The Blueprint of a Speaker | Part 1 of 6 | Introduction

What is speech? What’s the big deal about being able to talk? Very rarely do we stop to think about how amazing the ability to speak to someone really is. Could you imagine a world where there were no language, no writing and no other form of communication outside of grunts and yelling and [...]

David J. Parnell’s Professional Listening Series | Part 4 of 4 | Habits & Strategy

Today we are going to finish our 4 part professional listening series by talking about quality listening habits that you can begin developing right away and we will look at skill preparation and development at the Macro and Micro levels.
First let’s talk about developing quality listening habits. There is simply no silver bullet for doing [...]

David J. Parnell’s Professional Listening Series | Part 3 of 4 | Categorical Information

In revisiting part 1 of our series, effective listening is really about gathering information and the trick is in focusing your attention in a way to acquire the appropriate information. So what is the appropriate information? To help focus your mind let’s define “appropriate information” as whatever information will help advance your own interests in [...]

David J. Parnell’s Professional Listening Series | Part 2 of 4 | Bad Habits

As we determined in the previous post, when we reduce “listening” down to its purest form, it is the process of gathering information. When a communicator begins to CONSCIOUSLY determine for what purpose the information is being gathered AND what information specifically is being gathered is where they truly become an effective listener.
Before going any [...]

David J. Parnell’s Professional Series on Sensory Acuity | Part 2 of 3.

Due to the harsh realities of the world and the undeniable necessity to have a mentally stable “human” in order to pass genes on from generation to generation, the evolution of a mind that can ward off negative emotion is one of the end results…

There are five major factors that are working constantly to assure [...]

David J. Parnell’s Professional Series on Sensory Acuity | Part 1 of 3.

Literally, the most difficult challenge in communication is in ACCURATELY representing the concept or feeling that you are. Without extensive analysis and research, the average person is completely unaware of how INACCURATELY they are communicating their thoughts.

Thanks to evolved processes such as heuristics, metaphoric and analogical, stereotypes and predictive categorization that occur during experiential and [...]

Professional Listening Series Part 1 - 4

I am introducing my 4 part miniseries on professional listening and the effective usage of listening strategies.

Sex, Drugs, Cooperation…

Communicating to future prospects, whether they be clients, potential lovers or maybe just someone at the DMV who you want to help you get out of there quicker can pose us with an almost infinite number of possible strategies. Sometimes the most successful route is the simplest. Stick with me; you’ll be happy you did…

In [...]