I created this blog while in San Francisco at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Health Annual Conference. That’s the conference for NLP and Health. It’s been fantastic.

Here is something that I do not recommend  if you want people to believe what you have to say: being too enthusiastic. When you are too enthusiastic, some people will believe that you are telling them what to think.

“You’ve got to see this movie, you’ll love it!” That sounds like you are deciding for someone whether or not they will love it. If you want to become more credible, tone down the enthusiasm a little bit.

Tips

Look and sound confident, as if you believe what you’re saying, but use the “Language of Suggestion”. You could say something such as, “What do you think?” or “In my opinion” or “In my experience.”

“In my experience” is a great phrase for establishing credibility. Try “In my experience, I find… What do you think?”

If a person uses too many statements of fact, the listener may feel like they are being talked at or told what to do.  That is another hint – I suggest avoiding “should”, “you must” and “here’s what you’ve got to do.” Instead, you may wish to say “It seems to me that…”

If you make a suggestion and invite the other person to think about it. Those are great ways for establishing credibility.

Here is one more way to help you to establish credibility.  Douglas Adams, the wonderful author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, in the last book that was removed from his hard drive after his death, said that one can establish credibility by saying, “It turns out.” “Establishing credibility seems to be hard, but it turns out that if you know what you’re doing, it’s pretty easy.”

Those three little words seem to give some kind of credence to your ideas.

Again, the tips on how to be credible:

• tone down the enthusiasm,
• look and sound confident but use the Language of Suggestion
• invite people to decide for themselves,
• use phrases such as this “it turns out, in my experience.”

If you want a tried and true process for increasing your credibility, check out my MP3 “Presenting Ideas to Skeptical People”. It’s only $9.97 and could give you the edge next time you need to be convincing. 

Check out  www.ShellesTopTips.com if you would like some tips on communicating and solving some of the problems.

If you are interested in booking me (Shelle Rose Charvet) for a presentation, keynote or workshop contact me at [email protected].  Please visit my speaking page too.

Warning! This is a theory I have unsupported by any research. In other words, it’s an opinion. I believe that, and I think you find this in the workforce and this is particularly important for women, although if you’re a man, it might be useful to you too, there’s really three generations of women.

There is the pre-feminist generation of women and they’re kind of dangerous for other women. Why? You see the pre-feminists tended to view other women as adversaries. In the grand competition for getting the attention of men and being able to influence men, women tended to see other women as adversaries and competitors. This is where the concept of the frenemy came up, you know, somebody who appears to be your friend, but really behaves like your enemy. These are the people who are delighted when something bad happens to you or they want to knock you down if you’re up. I remember myself when I was much younger working for an organization, a youth development organization and I showed up at this meeting where I had to make a presentation. I thought I had looked really good, I was really well prepared and my boss came up to me and she looked down at me and she said, you know, Shelle, your button looks like it’s about to break off. I realized that what she was trying to do was sabotage my confidence because I’m like, hey, I’m looking great. That would be the act of a frenemy, somebody from a pre-feminist generation.

Then there are the feminists and in the feminist generation of women, women see other women as sisters and we need to support them. Now one of the dangers of the feminist generation is sometimes we support each other because we see the enemy is out there. It’s not like the truth is out there, the enemy is out there and that maybe going a bit too far. But the feminist generation did a lot of fighting and they had a lot of battles to win and even today, I mean I think we’re going backwards in terms of the number of women represented in leadership positions and this is something I think we really need to support, getting more women in leadership positions. But the feminists were good at fighting those battles and supporting each other through those battles and they come from a different age group than the pre-feminists, although sometimes pre-feminists can be young or old. It’s not necessarily always according to age.

Then the last generation of women, these are the younger women today that are just growing up. They’re in their late teens, 20s, and even in their early 30s and I call them the post-feminist generation of women. You see, they weren’t around when their mothers and their aunts were fighting all those battles just to be heard and be taken seriously. They get the benefits of some of those battles that we had to fight frankly in my generation. What’s important to the post-feminist generation of women is to be independent and decide for yourself and express yourself. Now, although this generation of young women like to communicate with their friends, they don’t necessarily think about the impact of what they do. These are the women who show up at work with cleavage showing. You don’t want to see that particularly if you’re a woman of my age. But the reason people really shouldn’t be showing their cleavage at this age is –and this is what I teach women when I’m teaching presentation skills is if there are breasts in the room, nothing else can occur. I mean even me, I’m not a lesbian and I can’t take my eyes off a good cleavage. But can you hear what someone’s saying if their breasts are in the room? I don’t think so.

So the post-feminist generation of women are busy expressing themselves, they’re not great at supporting each other. They tend to be very independent minded and they don’t tend, and I’m making a generalization here, to pay attention to the impact of what they do and what they say. You know what, I think these three generations of women each have lessons that they’ve learned about what to do and what not to do that if there were more dialogues they could each help each other. I hope this was an insight for you.

Check out  www.ShellesTopTips.com if you would like some tips on communicating and solving some of the problems.

If you are interested in booking me (Shelle Rose Charvet) for a presentation, keynote or workshop contact me at [email protected].  Please visit my speaking page too.

Recently I have had a few setbacks.  I have an ongoing health issue and I got back some blood tests and they were not very good.  Also I gained some weight.  I’m on a nutrition and fitness program and the news wasn’t good so I spent quite a while just feeling like it is so difficult to do what I’m trying to do.

Do you ever have that feeling where, it just feels like it’s too hard?

I realized this morning while I was out having a run that setbacks are really meaningful experiences for a couple of reasons. When you are trying to change your habits or when you have a goal that you’re trying to meet or a long-term problem that you’re trying to solve like my health issue, and you get a setback, you realize how reliant you are on some kind of external feedback. We know from research that when people are trying to change a habit or do something different over the long term in their life, they need some external support. Even if you are really determined inside you, you need some external support so when you get a setback, it is the evidence that shows you it’s not working and I think we’ve got a couple of choices when that happens.

• You can whine and moan like I did thinking its too hard, and I want to give up on all this stuff OR
• You can whine and moan first (because sometimes we just do that) and then realize that the setback is actually loaded with good information. I want to look at these blood tests and look at what I’m doing and look at what happened and what I was doing when my blood tests were better, is there some kind of correlation? No guarantees, but that’s what I could do. And also the fact that I kind of strayed off my nutrition program and my exercise plan, what is that telling me about my motivation? So these are two things that are external pieces of information that I can take in and I realized both of these things were telling me that my motivation was dipping.

Now, I want to look at some options and some ways of re-motivating myself because I was succeeding before so there’s no reason why I can’t succeed now.

So two strategies for doing that,

1)      Get some external support.
We know that the setback from the outside made us feel bad. Who can be supportive to you?   I’m not really keen personally on asking people if they will give me positive feedback, so what I’m going to do is look for external evidence that is going to show me that I’m on an off track.  A few examples for me are the weighing scale and how fit I feel when I’m running.  Those are very helpful.

2)      Why is this important to you?
Remember why you’re doing this. What goal are you trying to accomplish as you’re doing this and what problem are you trying to solve or get away from? And make sure you do it in visual. We know that if you can see your goal and you can see the problem you want to get away from, chances are you are going to be more motivated and that’s how you can use setbacks to your advantage.

So once you get over whining and feeling sorry for yourself, which a lot of us do, me for example, then you can look at those two options.

Have a look at other Shelle’s Top Tips .
http://www.ShellesTopTips.com

If you are interested in booking me (Shelle Rose Charvet) for a presentation, keynote or workshop contact me at [email protected]. Please visit my speaking page too.

Sometimes the hardest thing for people is finding a way to motivate themselves. They say they want to do something and they don’t do it. One of the most important things about  motivating yourself and staying motivated is to know your own motivation triggers.

For those of you who know me, you know a lot about my book, “Words That Change Minds” which talks about all these different motivation triggers. But, let’s talk about some specific things that are important to you but you have trouble either getting motivated or staying motivated.

Most people’s long term goals don’t give them immediate satisfaction, but the critical action times for motivating yourself are in the here and now. If you want to get fit, for example, and every day you decide you’re going to get up and go for a run. I’m talking about this because this is something that I do and some days I don’t do, every day is the important piece for your long term goal of getting fit. But how do you motivate yourself to get out of bed when you’re actually comfortable? Or how do you keep motivating yourself to stick to the nutrition routine that you’ve decided for your long term goal? I’m learning the German language and I have a lesson every week, and I need to put in more time. How do I succeed at motivating myself to do that?

Let’s look at a couple of things. Sometimes people have goals, but they don’t get started. And the reason they don’t get started is they think the goal is important, but it’s not urgent enough to do now. So they have a “toward” pattern in that they want to move towards the goal, but nothing makes it happen right now.

There’s nothing that makes you do something right now like an emergency or something that’s urgent. So if you don’t get started on the goal that’s important to you, it’s because you haven’t figured out what you want to move “away from”.

Let’s just take an example that I’ve lived a few times and that is I decide I would have a new weight, a lower weight. So I set my weight goal and I start to move towards it. Why not? Well, what I need is an image in my head of what I don’t want to make it an emergency.

Instead I need to get up, and look in the mirror– before I get stressed and say, “Ack!” Now that’s an emergency, right? That will get me started on a new routine of walking and running and a new nutrition program, etc. But the problem with goals that you do because you want to move away from a problem, is if you go, “Ack! I don’t want to look like that. Ack! I don’t want to feel like that,” is you have a very strong motivation at the beginning, but it doesn’t hold.

So if you want to keep motivating yourself every day, you need to have something to move away from and something to move towards. So here’s another trick: if you’re trying to continue motivating yourself just by talking to yourself, it’s usually not strong enough. You need to create an image in your mind of both of what you don’t want and what you do want.

What you don’t want will push you away and what you do want will draw you towards your goal. So if you have both of those motivation types, “the away from” and the “toward”, that’s even stronger.

Want to learn more about these or other motivation triggers?
Check out the LAB Profile® Learning Program »

Here are a couple of other tips. If you have a set process that you incorporate into your day, chances are you will remember to follow it. Particularly, if you have your “toward”, your “away from” and your “toward image”  set up so that you can move towards.

Now, how do you do that? Everybody has rituals. Put your new behavior or the thing you want to do inside one of the rituals or procedures that you already follow. So let’s say I’d like to take vitamins. Well, if I put the vitamins away in the cupboard, every morning I go and make my breakfast, I don’t even remember to take those vitamins.

I want this motivation thing to be easy. I don’t want to feel like I’m pushing a rock every day. So how do you do the vitamin thing in an easy way? Well, if you have tea or coffee in the morning, put the vitamins beside the kettle or in the teapot or in a coffee pot. When you see that, you’ll also see the vitamins much easier, no effort to remember.

The easiest way to have a new behavior and maintain it once you have the motivation pieces in place is to insert the new behavior inside a process or a procedure that you already do.

Would you like more information on how to get and keep motivated? 
“Wishing, Wanting & Achieving” mini ebook – only $4.99 USD »

If you are interested in booking me (Shelle Rose Charvet) for a presentation, keynote or workshop contact me at [email protected]. Please visit my speaking page too.

I know a couple of people, me included, who have difficulty saying no to their children.

A friend of mine has a daughter who has managed to find ways of getting money from her parents for years. She is in her early 20s now, and still the bank of Ma and Pa is open. Recently, I said no to one of my children who requested something. I then found myself running to my friends and family for support, so I thought maybe it’s time we really think about this.

If you feel that you’ve been the bank of Ma and Pa (that means your bank has been open for them to make withdrawals) one tip I have is to add up how much money you’ve spent on your kids over the last few years. I think you’ll be shocked and I think they’ll be shocked.

Here’s another tip. When your kids ask you for something usually they just ask you or sometimes they do the big setup where you’re sort of slowly leading to the unending conclusion that you need to lend them some money or give them some money. That’s what happened to me recently.  My suggestion is don’t answer right away. Instead say, “That’s interesting. Tell me more.” And then when they ask you for the money or they ask you for whatever it is they’re going to ask you for, tell them you’ll think about it and get back to them.

I know lots of parents who have to deal with children who are not making their own way. They made terrible financial decisions and then the parents are there to rescue them. I think it’s important to decide when to rescue and when not to rescue, what behaviors are you going to reward and not going to reward. So zoom out. Look at the big picture. How many times has your child stood on their feet, provided for their own needs and made good decisions? And how many times have they not done that and how have you rewarded them? It’s important to figure that out.

So if you find that you’ve been rewarding irresponsible behavior, now is the time to stop. Sit down, plan with your child how they can actually move forward, and tell them what your role is going to be and tell them what you’re not going to do.

But most important of all, when you get hit up for money, just say, “Let me think about it,” and then go and talk to somebody who you know will help you be logical about this.

Our children can certainly pull at our heartstrings and sometimes saying no will really help them grow up.

Cheers,

Shelle

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In Canada over the last few weeks, we have heard the tragic story of a teenager who committed suicide, after being sexually assaulted and then bullied online for over a year. This isn’t the only story about people suffering at the hands of others while bystanders do nothing, or worse encourage the bullying.

Bystanders are being blamed for not intervening and yet, hardly anywhere in all the literature does it tell bystanders exactly what to do. How many times has each one of us witnessed someone behaving inappropriately and not intervened?

And I just can’t stand it any more! I created this video because I believe there is one thing you can do to stop bullying right when it happens.

If you find the information useful, please share it on your Facebook page or wherever you think people need to see it.

Cheers,

Shelle

+1-905-639-6468

A lot of people tell me that getting others to do what you want them to do can be very difficult at times.

So here’s three tips on how to get someone to do what you want.

1)     Find Out What’s Important to Them
Most of us know what’s important to us but we don’t take the time to find out what’s important to the other person. Ask a few questions first about what is important to them, or think about it from their perspective.

2)     Link What You Want to What’s Important to Them
Usually, we just talk about what we want and we don’t link it to anything that the other person might like. What is the link? How can you make a case?

3)     Speak in a Way that is Motivating for Them
For example, if that person is very goal-focused or goal-oriented then you need to tell them what the benefit is (Toward Language).

If they tend to be more problem-focused and the kind of person who notices what is wrong and easily criticizes, tell them what problem will be prevented or solved; what they can move away from.

You can guess if they are in a Toward mode and need a benefit or a goal, or if they are more Away From and prefer to  hear about consequences or negative consequences that they can avoid by doing the thing that you want.

Learn more about influencing and persuasion »

Two more hints about speaking in a way that motivates the other person.
Do they want to have lots of choices and lots of options?  We call that Options Language. Or would they rather have a step-by-step procedure for doing something and talk about how to do something?  We call that Procedures Language.

Think about these 3 easy steps the next time you need to get someone to do what you want.

If you want more tips to solve problems (Away From Alert!) and get what you want (Toward Alert!), visit http://www.ShellesTopTips.com and check out my books and audio programs for yourself at the store.

Most of us avoid apologizing because we feel ashamed of something we’ve done and we’d really rather it was water under the bridge and we don’t ever have to think about it again. But, you know, apologizing is one of the best things you can do to maintain good relationships because it proves to the other person that you’re not perfect and you’re willing to go towards them and solve things and that you recognize when you’ve hurt people.

Learn more about my “LAB Profile Learning Package” »

What’s the formula for apologizing? Well, I get lots of practice at this. First step is say what happened. Say why it was bad. Say what shouldn’t have happened and then express regret.

Now, I’ve recently had practice doing this. I was looking at somebody’s Monday morning blog and it came in and I thought they had handled their topic in a completely superficial manner. So it being a Monday morning and I was procrastinating (you should listen to my other Shelle’s Top Tips on procrastination), I sent off a little message that I thought was just a little message and saying that I thought the blog was a bit simplistic and should have been handled another way. And this was a very famous person who then thunderously attacked me on email and I thought, well he’s a bit, I don’t know, hypersensitive. And so I wrote back and explained what I meant a bit further and then he attacked me again and I thought, why is he saying I’m so judgmental and negative and all these sorts of things?

So I went back and looked at my original email and to my shock and horror, he was completely right. So, I thought this email correspondence isn’t going to work so I phoned him. I picked up the phone and I said, “Listen, I reread my email, I realized that you were quite correct. I did attack you and it was very judgmental and my email didn’t give enough information. I’m really sorry for that and I shouldn’t have handled it that way, and I hope that you’ll understand and accept my apology. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.” And he phoned me back and he said he accepted my apology and he thought it was a very classy thing to do. And now, I’m going to go practice apologizing with my family.

Check out  www.ShellesTopTips.com  If you want some tips on communicating and solving some of the problems, check out my new book, “The Customer is Bothering Me,” lots of hints on communication.

If you are interested in booking me (Shelle Rose Charvet) for a presentation, keynote or workshop contact me at [email protected].  Please visit my speaking page too.

Oscar Wilde said, “The only thing to do with temptation is to yield to it”, but I believe there’s another option. So here you are, it’s holiday time, the table is laden with all of your favorite foods, some of which you may have even cooked yourself, (talking about myself here again).

You really want to dive in and all you can see is that lovely delicious stuff and you can practically taste it on your tongue before you’ve eaten it. How are you not going to just yield to it as Oscar Wilde said?

When you’re in the store, or you are behind at work and you know you need to be saving money but you really want those things right in front of you. What do you do if you’re on line doing the same thing?

Here are a couple of tips.

First, breathe deeply. Breathe deeply a couple of times because you end up giving in to temptation when you act on it really quickly. If you stand back and give yourself a couple of moments to think, that can be the secret to your success.

Second, after you’ve breathed, go away from the temptation. I go into the bathroom. I sit on the toilet. (that maybe too much information). But I remember while I’m sitting on the toilet what my real goal is here. Am I working towards becoming a better person? Am I trying to lose weight? Am I getting into shape? What do I really want? Get back in touch with what is really important.

If you haven’t ever talked to yourself about what’s really important, you might want to do that before you confront the holiday temptations.

The third suggestion for resisting temptation is to go have a glass of water and think about something else. The moment will pass and that’s really, really key.

Temptation only ever happens in the moment. So if you have a couple of tips for how to forget what’s going on in front of you and think about something else, timing off to reconnect with what’s important to you, that’s going to help you with all kinds of temptations whether it’s buying, eating, or anything else you can think of.

I hope these tips. Have a look at other Shelle’s Top Tips and enjoy the holidays.
http://www.ShellesTopTips.com

If you are interested in booking me (Shelle Rose Charvet) for a presentation, keynote or workshop contact me at [email protected]. Please visit my speaking page too.

Today, our topic is overcommitting. What do you do once you have enthusiastically jumped in and said yes and then you realize you have no time?

The first things I’m going to look at are prevention strategies, and then some tips for how to cure it, how to get out of the commitment once you have made the commitment.

Prevention

Prevention is a question of calming down and breathing. Lots of people are going to come to you and say, “Hey, Shelle, we’ve got this great idea that we would like to get you involved in.” Instead of saying, “Really? Yes I’ll do it!” breathe. Ask questions:

“Tell me more.”

“What does it entail?”

Take some notes and make sure you thoroughly understand what the person is asking you to do.

Once you’ve had all your questions answered, I suggest you say,

“You know what? I’m going to check with my other commitments to see if I can fit that in. Let me get back to you,” and then let them know when you can get back to them.

Breathe, stay calm, ask questions, and promise that you will check it out with your other commitments. The other person will know that you are taking them seriously. You’re weighing whether or not you have time to do it properly and then promise to get back to them. This gives you the opportunity to see whether or not it will be an over commitment.

The Cure

You’ve said yes. What do you do? First, as soon as possible, you need to do something. Don’t wait. Don’t hide. Don’t chew your fingernails in anxiety. Do something as soon as possible, as soon as you realized you’ve overcommitted.

Secondly, what do you do? Apologize. Use the Bad News Formula. Check out my Shelle’s Top Tips on apologizing and the Bad News Formula for exact instructions on each of these.

Lastly, offer the other person something. You’ve let them down, maybe you can help them find a replacement for you or perhaps there is a part of the task that you can do that will help them out. Find something that you can do and remember to think about this before you speak to them. I suggest you do this on the phone or in person rather than by email. It will go over much better and keep your relationship in good form.

For more tips on how to get out of those sticky communication situations, check out my book, The Customer is Bothering Me. It’s also an e-book that you can download and it’s got lots of hints and tips for difficult communication situations.

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