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 About 60 public relations and strategic communication professionals gathered in Kuching for The PR Show 2026, a forum built around a pointed question: what exactly is PR beyond getting people into newspapers? The event challenged practitioners to examine their role in leadership, reputation, and trust, and pushed the conversation well past the traditional definition of publicity. It was, in short, the industry talking hard to itself.
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4 min audio Australia's cybersecurity crisis is accelerating. The Australian Signals Directorate recorded over 84,700 cybercrime incidents in its latest annual report, alongside more than 42,500 calls to the national hotline, a 16 percent jump from the previous year. Threats are rising. Employee attention is not.
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4 min audio Singapore's CPF Board made a deliberate shift in how it shapes its workplace culture. Instead of handing employees a finished product, HR Director Dorcas Fong and her team brought staff into the design process itself. The result was higher engagement and genuine employee ownership of the changes. This was not a feel-good initiative. It was a structural communication decision with measurable impact. ---
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4 min audio Something fundamental has shifted in how chief executives are expected to show up publicly. The modern CEO is no longer evaluated only on earnings calls and shareholder letters. They are now expected to operate as a full media presence: publishing opinions, building audiences, and speaking directly to customers, employees, and the public on a continuous basis. The era of the invisible executive is over.
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4 min audio New research confirms what experienced crisis managers already know: in certain industries, a single quarter of poor reputation management wipes out the goodwill built over an entire year of doing things right. The industries most exposed include finance, healthcare, and consumer goods, where trust is the actual product. One bad stretch of silence, spin, or tone-deaf messaging can cost more than twelve months of careful, consistent communication.
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4 min audio Harvard Business School Online recently published a list of twelve tips aimed at helping managers lead distributed teams more effectively. The piece targets professionals navigating the ongoing shift toward remote and hybrid work. It represents the kind of authoritative institutional advice that gets forwarded around corporate Slack channels and filed away under "good intentions" without much follow-through.
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