Unpardonable Communication Sins: Being Unprepared, Uncommitted, Uninteresting, or Uncomfortable

If you’ve ever been forced to do some public speaking, perhaps you can relate.

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“Bimonthly can mean either twice per month or every other month, but in this instance…”

Did I really just say that?

And then…laugh??

This is the point when I sort of woke up, already about halfway into presenting my one slide for new employee training. (That’s right, one slide.)

Each week I head on over to new employee onboarding and describe what I do for my company. I have one slide that covers it: internal communications and employee engagement. This week, I hadn’t heard back from my contact about how many new hires to bring gifties to (and which training room to find them in), so I wrote it off and decided to focus on other things. I happily started ordering gifts and drafting emails for an upcoming appreciation event.

When I got the email with numbers of new hires and the location of the training at the very last minute, I grabbed my materials and headed out the door, my mind a million miles away.

I don’t even remember where I started my presentation. I have no idea what the first words out of my mouth were, and I didn’t even bother with the usual…