what you get working. And if you are past state retirement age, you won’t be paying any NI. What a great tax-break that is! So let someone else walk up and down a golf-course or kill time on a bowling green.

business, career, jobs, Law, property, real estate, self improvement, society

Conveyancing – How to Increase Your Productivity and Your Chargeable Output

bruceandholly

Conveyancing – Four Ways to Increase Your Productivity and Your Chargeable Output

Conveyancing is piecework.  Forget hourly rates.  In a competitive legal market, residential clients want to be able to compare quotes.  And professional rules now require transparency when it comes to pricing, so that prospective clients can see at a glance what they are going to have to pay.  But whenever you quote a prospective client, you need to be able to work within budget.  If you overrun that budget because you under-quoted or did not appreciate the extent of the work-tough!  You’ll be doing some free work. That’s not the client’s fault.  Unless you can genuinely say that additional complications cropped up which no one could have ever previously foreseen or because of something your client didn’t tell you.  So it’s all about packing in as much personal productivity as is possible for each working hour of your day.  Here are some tips:

  • Always dictate-dictate-dictate your work.  Never try to hand-type everything.  It’s just too much hard work.  Maybe like me, you lost your secretarial support more years ago than you can even remember.  Never mind.  There is Microsoft voice dictation.  If you’re working on a computer which is Windows 10 or above, you’ll find voice dictation somewhere.  Just go to ‘settings’ and ‘ease of access’.  Dictating your work can be annoying to those around you, particularly if you have to keep repeating the same phrase until your voice recognition gets it right.  Sometimes it never gets it right.  If I say the word ‘comma’, it will tell me to ‘call my mum’.  If I say ‘draft’ as in document, I will always get the draught which blows in from an open window.  So why do I use voice dictation?  Because even with its faults, it’s still three times quicker than trying to type everything out longhand.  Because even if you can touch type, you can’t type as fast as you can speak.  So by using voice dictation I can triple my chargeable output.
  • Standardise-standardise-standardise.  Take a tip from Henry Ford.  Install a conveyor belt.  Metaphorically speaking of course.  Try to create your own all-purpose templates, which you can easily and quickly populate before sending out.
  • Front-load your work, so that you can do as much as possible in one shot.  Don’t wait for the other party solicitor to send across to you their title documentation, download it yourself and save a week.  Never issue documentation in draft if the you can send out something which is a engrossment-ready.
  • Finally, never compromise on the quality of your work or the service which you provide to your client.  Make sure that everything is right first time, the moment it is sent out.  Don’t rely on your client to pick up your mistakes.  Take the trouble to organise your electronic file so that everything is correctly labelled and stored in its correct folder, so that you can find anything in an instant instead of having to trawl through the whole file.  It also makes it easier if a colleague has to look after your file in your absence.
business, culture, job; career; money; raise; pay; increase, self improvement, society, Uncategorized, writing

Selling Your Writing in a Changing Market

bruceandholly
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Ever since the first words were written many thousands of years ago, writing for publication has been about knowing the secrets of selling.  It’s about knowing how to grab a reader’s attention in the first line.  How to interest your reader in what you are about to say.  How to keep them reading.  And to provide your reader with a call to action.  In other words, something for the reader to take away.  Being a successful freelance writer is also about studying changes in the editorial markets and adapting to those changes by changing your own business model.

30 years ago there were always opportunities for someone who knew their subject and could write to a publishable standard, to earn a good second income writing for professional and trade journals.  There was also the excitement of receiving money through your letter-box.  But no-one writes cheques any more.  And editors no longer have to pay freelancers to fill their pages, because they receive so much quality material free of charge from businesses wishing to promote their goods and services.  But even promotional material has to be professionally written.  And someone has to be paid to write it.  Why not you?

Forget expensive newspaper and TV advertising.  The most cost effective way to promote the sale of goods and services is on the Internet.  It’s about drawing the casual Internet browser to your website and to the goods and services you are offering.  Today, the ‘keyword’ is king.  It is about trying to anticipate the words and phrases which your prospective customer is going to type into their search engine, when they are looking for the type of goods and services which you are offering.  It is those critical keywords which must be incorporated within your promotional material to draw those prospective customers to your website.

So what about artificial intelligence (AI)?  Is that going to make freelance writers redundant?  If your computer can write your promotional material, why do you need to pay a copywriter? 

They said the same thing about secretaries when word processing was invented at the end of the 1970s.  But it didn’t happen.  Instead, the amount of paperwork ballooned.  The issue with any piece of written work generated entirely by a computer is that it lacks originality.  I learned that when I asked my computer to generate some promotional material for a book I had written.  Instead, it repeated back to me the promotional material which I had already written.  I’m sure that if I asked my computer to compose my next Eurovision hit, it would come back to me with a mishmash of every successful Eurovision entry which had ever been written, including words and music from ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’.  Is that going to convince anyone?  I don’t think so.  ‘United Kingdom – Nil points.’

Just to show you how modern marketing works, I have included at the end of this article, a link to my book, ‘Write Quick.  Get published.’ I’m not asking you to buy it.  Just to notice it.  And if you do notice it, please take a moment to look inside.  If you then decide to buy a copy, I’ll be raising a glass.  Cheers!