Eamon Blackthorn is a communication skills expert and author of the best-selling book SAY IT RIGHT EVERY TIME.
15 min audio Icebreakers feel risky because they ask you to be warm and direct at the same moment. This article explains the Double Bind at work in those first exchanges, why the tension is real, and how Strategic Positioning changes what happens before you speak.
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17 min audio Most icebreakers reward the loudest voices and leave quieter people invisible from the start. This article gives you a practical, step-by-step process for designing opening moments that draw out overlooked contributors and set a genuinely inclusive tone before the real work begins.
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15 min audio Icebreakers fail when they feel forced. The Me Too Bridge is a six-step method from Say It Right Every Time For Women that turns cold openings into genuine common ground by finding shared experience quickly, signalling warmth, and giving others an easy way in.
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21 min audio Breaking into a group conversation feels awkward without a reliable system. The S.O.C.I.A.L. Method gives you six clear steps to scan the room, open naturally, find common ground, include others, amplify quieter voices, and exit gracefully. It turns social anxiety into practiced skill.
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22 min audio Most people treat icebreakers as improvisation. This article gives you six named frameworks for opening conversations with confidence, drawn from decades of practice and the strategic positioning principles in Say It Right Every Time For Women. Choose the right structure for the moment.
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17 min audio Opening a conversation well is harder for women than most communication guides admit. This article gives you a practical, numbered icebreaker process built for real professional situations, including the specific missteps that undermine first impressions and how to avoid every one of them.
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4 min audio Scientific research drives decisions that affect every person alive, from vaccine uptake to climate policy to how schools teach reading. But most research never leaves the journal it was published in. Scientists write for other scientists, the public gets nothing useful, and the gap between discovery and understanding keeps widening. That gap is not a knowledge problem. It is a communication failure.
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4 min audio Shopify published a 2026 guide on brand crisis management, walking businesses through the process of handling reputational emergencies. The piece covers how companies should respond when things go wrong publicly. It reflects a growing recognition in the business world that crisis communication is not an afterthought. It is a core competency that needs to be built before disaster strikes, not scrambled together during one.
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4 min audio OpenAI watched fourteen of its executives walk out the door in 2026. That is not a personnel shuffle. That is a signal. Whether those departures were voluntary, pushed, or somewhere in between, the sheer number tells a story that no official statement can fully contain. When that many leaders leave one organization in a single year, the organization's communication problem becomes impossible to hide.
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3 min audio During a recent match, Real Madrid forward Vinicius Junior was sent off after pulling an opponent's hair, a moment of frustration that escalated into a red card and immediate controversy. Following the incident, Vinicius issued a public apology acknowledging his behavior. Notably absent from that apology: any mention of the player he actually wronged.
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4 min audio Leadership communication is not one skill. It is three separate skills wrapped in one job title. A new wave of attention in business media is focusing on how effective leaders shift their communication style depending on whether they are talking to a boss, a client, or a direct report. The core argument is simple: the same message delivered the same way to all three audiences will fail with at least two of them.
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4 min audio New research confirms what experienced operators already suspected: in certain industries, a single quarter of poor reputation management can wipe out the credibility gains from an entire year of doing things right. The damage is not symmetrical. It takes far longer to build trust than to destroy it, and in high-stakes sectors like finance, healthcare, and hospitality, the gap between building and burning is wider than most leaders want to admit.
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