Drop the Pink Elephant (eBook)

Bill McFarlan is a journalist, broadcaster and Managing Director of one of Britain's leading media consultancies. He established The Broadcasting Business in 1989 to help individuals and businesses get their message to the world in a brighter, more positive vivid manner. Since then, he's conducted more than a thousand media training and presentation skills courses in Britain, France, Spain, the USA, the Caribbean and African. He's a regular speaker at conferences and passionate advocate of confidence-building techniques. In Tandem with his business life is a broadcasting career that began in radio in 1980 and took him through news presentation at Scottish Television to ten years with the BBC, anchoring Breakfast News Reporting Scotland, Sportscence and World's Strongest Man. He's fronted sports programmes on three satellite channels and is a regular contributors to news and current affairs programmes. Bill lives in Glasgow with his wife and three children.

World's Top Ten Pink Elephants xi

Foreword xiii

Introduction xv

SECTION ONE: Dump the Baggage and Create Clarity 1

1 Drop the Pink Elephant 3

2 Every Picture Tells a Story 13

SECTION TWO: Be Principled in What You Say 23

3 Staying on the Louisiana Highway 25

4 Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word 32

5 Tell the Unpalatable Truth, Rather than the 'White Lie' 46

6 Thank You and Well Done 53

7 Who Looks Stupid When You Criticize in Public? 59

SECTION THREE: Positively Assert Yourself 73

8 Flush Out the Watering Down Words 75

9 Talk Positively About Yourself 88

SECTION FOUR: Think of the Audience 103

10 It's All Relative 105

11 Email and Text - Bullets or Boomerangs 117

12 Three Little Questions 126

SECTION FIVE: Create Deeper Understanding 137

13 Listen First to Understand 139

14 Powerful Words 148

15 Think, Talk, Act ... Then Tell the World 153

Appendix: What do Your Words Say About You? 165

Index 175

"full of advice about how to avoid sending out the wrong signals" (Human Resources, March 2006)