Our Head of Coaching, Nicola Hainey, reviews Microsoft Powerpoint’s new feature: Presenter Coach. An AI tool to help rehearse presentations? In honesty, we were slightly sceptical. However, having reviewed Microsoft’s new Presenter Coach in Powerpoint, we do think...
3 Minutes of Embarrassment There’s a hilarious home video of a Nativity play in an English village church. It usually goes viral at this time of year. A four-year-old girl doesn’t so much sing as bellow her way through ‘The Virgin Mary had a Baby Boy’. The girl, now...
The relationship between the mind and the body has been the subject of philosophical speculation for millennia. Here at MSB Executive we enjoy a bit of chin scratching, and it is a favourite topic of ours. Many of our team have professional training and experience as...
We all know that sinking feeling when we’ve started the day off positively, only to open our diaries and see a flurry of colour blocks demanding every second of our day to be spent in front of our computers on calls. We see this frustration often at MSB during our...
If I were to ask you, “What part of the body do you use for listening?” most English speakers would emphatically shout ‘EARS’. Of course, that’s what gets drummed into us in our infancy. However, the Chinese symbol for listening embodies a far more complex and...
‘We can’t decide what to do about our backgrounds.' This question arose recently during an online communication workshop I was running for the senior team at a law firm. I cast my eye across the framed faces on my screen. Most people were evidently sitting in a home...
Though we cover a range of disciplines at MSB Executive, a few core themes cut across all our specialist areas. Stress is one. The subject arises wherever we work, from executive coaching sessions to communication workshops. So when Martyn, our founder, told us...
Lisa’s heart is racing. Her breathing is rapid and shallow. Her armpits are sweating, her hands are clammy, and her neck and face are red. Her legs are jittery, her mouth is dry and her teeth are clenched. Her brain is alternately racing, then going blank. She has...
Public speaking gets a bad rap. One well-known poll places glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, at the top – making it a more terrifying prospect than spiders, enclosed spaces and even dying. (As Jerry Seinfeld wryly observed, at a funeral, most people would...
When it comes to speaking with impact, we at MSB Executive are passionate believers in the usefulness of storytelling techniques. Whether you are launching a new product, pitching for investment, or developing your personal or corporate brand, you will increase your...
Among all the terms future dictionaries will inherit from COVID-19, ‘Zoom fatigue’ is certain to feature. (It applies to all video conferencing software, but ‘Microsoft Teams fatigue’ doesn’t have the same ring.) Citigroup employees are clearly fatigued: on 23 March,...
We’ve recently been coaching a group of Directors from one of the 'Big 4’ accountancy/consultancy firms to help them with this very thing. Emotional Intelligence (or EI/EQ as it’s often referred to) is an essential component for successful leadership. What do you...
