Welcome to our community of professionals who believe that you can never get too good at communicating respectfully with others while being true to yourself! Please tell us a little about yourself! What brings you to our community? What communication challenge do you most want to overcome? Answer our poll below, and then make a post so we can get to know you a little!

I'm Richard Kelly Stifora, but I go by Kelly. I'm super excited to be meeting (or reconnecting with) you here because this is the space where, working with my brother and business partner Andrew, I am thrilled to be building the course I have wanted to teach since I became a college communications instructor almost 17 years ago. I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as a painfully shy and introverted kid. In love with movies and literature, I studied theater and film at university and became an amateur actor through sheer force of desire and will, desperately making up exercises and mantras to push through the anxiety and self-consciousness that constantly dogged me so I could perform. I learned to cope however I could because I had to constantly push through the lack of self-confidence if I wanted to "commit theatre" and I wanted to do that really badly. (Some people even said I got pretty good at it!) Things got better as I got older. I studied journalism, advertising, and public relations; worked as a radio reporter and producer, a publicity manager, and a university communications officer; and, thanks to an ex-instructor who believed in me, landed what turned out to be my dream job of teaching communications courses to college students in 2009. I saw my young self in so many of those students. Visibly uncomfortable talking to another person one-on-one, let alone presenting to a whole room. Unable to articulate themselves clearly. Crumbling under even the slightest interpersonal stress. I didn't want to just teach those students how to cross "i"s and dot "t"s, I wanted to teach them (and keep teaching myself) how to be comfortable moving through the world and interacting with others as their genuine, authentic selves. But how do you teach students to be more comfortable in difficult interpersonal situations when the very manner in which you are teaching them makes it almost impossible to create a completely stress-free environment in which to practice those interactions?