Top Drills
Use Goalsheets to Improve Like a Professional
The worst kind of self-challenge is to get “all” of anything right. Improvement tends to happen incrementally, by focusing on one aspect of a skill at a time. For example, instead of aiming to improve your speaker points from 22 to 24, on average, it would be better...
3 Handy Tips for Nonverbal Communication
From the moment you walk into a debate round you are communicating with everyone in the room. Everything you do matters, your dress, your posture, your expression, and especially your body language. Because even before the first line of your first speech the judge has...
Drills: Mindset Blockades and Growth Tactics
Not to be ornery, but when a dentist pokes a drill into my mouth and assures “this will only hurt a bit”, I cringe. And then I grip the chair, inhale deeply, and try to find that inner happy place of dental bliss. I know his use of the drill is going to improve my...
Hemmingway’s first rule of writing: cut out any unnecessary words.
Word conservation shows maturity in argumentation. If you’re willing to stop talking, it shows that you trust your words and logic to accomplish their intended purpose. If you’re looking to master word conservation, then this is the drill for you. Step 1: Find your...
How to Improve: SWOT Your Ballots
As Chip and Dan Heath (also authors of our favorite communications book, Made to Stick) note in their book “Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard,” improvement is often about capitalizing on the “bright spots.” A similar point is made by Charles Duhigg in...
Parli Debaters: Practice this LOC
Simple exercise I did with Graham Stacy and Clare Downing tonight. Go to youtube and find a parli round available on youtube (probably by searching NPDA). Give yourself 15 minutes or less and prep your opp strategy and LOC. Watch and flow the PMC, preparing your LOC...