Intimidate!
Top 13 ways to Intimidate Your Professors
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2. Ask whether the first chapter will be on the test. If the professor says no, rip the pages out of your textbook.
3. Hold up a piece of paper that says in large letters "CHECK YOUR FLY". (At Least for the Male profs)
4. Address the professor as "your excellency".
5. When the professor turns on his laser pointer, scream "AAAGH! MY EYES!"
6. Relive your Junior High days by leaving chalk stuffed in the chalkboard erasers.
7. Sit in the front, sniff suspiciously, and ask the professor if he's been drinking.
8. Correct the professor at least ten times on the pronunciation of your name, even it's Smith. Claim that the i is silent.
9. Sit in the front row reading the professor's graduate thesis and snickering.
10. Feign an unintelligible accent and repeatedly ask, "Vet ozzle haffen dee henvay?" Become aggitated when the professor can't understand you.
11. Wink at the professor every few minutes. (Hey you might even get a date if he/she is cute)
12. Every few minutes, take a sheet of notebook paper, write "Signup Sheet #5" at the top, and start passing it around the room.
If your communication quest is to impress or intimidate, use big words and clever acronyms. If you speak with the intent to educate, simplify your ideas and analogies so they are fit for third-graders. Use clear comparisons and illustrate your point with familiar circumstances to which people readily relate.
I listened to a financial advisor describe volatility with weather analogies. He said the average temperature in New York City is about 55 degrees; the average temperature in Los Angeles is 63 degrees. This appears to be a close set of averages, but not when you consider the more extreme temperatures of New York City (greater highs and lows). He continued to illustrate that while both mutual funds offer similar performance during a one-year time period, mutual fund A would experience greater highs and lows only a concern if you need to liquidate during a downturn in the market. I dont always understand my financial advisor, but I listen to the weather every day and easily understood his parallel explanation.
Analogies are wonderful tools to engage, entertain, and explain. Shakespeares sonnets make memorable comparisons: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summers Day?, or Macbeths soliloquy comparing life to a brief candle. The meaning of life is complex, but not in the hands of Shakespeare.
Golf is a common analogy used to simplify the complex. Keep your eye on the ball; your past doesnt determine your future; visualize; skill sets are like a bag of golf clubs: different tools for different circumstances; and grace under pressure. You dont need to play the game to appreciate the analogies.
Effective analogies are no accident; seldom are they improvised during delivery. They are carefully identified and positioned during the development of a presentation. These arent so important during a staff meeting unless working with your team is like trying to herd cats. But even if business has been so good youre shooting fish in a barrel and printing money, remember how people will appreciate your information with prepared simplification, clarification and creativity.
Ken Lodi writes speeches and presentations for a variety of corporate clients so they better represent their brand and distinguish themselves from the competition. Its not the PowerPoints they remember. www.kenlodi.com & Ken@kenlodi.com
Intimidation
Intimidation is a criminal attempt to threat by speaking or acting in a dominating manner, often with the goal of making a person or people do what the intimidator wants.Threatening behaviours are supposed to be a maladaptive outgrowth of normal competitive urge for interrelational dominance generally seen in animals. In case of human beings, threatening behaviours may be more completely modulated by social forces, or may be more mercilessly plotted by individual egotism.
Like all behavioral traits it exists in greater or lesser manifestation in each individual person over time, but may be a more significant "compensatory behavior" for some as opposed to others. Behavioral theorists often see threatening behaviours as a consequence of being threatened by others, including parents, authority figures, playmates and siblings.
Intimidation may be employed consciously or unconsciously, and a percentage of people who employ it consciously may do so as the result of selfishly rationalized notions of its appropriation, utility or self-empowerment.
Intimidation may be manifested in such manner as physical contacts, glowering countenance, emotional manipulation, verbal abuse, purposeful embarrassment and/or actual physical assault.
Criminal threatening is the crime of intentionally or knowingly putting another person in fear of imminent bodily injury.
There is no legal definition in English law as to what behaviour constitutes "Intimidation", so it is up to the courts to decide on a case by case basis. However, if somebody threatens violence against somebody, then this may be a criminal offence.
In most U.S. jurisdictions, the crime remains a misdemeanor unless a deadly weapon is involved or actual violence is committed, in which case it is usually considered a felony.
Criminal threatening can be the result of verbal threats of violence, physical conduct (such as hand gestures or raised fists), actual physical contact, or even simply the placing of an object or graffiti on the property of another person with the purpose of coercing or terrorizing.
Criminal threatening is also defined by arson, vandalism, the delivery of noxious biological or chemical substances (or any substance that appears to be a toxic substance), or any other crime against the property of another person with the purpose of coercing or terrorizing any person in reckless disregard for causing fear, terror or inconvenience;
"Terrorizing" generally means to cause alarm, fright, or dread in another person or inducing apprehension of violence from a hostile or threatening event, person or object.
