Uncategorized

Alternative CYA phrases

"CYA" (cover your ass) is a great phrase for office life, but sometimes it has connotations of selfishness, like you're saying someone just wants to protect himself, he doesn't really care about the group or the company. Example: "That email was mostly CYA. He just...

Three tips for videoconferencing

I know a lot of you are working from home this week. It probably involves a lot of videoconferencing, which might feel a little strange, since it's probably a bit unfamiliar. I do a lot of videoconferencing, so here are three tips that might help.  1. Humans like...

CXO letter sample

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: matt@krauseenglish.com Date: XYZ Subject: CXO Letter sample To: xyz@xyz.com A favorite word that I've run across an unusual number of times in my readings this week is "slog." This word can be a noun or a verb, and using it...

Free stock photo sites

BucketListly Photos CC0 Archives | Magdeleine Cupcake FoodiesFeed Foodie's Feed Free Refe Real Life Photos FreeDigitalPhotos Function - Design Blog Gratisography ISO Republic Jay Mantri Kaboompics.com Life Of Pix Little Visuals Magdeleine MMT morgueFile Pexels...

Interview with Memet Yazıcı

Baldwin and Matt interviewed Memet Yazıcı, Managing Partner of TRPE Capital. Memet speaks here about preparing for pitch meetings, a portfolio company’s management team’s role in telling the company’s story, and the importance of relationships with LPs.

Interview with Roland Meerdter

Baldwin and Matt interviewed Roland Meerdter, co-founder of Door Ventures. Roland speaks here about streamlining the DDQ process, the origins of Door, how standardized DDQs evolve over time, and how digitalization is affecting the due diligence process.

Interview with Kyle Dunn

Baldwin and Matt interviewed Kyle Dunn, CEO of Meyler Capital. Kyle speaks here about marketing in the fund world, and what opportunities fund managers are missing, and that performance is vital, but it’s table stakes, it’s like BMW saying, “Our cars run good.”

Tsufit on speaking at conferences

Tsufit started out as a lawyer, singer, and actress, and for over 15 years now she has been coaching others to step into the spotlight. In fact, she wrote a book titled exactly that: “Step Into The Spotlight!”

Baldwin Berges on speaking at conferences

Baldwin Berges spent years in the investment world, helped companies raise money, and is now helping them clarify their messages, making complex ideas simple to understand. In this interview he talks a bit about speaking at conferences, and gives some tips to other speakers.

Erik Vos on speaking at conferences

Erik Vos has worked and presented in 91 countries and counting. In this interview he talks a bit about speaking at conferences, and gives some tips to other speakers.

Zeynep Stefan on moderating a panel

Zeynep Stefan has been in the insurance and risk management business for over 10 years. In this interview she talks a bit about moderating a panel.

Office hours

UPDATE: As of March 2017, Matt’s public office hours have been replaced by “members only” office hours. For the location of the members-only office hours, please see: https://dopplercomm.com/members-only/office-hours/ Matt holds […]

What’s behind that 25 times

There’s more behind that “practice 25 times” advice than just an unthinking “more practice is good, so get a lot of it.”

Here’s what’s behind it…

Speaking

It’s BizDev on steroids, and we’re your personal trainer.

Freelancers’ Show

Welcome to the Freelancer’s Show podcast listeners! Here are a couple things to reinforce what we discussed on the show. Just sign up with your email address, and we’ll send […]

Email styles

A great cartoon showing one of the main differences between executive and associate email styles…

Mindset change

Why the Tips and Tricks is a weekly email series, not a once-and-done ebook.

The Jesse Interviews

Jesse Scinto, our head speechwriter and presentation trainer, is a faculty member at the Strategic Communications department at New York’s Columbia University. So, understandably, we are proud of him and […]

Preparing for “12 Minutes With…”

Equipment: Please use headphones. They don’t have to be fancy; the ones you use with your iPhone are fine. Please use Chrome or Firefox. Sometimes Internet Explorer works for this, […]

Remote Coaching

With today’s technology, we don’t have to be face-to-face.

Speaking before an industry conference next month? Call on us to design your slides and coach you through the presentation.

Meeting with investors in London? Let us guide you through refining your message and designing your collateral materials.

Want to come across more professionally in those quarterly earnings conference calls? Perfect, we can help you with that.

Softening words

Eric Takaha at Franklin-Templeton is a master of using what we call “softening words,” which can come in very handy when you are describing overall trends in a public forum…

Client Communications

Equip your people to break through the barriers of resistance, to influence client decisions more effectively, and to use tested and proven techniques of visual design, communications framing, and neuromarketing.

We help your people focus on your client and transform confusing, cluttered messages into clearer, more impressive, and easier to understand sales tools.

You depend on your people to grow your business. Send them out into the field with the right tools for the job.

Investor Presentations

Markets are most unkind to things they don’t understand. We help you clear up those misunderstandings and represent your company and its ecosystem more clearly.

There’s almost almost always something about your company, or the market in which it exists, that you wish your investors understood more clearly.

Executive Communications

Expanding your markets. Representing your company on panels. Getting board approval for a major initiative. These all require the right presence, the right wordings and turns of phrase.

We edit/improve your speeches, practice your speaking skills, and design a whitepaper you can use in followup inquiries. But if you just want to talk astrophysics or House of Cards, we can do that too.

You’ve invested a lot in yourself, and made sacrifices for years, to get where you are. Don’t stop now.

Money is especially emotional

One of the best arguments for how people make decisions on emotion, even when (perhaps especially when) they are making decisions about money, is…

The wrong question

If you’re asking how can I speak better English, you might be asking the wrong question.

You are just a midwife

The fastest way to Death By PowerPoint is to think you are anything more than a midwife to the audience’s dreams.

Pause

I love this article, especially the third tip…

Sometimes…

Sometimes public speaking doesn’t go so well…

Jesse Scinto: Commitment and Consistency

Matt and Jesse discuss a chapter from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, specifically the human desire to seem logical and consistent, and how we can use this natural human desire to persuade our audiences…

Jesse Scinto: What Benefit Am I Going to Get?

Often, our clients feel like if they talk about conflict or problems in their presentations, their audiences won’t respect them. It feels kind of risky. We asked Jesse about this. If a speaker takes the risk, what is the speaker going to get in return?

Why Watch Videos of Yourself

There are a lot of reasons to watch videos of yourself practicing. Watching videos of yourself helps you improve your body language, content, your opening and closing. But mainly, watching videos of yourself helps you get out of your head.

Turkish or English?

It’s a good question: Should I do my training in Turkish or in English?
The best way to answer that question is probably to ask yourself, “What do I ultimately want to be able to do?”

Brevity

Brevity is vital. But one thing that often gets lost is that brevity is not enough.

Why listen over and over

Here’s one thing I recommend: Listen to the same thing, over and over. You want to listen to a 20-minute speech? That’s great. Pick three minutes of it, and listen to that same 3 minutes 5 times. Each time, write down one new thing you heard.

Hands When You’re Sitting

Ever wondered what to do with your hands when you are delivering a speech while sitting down?
Watch this short video for some tips.

Get them to agree with you first

Sometimes you’re speaking about a hotly-debated topic, something that not everyone in the room agrees with you about. Here’s a tip for those situations: Before you talk about the hot […]

Good First Impression Tips #1

When you connect your computer to the projector before starting a presentation, what does your audience see first? Do they see a neat and tidy computer desktop with a regular […]

The seventh method

In the Fundamentals we mentioned the Curse of Knowledge, and six ways to overcome it. My personal favorite, though, isn’t on that list. It is: #7: Ask questions. Specifically, ask […]

How does this person think?

“How does this person think?” Maybe your audience members don’t know who you are. They might not even care about your subject. But they probably want to know how you […]

Are you sure you want to use that picture?

Yesterday I saw this ad in the subway station… At first I thought, “Oh, that’s such a pretty picture there on the screen… fish, water, blue, nature, sun, how nice!” […]

The Joe Black Chair

Sometimes our clients ask us to sit in on their “real life” presentations. We love opportunities like that. Seeing our clients operate live, “in the wild,” helps us do our […]

Slow down

The other day someone asked me for advice. He had wanted to give a speech that would last about 4-6 minutes, but instead the speech went for almost eight minutes. […]

Your speech will never be the same twice

You know the saying, “You never cross the same river twice”? That applies to speeches too. The other day I was speaking about my walk across Turkey. Because of a […]

Three questions

When you start preparing a presentation, don’t you dare start by opening PowerPoint. Mull over these three questions first: Who are you talking to? What do you want them to […]

Dealing with fear

There are many ways of dealing with fear. Here are two of them: 1. Conquer your fear Try to wrestle your fear to the ground. Try to beat it. Try […]

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell

“The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea.” What is the idea? The idea is that “[i]deas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” In […]

The edge and the center

There are different ways to see the world. One of them is “What can I do on the edge?” Another is “How do I get to the middle?” Before you […]

Some examples of Stage’s formatting…

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus laoreet sodales nunc, porttitor vehicula nisl elementum eget. Sed feugiat tristique tellus ac cursus. [highlight]Duis nec leo at enim egestas tempor […]

A Google story

Some years ago I heard a story about Google. I forget the details, but the gist of the story sticks with me, and I think of it often… In Google’s […]

If you can’t explain it simply…

If you can’t explain it simply, you probably don’t understand it well enough. Students come to me often and say, “I want to use more complicated sentences, like a native […]

The Dip, by Seth Godin

The upshot: If you want to get to the high points, you’re going to have to push through the low points. Most people don’t push through the low points, so […]

The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The upshot: Sometimes big, disruptive things happen, and they can’t be planned for, because you don’t know what they’ll be. They will end life as you know it (or as […]

Resonate, by Nancy Duarte

Do not look for a summary of this book. In my opinion, this is one of those books you should either submit to, allowing it to change the way you […]

No visual aids

Transcript: I recommend, for the first 10 speeches, no visual aids at all, no slides, nothing. We’re there in Toastmasters to learn how to connect with the audience. We’re there […]

Why practice 25 times?

New Service: Test My Presentation. You send us your presentation, we suggest how you can improve it. Click here for more info. Pro Tip: Use this service once a month, […]

Channeling Don Draper

One of my favorite scenes from Mad Men comes at the end of season 1, when Don pitches Eastman Kodak using a slide show from his own life… There are […]

Keep your answers short

Q&A (questions and answers) is a great way to break up a speech and make sure you and your audience are thinking in the same direction. However, I often see […]

Call your audience

Ken Robinson is one of the most popular speakers in the TED community. But it’s not because he’s doing most of the things speech trainers tell us we should do. […]

Talk to the dog

Talk to the dog

The other day, I was helping a client with a presentation. He was an engineer for a solar power company, and he was going to introduce his company to some […]

Why do I have to practice 25 times?

People ask me for advice on how to speak better. When I tell them they have to practice 25 times, their eyes glaze over.  They don’t want to hear it.  […]