(Slightly off topic)
Here is something a little unusual. On Saturday. a song that I wrote using Garage Band on my IPAD was broadcast live as the opening song on Geek Speak, a radio show from KUSP (Central Coast Public Radio, Santa Cruz). It is syndicatd via the US National Public Radio podcasts. You can listen to the show here (but you have to wait until the end to hear the credits).
You can downoad the song off my photo-blog here: Geek Speak Theme
Craig Valentine offers 10 simple guidelines for adding impact to your speech. Included are:
1. Don’t move all the time. If you are always moving then no movement will be meaningful. Your audience will never know what’s most important. Move with a purpose. When there is no reason to move, don’t.
6. Don’t use the same gesture over and over again. This is evidence of a habit and most likely distracts from your presentation.
Read the full list with more details and audio-examples here.
I have had my Amazon Kindle for about 18 months (6 months out of warranty), and a few weeks ago it started behaving strangely, in that whenever it went onto standby, it would crash.
So, I started a live chat with Amazon support on their website to see if we could resolve it. The short version of what happened is that they are replacing it with a brand new (not refurbished) 3G Kindle, at a total cost to me of $85, bearing in mind that my Kindle is 6 months out of warranty, and that the total cost of the order (include shipping and tax), is $210. They had no obligation whatsoever to offer me a $125 discount on a replacement unit.
The customer service staff were friendly, supportive and helpful. My new Kindle arrives next week.
Imagine if every company offered such great service.
What service do you offer?
Obstacle Illusions: Transforming Adversity into Success.
Stephen J. Hopson was born deaf but quickly learned to speak and began attending public school. At five years old, he told his parents he would become a pilot and was dismissed as being foolish, but as an adult he made aviation history by becoming the world’s first deaf instrument-rated pilot.
He says “As a transformational speaker, my audiences expect no less from me. When I’m up there on the platform, I have a huge responsi-bility to bring forth ideas and concepts that have the potential to truly transform lives but if I try to be someone else then the mes-sage gets lost. The audience subconsciously turns a deaf ear.”
Having a blind wife exposes me to many disabled speakers that have achieved despite having a disadvantage in life. This is not just another life-story written by a disabled person.
In the preface, Stephen says that it can be read in a single sitting, and he is right. It is not a long book, and it is very easy reading. However, it is the type of book that you keep going back to. Rather than writing a chronology of his entire life, he presents his message through a series of 25 vignettes, each describing what he learned through something that had happened to him (and often things that he caused to happen). Each chapter ends with a something to think on, and a reflective exercise on how you can apply the lessons that he has learned to your own life.
Stephen is a remarkable person, and he has written a remarkable book. The stories are inspirational, and perfect to put your own perspective back on track. You can buy it from Amazon.com for $16.10, or find out more about Stephen on his website.
I was queuing to pay at a shop the other day when my phone rang. I took the call and quickly hung up when I got to the front so that I could pay for my shopping. The shopping assistant was surprised that I had hung up to speak to her. She told me that it was the first time that had happened, and everybody else just carried on speaking on the phone while they paid; as if she did not exist.
I thought it was just basic manners to speak to the person serving you, and not to treat them as a servant. I must be in the minority.
How do you treat those around you? Are you in the minority?
Why do so many companies make it so difficult to give them money? Here are just 5 ways to make me take my money elsewhere?
I bet you are thinking that your business would never do any of these. These are not difficult things to get right; they really are the basics. If you can’t get these right, how are you going to get a complex task like implementing a 5 year growth strategy right?
In this week alone, every one of these has happened to me several times, when trying to work with both small and large organisations.
I have listened to Darren LaCroix’s “Get Paid to Speak by Next Week” CD’s several times, and they provide great insight into the business and art of public speaking.
Darren has now gone a step further by offering offering 52 weekly modules (IE 1 year) via email for free. You can signup or find out more here.
I just gained a new client because her current service provider takes too long to get back to her.
Not because my product is better, or because I am more skilled. It was simply because I am a better communicator than her previous supplier.
I have been using Microsoft Office 2010 for a few months now. When I closed Word the other day, the following dialogue appeared on the screen. Basically Word had made a list of words that I commonly use that are not in the Word dictionary, and gave me the option of uploading them to their spell check database.
I am sure that they are using the community-gathered information to add new words to the dictionary to make for an ultimately better product.
This is a simple and elegant way to make a better product, and to have happier customers.
You often hear me speaking about the value of impromptu speaking, and why learning to speak off the cuff is as important as learning to speak prepared.
Here is a great resource; an entire website dedicated to the art of “table topics”, or speaking impromptu.What I like about the site is that he gives you a lot of templates, or outlines you can use for practising unprepared topics.
Here is an example:
Split Personality
Number of participants: Two
The majority of the information we convey doesn’t come from what we say, but from how we say it. Bodily gestures are a large part of this. The goal of this template is to separate these different aspects of communication between two people. One participant does the talking, the other does the gesturing.
There are two ways to use this template. Either one participant talks, and the other creates the corresponding gestures, or one uses gestures, and the other talks about what the gestures are indicating.
Doing this effectively requires a reasonable amount of cooperation from the participants. It can weaken the delivery if both participants end up gesturing (once you do it, it can be a difficult thing to put down temporarily!). This should possibly be made clear to the participants.
It’s interesting to see the different ways people can take this, sometimes you may have one participant controlling the flow of the entire topic, while others will work together to figure out how the talk or story will evolve.
The purpose of this template is to give people the chance to carefully consider what their gestures are saying to an audience.
Thanks to Andrew William’s for creating the resource.
