Ingrid Gudenas

December 29, 2021

Coaching, Communication, Presentations

Painting 2022 with your palette of dreams

Ingrid Gudenas

December 29, 2021

Coaching, Communication, Presentations

This week right now is for dreaming your 2022 into being.

2021 was all about What do I need to do to survive?

2022 does not have to be more of 2021. 2022 can go way beyond a survival endurance contest.

2022 can be about dreams that come true. Don’t look to the world for permission. There is no “Dream-Come-True Licensing Entity” that’s ever been any good.

You are your own licensing entity. You are the one who gives yourself a license to dream and to paint those dreams into reality, to make them come true. Or not.

Don’t limit your dreams by what other people dream.

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Each weekly issue of Causative Communication offers you fresh insights into your communications and relationships, both at work and at home, along with specific actions to take to become more causative in your life. To get on the list to receive the next issue, enter your information below.

Featured

May 15, 2024

The power of intention to fix everything

May 15, 2024

Liza: “I’m leaving you.”

Matt: In shock. “Oh no you’re not.”

He was at home in Silicon Valley. Liza was calling from Boston. She was in a hotel room with the man she was leaving Matt for. She was on a business trip, but now she was telling Matt she wasn’t coming home. Matt just found out that their affair had been going on for months.

He knew things had gotten distant between them, and he felt responsible because he had been working too hard and had stopped really being present in their marriage. “I wasn’t there for her.” He suddenly realized what a mistake that was. But he loved Liza and he didn’t want her to go.

Matt was on the phone and thinking fast. He felt he was losing everything, his mind was a blank. He had just done Causative Communication and the only thing he could remember was intention.

May 15, 2024

May 8, 2024

How to move a mountain

May 8, 2024

Many people don’t know what to do when they run into push-back, hostility, opposition, or resistance. Especially when it comes from groups. There are so many wrong ways, but there are also many right ways to transform it. They all rely on outrageously great communication.

This isn’t something you can do “half-way” and expect to generate extraordinary outcomes. This type of result requires an ability most anyone COULD achieve but one that few ever will.

May 8, 2024

May 1, 2024

How to talk to a large audience

May 1, 2024

Terror, fear, even a little anxiety, makes people talk too fast. When you talk too fast, your words lose their meaning. Correct pacing is the hallmark of a professional speaker. There was one thing that Mariela was doing that was causing ALL the problems I just mentioned. She was talking to EVERYONE.

It seems logical. You have 300 people in your audience - you should talk to 300. Right?

This is the worst thing you can do.

May 1, 2024

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Apr 24, 2024

Coaching with candid screenshots

Apr 24, 2024

I take many candid screenshots during the virtual training, and a number of videos with small enough groups when the workshops are in person. A candid photo is a photo where the person is not posing, they don’t even know a photo of them is being taken.

As people go through the workshops, and they see their faces change in their screen shots, especially when they see the anxiety replaced with affinity, they almost can’t believe how good they look.

Your face alone has 42 muscles. Some sources say it has up to 60. Every single one of them reflects your attention and your affinity.

Apr 24, 2024

Apr 17, 2024

The power of dignity

Apr 17, 2024

How do you teach the principle of dignity? Most people wouldn’t know where to start.

I start with the word. People don’t know what it means. And if you can’t define it, you can’t do it.

Think to yourself, do you have crystal clarity on dignity?

I use a revolutionary new process called Word Clearing to teach extremely powerful concepts, including executive presence.

Apr 17, 2024

Apr 10, 2024

Navigating the maze when the other person is stubborn

Apr 10, 2024

People make a huge mistake thinking that just because they said something, that the other person “got it”. That it registered.

When the person you’re talking to is solidly stuck in a particular viewpoint, when they have an obstinately fixed idea, there can be a time lapse between the time you say something and the time it registers. Why?

Your communication hasn’t ARRIVED.

Apr 10, 2024

Apr 3, 2024

How to change someone without saying a word

Apr 3, 2024

He was a hard-driving senior executive everyone was terrified of. His criticisms were plenty, immediate and penetrating. Even so, the people in his division were fiercely loyal. He demanded, and they achieved.

Yet even the ones who had worked with him for years trembled with fear when they were called into his office. Most of his people don’t know what real listening is. They are too terrified of him to really listen, too terrified to really be there for him. You’re not hearing anything when you’re terrified. You’re focused on your own survival. You’ve got to really be there for someone for them to open up.

Apr 3, 2024

Mar 27, 2024

So good they won't interrupt you

Mar 27, 2024

Imagine being in a really good movie. Would you interrupt what’s happening on the screen? Never! You would never let anyone else interrupt either until it’s over.

The audience only gets restless and starts to talk, or wants to do something else, when what’s happening in front of them doesn’t hold their interest.

The right question to ask yourself is, “What does it take to be uninterruptible? What does it take to be so good, everyone wants to hear everything I have to say? How do I keep them totally captivated from my first word to my last?”

When do you give up on someone? That’s something only you can answer, but when the answer to this question affects tens of thousands of people, it’s worth pushing the limits of not giving up.

I’ve seen communication succeed despite all odds, and this is where REAL skill comes in.

Mar 27, 2024

Mar 20, 2024

How to influence the leaders

Mar 20, 2024

Some of the people that have come here for training have no authority and they’re being influenced by the people at the top in ways that block them from doing what really should be done. Their goal for the training is to learn how to influence their leaders, especially when the leaders don’t have the communication abilities needed for others to find them easy to talk to. Especially leaders who don’t listen.

When do you give up on someone? That’s something only you can answer, but when the answer to this question affects tens of thousands of people, it’s worth pushing the limits of not giving up.

I’ve seen communication succeed despite all odds, and this is where REAL skill comes in.

Mar 20, 2024

Mar 13, 2024

The power of pure intention

Mar 13, 2024

Intention is an invisible wave that carries your communication across and causes you to be successful in being fully understood.

Learning how to create this carrier wave is a game-changer.

People often try a variety of different approaches before they land on the precision it takes to create pure intention.

Mar 13, 2024

Mar 6, 2024

Creating exceptional relationships with "difficult" people

Mar 6, 2024

If you would like a little more magic in your life, raising your affinity for the other person is a super effective and rapid way to create it.

It’s not something that needs to happen only once in a while. You can do it in every conversation you have. Even in horrible, terrible, hammered situations with “difficult” people. Especially in those.

Mar 6, 2024

Feb 28, 2024

How to be a soft-spoken powerhouse

Feb 28, 2024

Amy came to Causative Communication thinking she had to learn to “be more forceful”, but that made her feel defeated because it was so far from who she really is, and it wasn’t who she wanted to be. It meant sacrificing too important a part of herself.

I loved her immediately.

The problem wasn’t that Amy was soft-spoken. The problem was that she had absolutely no intention when she communicated.

Feb 28, 2024

Feb 21, 2024

How to skillfully step into "frenzy" meetings

Feb 21, 2024

Everyone also tells me, “I know that listening and acknowledging are ‘the right thing to do’” and they wish they could do it because, “A good person does it.”

But, there seems to be a big split between “The right thing to do” and GETTING THINGS DONE!

Of course, people want to do the right thing and be a good person, and the people I teach really are good people already. But more than anything, they need to GET THINGS DONE!

Feb 21, 2024

Feb 14, 2024

Touching another human's heart...at work

Feb 14, 2024

There’s a love that happens at work that’s not a romantic love. It comes from sharing and working together to achieve a deeply-felt, and deeply personal, purpose. It comes from pure appreciation. It comes from real admiration. It comes from the joy of creating something incredible with someone or someones. Perhaps you are thinking of someone in your life that you feel this for as you read this. Then you know - it’s powerful and deep.

Large corporations give us an extremely limited vocabulary for expressing this deep love. And great restrictions on how we communicate it.

Feb 14, 2024

Feb 7, 2024

The decision that makes your dream come true

Feb 7, 2024

“The thing about working in a really large corporation is I’m not very powerful.”

Carla didn’t realize that what she was telling me wasn’t a fact. It was a decision.

Many people don’t get this. They confuse their decisions with “the facts of life”. These only become facts after the decisions that create them. Different decisions create different facts.

Here’s how it played out for Carla and how she did the impossible.

Feb 7, 2024

Jan 31, 2024

When logical arguments don’t work

Jan 31, 2024

Jayne showed up for Causative Communication desperate for a solution.

Her arguments were logical, rational and she had no idea why it wasn’t working. This kind of situation didn’t just happen once in a while in Jayne’s life. It happened a lot.

Jayne thinks light years ahead of most people, she sees what they don’t see, she comes up with answers faster than they can perceive problems. And when she has to communicate from her world to their world, if they’re not already in her world, they don’t follow her.

If you are like Jayne, here’s what you can when logical arguments don’t work.

Jan 31, 2024

Jan 24, 2024

Misled by hand gestures

Jan 24, 2024

Latisha showed up for Transforming Your Presentation Skills in quite a state. She was very self-conscious. No matter what I said, she kept asking me to coach her on her hand gestures and her words.

“Do you think this hand gesture is better than this one? Do I have more presence if I put my hand on my hip like this?”

On and on. It took Latisha all morning to realize I wasn’t going to coach her on any of that.

It’s a common mistake - I’m always coaching people on this point.

Jan 24, 2024

Jan 17, 2024

How to change everything with a single presentation

Jan 17, 2024

Most people have a lot of attention on themselves, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they want, what they’re going to say, etc. etc. etc. etc. It’s a deeply trained-in self-consciousness that makes the most important question in their mind when they’re giving a presentation the absolutely wrong question and that is, “How am I coming across?”

It’s a common mistake - I’m always coaching people on this point.

Jan 17, 2024

Jan 10, 2024

How to avoid the anticipation trap

Jan 10, 2024

John sat down in front of me with a sour look on his face.

We were filming his first video in the Causative Communication training session. I have the students role-play a real situation with me, a situation from their lives that’s challenging for them so I can see how they handle pushback. We hadn’t even started and he was already looking at me with resentment.

It didn’t help that the look on his face was overlaid with a thin veneer of artificial civility. The first words he said to me were the forced polite, “Hello, how are you?” with a small, tight, fake smile. The look in his eyes told me he didn’t care.

John had no idea he looked this way.

Then John told me what he wanted from me in a tone of suppressed exasperation. He was restraining his frustration, but it was unmistakable. His face and tone betrayed him.

This made his communication feeble, the outcome hopeless. It made him powerless.

When we were discussing it afterwards, I asked John what he was thinking when he first sat down with me.

He said, “The last two times I tried to talk to this person, it really didn’t go well. I got nothing but resistance. I was expecting the same resistance again.”

And this was exactly what I was seeing – his overwhelming anticipation of a person he couldn’t influence, anticipation of an unsurmountable problem. Which is the same as saying that he came into this situation dragging the past into the present and anticipating failure.

John had no idea he was doing this. And he had no idea the impact it was having on his outcome.

Why is this important?

Jan 10, 2024

Jan 3, 2024

Seeing the real you

Jan 3, 2024

Let’s begin our New Year by talking about Vision.

Vision is all about seeing. The kind of vision that I’m talking about isn’t seeing what’s on the surface. It’s about seeing PAST.

On Day #1 of Transforming Your Presentation Skills, we usually film our students.

As we watch the first video together, we see very different things, the students and I. They usually hate themselves. This has everything to do with vision. What I do differently is….

Jan 3, 2024

Dec 27, 2023

Dreams don’t take a day off

Dec 27, 2023

When I first started Effective Training Solutions in my 20’s, I was a staff of one. This made me the CEO, which made my mother laugh to no end. After she was finally done laughing, she looked at me, and with great pity and sadness, said, “Oh, honey, why don’t you get a real job?”

As confident as my parents had taught me to be, my parents were terrified that I was going to fail. But I had learned well from them.

Even if it was all I had, I had a dream, and I knew that nothing else was going to make me happy but living that dream. I knew that you can make any dream come true if you don’t give up on it. And now, I’ve been living my dream, every day, for over 30 years.

Dec 27, 2023

Dec 20, 2023

Affinity magic at home

Dec 20, 2023

We all had tears in our eyes. Elizabeth is an exec in the C-suite of a successful organization. Their senior exec team did the Causative Communication course together, and now, a month later in our follow up session, they were talking about the successes they created in the preceding month.

For Elizabeth, who was a stunning success in her professional life, this was personal.

Elizabeth‘s 12-year-old son, Matthew, had hit a stage where he wouldn’t talk to or look at her anymore. He defiantly turned his head away from her whenever she was talking.

You can imagine the pain wrenching her heart. Physically he was still in the house, but she’d lost his eyes. She’d lost his heart. She’d lost his trust. She’d lost all connection.

What I love about Causative Communication is that you learn simple truths that require very light energy and produce powerful outcomes.

We spend a lot of time on the concept of affinity. This is one of the most misunderstood, undervalued, underutilized, and yet most INDISPENSIBLE elements of deep, rich, emotionally satisfying human relationships.

Affinity ISN’T what you’re thinking. Affinity is what you’re FEELING.

Dec 20, 2023

Dec 13, 2023

The alternative to walking away

Dec 13, 2023

I was explaining to Emily why I was not able to attend a meeting where I was not essential. The acknowledgement she gave me was a very resentful, “Bummer”.

I then tried to tell her what I had already booked during that time, and also why the meeting would be fine without me. Emily’s face was sour as I talked and she gave me an even more resentful, “Bummer.” She clearly was not listening to me.

My first impulse was, “This is not fun. I don’t like talking to you. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

And Emily was about to walk away herself.

At first, I was happy it was over, and then I thought to myself, “What would I tell a student to do in this situation?”

They already know how to walk away. But what they don’t know is how to transform an impasse like this.

Dec 13, 2023

Dec 6, 2023

The single word that can transform any presentation

Dec 6, 2023

George helps sales people close big deals. His track record is impressive. On average, he saves them 30 to 40 hours per sales proposal. His advice also increases their win rate by a wide margin.

George can look at a proposal or presentation in advance and with 100% accuracy tell you whether it will close the deal.

He has a very simple method. He has a computer algorithm which simply counts the number of times they use the word “YOU”. He compares that to the number of times the sales person mentions their own company.

Proposals where the prospect name is mentioned 10 times for every one time the sales person’s company is named (a ratio of 10:1) are a slam dunk and the deal is going to be closed.

Why is that? Is it because people are egotistical and they want it to be all about themselves? No.

Dec 6, 2023

Nov 29, 2023

How to be a hero in a distracted world

Nov 29, 2023

If you look at the list of skills that make a hero, the ability to be in the moment is at the top.

When Dillon Reeves was asked how he knew exactly what to do to stop the bus to avert a catastrophe, it turns out he’s been carefully watching his father drive for years. His father said, “He’s always been very attentive to his environment.”

This extraordinary boy stands out. In a distracted world, he is awake, alert, aware.

Awareness is king.

The problem people have, when they’re not aware, is they don’t know what they’re not aware of.

Nov 29, 2023

Nov 22, 2023

How one person can unite thousands

Nov 22, 2023

Sometimes humanity is lucky enough to have a single individual who is able to break through all the preconceived notions of despair, hopelessness, and impossibility that overwhelm the rest of the world. They release in humanity the most powerful of forces, the force of love and harmony.

At that moment we see with great clarity what being human really means.

At that moment, we find what we are seeking, what seemed impossible the moment before. We reach that distant shore that we as humanity long for.

The video below is one such a story.

Nov 22, 2023

Nov 15, 2023

How Ahmet lights up a room of executives

Nov 15, 2023

Ahmet: “Are you hungry?

Would you like half my dinner? I’m happy to share it with you. My wife made it and it’s very good.”

It was the end of a long day. His homemade dinner was steaming on a hot plate, it looked good, and it smelled good. And I was smiling as I said, “It looks delicious! But no, thank you. I’ll have dinner when I get home.”

Ahmet is a parking attendant in the basement garage of a tall, stunningly gorgeous building with floor-to-ceiling windows and spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay and the city’s financial district.

Everyone he serves has a lot more money than he does. But Ahmet has more heart than 100 people put together and he extends every bit of it as he invites me to share his dinner.

I can’t remember the last time someone made an offer like this to me.

Nov 15, 2023

Nov 8, 2023

What to do with someone who never lets their guard down

Nov 8, 2023

We were meeting for the first time. Her face was hard, stern. She had her head tilted back and was looking down her nose at me. Her voice was uncompromising.

“I am the Chief of Staff here. We are responsible for billions of dollars of new product development and I report directly to the Chief Operating Officer. Everything to the COO goes through me. I make sure everything gets done. I have global responsibility.”

Her eyes challenged me, daring me to top that.

I looked into the heart of this woman and said, “Very nice to meet you. You must have done a lot to get there.”

I wasn’t flattering her. I was understanding her.

She looked into my eyes and changed into a different person. Her eyes softened and she smiled very slightly.

She thought for a moment and said, “Honestly, it’s a tough job, they don’t always listen to me.”

I thought about that for a moment and quietly said, “I can really understand that. That would be tough.”

I was in no rush. I wasn’t being sympathetic. I was understanding her.

She looked into my eyes to see if my understanding was true. Being understood was new to her. She saw it was.

Nov 8, 2023

Nov 1, 2023

Transforming Henry: the worst communicator in the room

Nov 1, 2023

Some people think you have to be “born with” the skills and charisma that make a really great public speaker. Not true. Let me tell you the story of Henry.

I was invited to give a two-hour talk on presentation skills at a technical conference for a highly specialized professional association.

At the banquet the night before my presentation, I told the President of the association, Steve, that I wanted to line up a volunteer to coach during my talk. He asked what qualities I was looking for and I said, “Someone who really needs to improve in their presentation skills.”

Steve enthusiastically told me Henry would be perfect and I said, “Let’s go meet him.” Well, meet him I did. Henry hardly took his eyes off the floor while we were talking, and for the brief moments they did come off the floor, they went straight to the ceiling or the wall on our right. Turns out, Steve interpreted my request as, “Who is the absolute worst communicator in this group?”

Henry didn’t look like someone who liked to be told what to do. I told Henry, “You know, I’m going to be coaching you in front of 300 people.” He glared at me for a brief moment and said, “What does THAT mean?” I said, “I’m going to be telling you what to do and you’re going to have to do it. Are you okay with that?” He mulled it over a little (looking at the ceiling) and then said, “I guess that’s okay.” Neither one of us was sure that it was, but with these words we locked in our next day’s destiny.

After Henry left, Steve said, “I hope you’re going to coach him on looking at people!” And then laughed for 2 minutes straight.

Nov 1, 2023

Oct 25, 2023

How to light up the virtual meeting room by subtracting

Oct 25, 2023

Tamara was nervous. In two days, she had to give a presentation to 400. Her first really big one.

It was Day 1 of Mastering Virtual Presentations and it was difficult for Tamara to practice without her teeth chattering.

The problem with being nervous is it makes you lose touch with everything good about you. Sometimes to the point where you can’t see anything good about yourself. The things you tell yourself at these moments tend to be dreadful.

Tamara was doubting whether she could speak without forgetting what to say, without everyone seeing how nervous she was.

There was a lot riding on how well Tamara did. If the Salespeople got excited about the new product, the revenue it would generate would be tremendous. But they had so many other products that they were selling, one new one often didn’t register. Tamara was one of many speakers throughout the day that would all turn into a blur.

As one doubt piled on top of another, Tamara doubted even her own ability to speak coherently.

She was a nervous wreck.

It was a truly exciting product she was going to present. If only the Salespeople understood what it did.

In Tamara’s case, it was not a matter of adding anything to her presentation. It was a matter of subtracting.

Oct 25, 2023