Environmental Communication & Management

In a world flooded with information and distractions, how can you make sure your message not only breaks through but leaves a lasting impact? Welcome to Persuasive Presentations Quick Start. Discover the art of crafting presentations that grab attention and resonate with your audience. It's time to make your message the one they remember.

Why Choose This Course?

Are you tired of struggling to make your message heard? In today's professional landscape, your ability to present with authenticity, confidence, and persuasion can define success. Learn essential skills to connect effectively with your audience even if there is mistrust, controversy, or anger. This course is ideal for busy environmental professionals, including risk managers, regulators, public involvement managers, project managers, technical experts, and planners.

What You'll Gain

With each presentation, you're not just conveying information; you're shaping your reputation. Ensure it's your message that charts the path forward. In this course, you'll gain the skills to,

• Influence and inspire action.
• Transform audience skepticism into trust and engagement.
• Overcome resistance and effectively respond to criticism.
• Handle questions with confidence.

Course Highlights

You will learn how to present yourself and your information in the best possible way to both deliver the facts and, at the same time, be persuasive, including,

• The reasonable objective to shoot for
• Three non-traditional audience analyses to address skepticism and resistance points
• Three models for planning persuasive remarks
• Three techniques for impromptu presenting when answering questions

Are you tired of crummy virtual meetings?

You can do something about it with this workshop from the author of the Amazon best-seller, Mastering Online Meetings.

Employers are looking for leaders who can get people to work together, even if working remotely. Good online meetings are not an accident. Good meetings happen because there is good leadership.

Attend this workshop and learn how to lead groups through the special challenges of online meetings by good planning, engaging participants, using the right tools, and keeping things on track to reach a firm decision.

Enroll in this course and receive a free copy of your instructor’s book, Mastering Online Meetings, 52 Tips to Engage Your Audience and Get the Best Out of Your Virtual Meetings.

“The book Mastering Online Meetings is greater than the sum of its parts, but each tip is complete and immediately useable on its own because of the author's excellent organizational and presentation skills.” - Arlen Harmoning

Why Choose This Course?

The most valuable resource in a meeting is time—the time available for the meeting and time the participants could spend on other work. This workshop helps you make the best use of that time.

Everyone is busy these days. Crazy schedules, emails, texts, chats, etc.—in short, an avalanche of interruptions. Consider this workshop an investment—one that will improve personal productivity and an opportunity to bolster your leadership credibility.

“This book is a concise, substance-packed, guide for effective online meetings.” - JohnM360

What You'll Gain

The worst replacement for a bad meeting is a bad online meeting. You will get easy-to-use tips you can apply right away; tips for,

• How to keep people focused and engaged,
• How to set up a meeting,
• What to do before, during, and after the meeting, and
• How to lead meetings toward firm decisions.

 “This easy read is a timely investment for anyone who is working and meeting online.” – GraniteStater

In today's complex professional world, effective leadership hinges on skillful conflict management. As diverse teams collaborate, conflicts naturally arise. Left unaddressed, these disputes can hinder progress by individuals, teams, and organizations. Conflict Resolution Quick Start equips you with essential skills to confidently navigate complex disputes and lead with excellence.

Why Choose This Course?

Facing workplace conflicts? Discover effective resolution strategies for challenges with colleagues, clients, or supervisors. This 4-hour course, a condensed version of our popular 2-day Conflict Resolution Skills for Environmental Professionals course, provides practical skills that you can apply the day after the course.

What You'll Gain

• Enhanced Reputation: Elevate your professional image by mastering conflict management.
• Stress Reduction: Confidently and proactively manage conflicts, reducing stress.
• Leadership Enhancement: Position yourself as a trusted problem solver who transforms conflict into cooperation.

Course Highlights

In this course, you'll learn how to:

• Diagnose Conflict Sources: Master the art of pinpointing the roots of conflicts and structuring crucial conversations.
• Roadmap Creation: Identify core dispute topics and convert them into a clear path to resolution.
• Uncover Motivations: Explore the psychology behind conflicts, revealing the underlying motivations behind people's words.
• Guide Decision-Making: Skillfully steer conversations toward actionable options and confident decisions.
• Craft ‘Durable’ Solutions: Develop long-lasting resolutions that foster ongoing cooperation.
• Communication Mastery: Acquire the six key communication skills necessary for successful conflict resolution.

**Note - This course is offered exclusively using live stream remote attendance. You will need a computer and an internet connection. We will continue to monitor the situation surrounding COVID-19 closely.  When it is deemed safe to reconvene group gatherings, we will resume our in-person class offering as usual.  If you would like more information or have any questions, please contact us via email or phone 425 270 3274.

How to Get Distracted Audiences to Stop, Pay Attention, and Act

Being persuasive has always been important because it helps people act despite mental roadblocks.  Online presenting is more important than ever because presentations are increasingly moving to the Internet.  And it is hard to capture the attention of busy people because they are, well, too busy to focus for long on your message.  This course teaches simple, but effective tools to deliver your message, make it stick, and, in so doing, create positive change. 

What are the Benefits From this Course?

Every time you present, you are managing two reputations—yours and your organizations. Make sure your presentations enhance these. The person whose message sounds like the most sensible way forward will define the future.  Make sure that person is you.  Whether presenting to clients, employees, stakeholders, or the media, you need to communicate with credibility.  This course will offer tools to deliver your information convincingly and with this confidence.

We all have to deal with ‘difficult’ audiences.  Make sure you gain the edge in challenging situations even when:

• There is mistrust and anger in the room,
• There is technical complexity that impedes understanding, and
• The Internet gets in the way and keeps your audience from being fully engaged

This highly interactive workshop develops skills for making prepared and impromptu presentations.  We take on the challenge of presenting in situations that may be controversial or highly charged.  And we cover online presenting and presenting with brief written documents. We focus on communication skills for occasions when there is time to prepare in advance, such as a formal briefing or prepared speech.  And we focus on skills for making impromptu presentations such as handling questions and media interviews. This course will focus on oral and brief written communications for occasions when you have to get your message across effectively and quickly but remain persuasive.

This course covers:

• Analyzing why an audience is resistant to your message—what brain researchers and risk managers have to teach us.
• Designing a way to deal with resistance points—developing messaging that responds to criticism you might encounter.
• Designing the delivery of your communication—whether presenting in writing or orally, when you need to deliver recommendations, not just information.
• Models for persuasive oral remarks.
• Models for persuasive written briefings.
• Models for when you do not have time to prepare ahead, such as media interviews and question/answer sessions.
• Transforming conflict conversations into a respectful and more positive discussion using tips and techniques that mediators use.
• Capturing attention and delivering motivational remarks using tips that professional speakers use.

Who This Course is For?

This course is suitable for a wide variety of professionals including environmental risk managers, regulators, public involvement managers, remediation project managers, program managers, technical experts, engineers, scientists, health and safety personnel, natural resource personnel, environmental planners, public affairs officers, attorneys, and others who are called upon to communicate in difficult environments and who need to persuade when doing so.

What is Unique in this Course?

We improve the usual approach to audience analysis (demographics, topic familiarity, etc.) by considering research findings on how the brain processes decisions and makes people skeptical and resistant to new courses of action.  Then we introduce multiple planning models to design a persuasive presentation, including techniques used by professional motivational speakers.  We look specifically at communicating when there is a lot of distrust and conflict in the audience.  And we cover how to handle a media interview and models for impromptu presenting. 

Participants working in teams prepare and deliver several presentations during the workshop and receive instructor and peer coaching on how to improve.  The goal of this course is to move beyond the notion that persuasive presenting is about delivering information.  Persuasive presenting is a carefully designed communication process designed to inspire forward movement on your issues.  

What Can You Expect in this Workshop?

Teaching Model:  We use a Tell → Show → Do → Teach-Back Model

• Tell: We present what we know about the skills being taught.
• Show: We demonstrate how the skills are applied through lectures, exercises, facilitated discussion, etc.
• Do: We have participants practice the skills using team assignments, role plays, mock activities, etc.
• Teach-Back: We wrap up topics with peer-to-peer and instructor advice on how to apply the new skills in the real world.

How We Present this Material:  We use discussion, exercises, lecture, and mock exercises combining student and instructor experiences to collaboratively create dynamic, fun, and highly interactive training.   But learning is not complete until there is application.  Participants discuss how they can transform the course content into a real-world application after the course. 

Can the Course be Customized for your Organization?

If your need is to train inside your organization we can increase relevance and value by modifying the content to match your audience and your specific goals for the event.  While this program is designed as a specific, interactive training session, we can provide anything from a one-hour keynote presentation to the full event and we emphasize the topics that you think are most valuable.

Testimonials

"Instructor is clearly skilled in the field and adept at conveying the material." J. Corwin

"Michael was knowledgeable, entertaining, and struck a great balance between presenting to us and hands-on participation. I enjoyed this class!" Ian S.

"Good variety of topics & tools, so even if one tool doesn't seem applicable, others will be. Good participation methods for attendees." Anonymous

"Great instructor! Lots of great information delivered well!" C. Marchand

In reality, good persuasion is all about helping people. There are a lot of reasons why being persuasive is an important skill for a professional, but most importantly persuasion helps people take beneficial action despite the mental roadblocks that get in the way.  The bottom line is that people won’t buy into your vision for the future unless you persuade them.

Two-day course covering meeting management

In this one-day session, attendees will gain an understanding of how to recognize situations that can lead to difficult interactions with co-workers and stakeholders, and how to navigate them with sensitivity and respect when they do arise. Through lecture and activities, participants will gain experience putting the strategies and techniques presented into practice, allowing them to immediately make use of the new skills. 

This course combines concepts and material from NWETC's Facilitation Skills for Environmental Professionals and Collaborative Negotiation Skills for Environmental Professionals. A basic agenda of the topics covered is:

Negotiation

1. How to get a group who is negotiating a compromise to re-direct the course of the negotiations when you are a team member and when you have special knowledge of a desired income.

2. How to identify and advocate for your own interests in a negotiation without bargaining from a fixed position (i.e., how to be a source of creative solution finding that can help a group move forward in your direction).

Facilitation

3. Meeting Leadership Skills - How to design and lead a meeting that maximizes the chance of producing a concrete and tangible deliverable (e.g., a decision, white paper, analysis, recommendation).

4. Meeting Participation Skills - How to lead from behind in a meeting (i.e., when you are a meeting participant, not leader, how to diplomatically re-direct the course of a meeting when it goes off track or is at risk of becoming unproductive).

Problem Management

5. How to manage problem behaviors in a negotiation or in a facilitation.

6. How to get closure and a definitive decision in a negotiation or meeting.

In this one day class, you will learn how to get your audience to STOP, LOOK, and LISTEN, even if they don’t want to.  Whether you’re speaking to clients, employees, stakeholders or the media, you need to speak with authenticity, confidence and passion.  Even when there is mistrust and anger in the meeting room, the skills you learn in this course will help you gain the respect and attention of the group.  National Speakers Association member Michael Fraidenburg will teach you how to deliver your message using speaking models that are designed to persuade.

Benefits:  Environmental Professionals often need to make themselves heard above many other voices competing for attention. Knowledge and expertise is often not enough to show credibility, so adding persuasive speaking skills to your work will help you stand out as unique, and make your message stick. The person whose speech is the clearest and most sensible will define the way forward-make sure that person is you!

Learning Persuasive Speaking will help you:

• Convince listeners to act on your message, 
• Inspire groups to accept change, 
• Reply to challenging questions with tact, diplomacy, and effectiveness, 
• Know what to say and how to say it when just giving information is not enough, and 
• Be remembered for the right reasons after your presentation is over.

During the session we also touch on effective platform and non-verbal skills to establish and maintain your credibility as a speaker who has an important message worth listening to.  Through lecture, sharing of experiences, role plays, and demonstrations you will learn these techniques you can begin using right away. Come prepared to learn and practice how to create a persuasive presentation every time you speak.

See the Course Topics Section for more details.

**This course will be presented online as a live webinar in three 2-hour sessions. Sessions will be recorded and will be available to all enrolled attendees. All paid registrants will receive a certificate of completion of 0.6 CEU's**

All sessions will be from 10 a.m.-noon Pacific (11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Mountain) (noon to 2 p.m. Central) and (1-3 p.m. Eastern).

Group discounts are available. Please call 425-270-3274 ext 103 for more information.

This webinar is being presented by Sustainable City Networks and NWETC

Facilitating Remote and Online Meetings – Essential Success Skills provides a practical model and extensive toolkit for designing and facilitating online meetings.

This course offers specific strategies you can use immediately to create a participatory environment where all attendees are providing ideas, remaining engaged, and contributing to the meeting’s success. Attendees will learn how to merge their existing facilitation skills with online technology to manage meetings effectively even when you cannot get people together in the same room.

If you have a geographically dispersed audience but need greater collaboration and teamwork, this course is for you.

If your job is facilitating groups but travel problems get in the way, this course is for you.

If you already have a lot of online meetings but are not satisfied with their productivity, this course is for you.

All attendees will receive prepared material, demonstrations of online facilitation techniques and tools, and access to resources you can use after the course.

At the end of this course you will be able to,

• Design and implement a facilitation that is appropriate for the online environment.
• Pick and use the online meeting support tools that are a best fit for the purpose of your meeting.
• Manage the group discussion and teamwork to ensure forward momentum to arrive at a definitive closure.
• Manage participation to keep everyone engaged and ‘on task’.

Why Take This Course?

This webinar will equip you with knowledge and tools for creating and facilitating online meetings to share information, evaluate options, or decide something.  You will learn how to tackle some of these common challenges:

• Adapt face-to-face techniques with appropriate online techniques and technology.
• Keeping remote participants engaged.
• Minimizing distractions and multi-tasking.
• Collecting feedback from remote participants.
• Managing people when you can’t see non-verbal cues.
• Bringing the online meeting to closure and getting a clear decision.

For additional information, see these articles by instructor Michael Fraidenburg:

Good Practices for Interactive Online Meetings, Tips for Successful Online Facilitation, Getting Meetings Off to a Good Start

Registrants will be emailed webinar login information after registration is processed.

**Note - This course is now offered exclusively using live stream remote attendance. You will need a computer and an internet connection. We will continue to monitor the situation surrounding COVID-19 closely.  When it is deemed safe to reconvene group gatherings, we will resume our in-person class offering as usual.  If you would like more information or have any questions, please contact us via email or phone 425 270 3274.

Every time you open your mouth, you are managing two reputations: your personal reputation and the reputation of your organization. Whether you are presenting to stakeholders, clients, elected officials, or the media, you need to speak convincingly, with confidence, and with credibility. This course will help you gain the edge in difficult speaking situations.

This two day class is designed to develop skills for making prepared and impromptu presentations, especially for situations that may be controversial or highly charged. This course will help you gain the edge in difficult speaking situations and provide you with tools to effectively communicate environmental risk-related and other controversial issues to a broad range of audiences. Even when there is mistrust and anger in the room, with these skills you can  build trust and credibility for you and your organization.

Through lecture, sharing, practice, exercises, role-plays, and demonstrations, you will learn communication techniques that excite, inspire and persuade. Position yourself and your organization as the thought leader on your topic by learning the techniques taught in this workshop.  Do not miss the chance to improve your communications by getting valuable, hands-on advice so that the next time you get up to speak, your audience will STOP, LOOK, and LISTEN.

The first day focuses on communication skills for occasions when there is time to prepare in advance of an event, such as a formal briefing or prepared speech.

The second day focuses on the advanced skills for making impromptu presentations. You will learn how to present yourself and your information in the best possible way with techniques used by professional speakers.

Over the course of the sessions, attendees will learn five impromptu speaking models and stagecraft techniques used by professional speakers.  These are designed to help you think on your feet and to quickly articulate your thoughts-vital skills, especially in communicating about environmental risk and other controversial, hot topic issues.

Environmental professionals have important information and an important message for stakeholders and decision makers. Make sure prepared statements are clear and confident, and ‘spur of the moment’ communications stick in the minds of your audience.  Come prepared to learn from the instructor and learn from one another in a highly interactive and fun workshop where you will get the chance to practice and receive helpful coaching to improve your personal skill set.