Human Behavior By Design

Use This Sales Tip And Get Your Prospect’s Attention Every Time

2009-12-08T09:30:00.005-05:00

Here is a behavioral pattern I learned in high school that has applications in sales and in presentation delivery.

Back then, I remember getting on the Cleveland Public Railway System and heading to downtown Cleveland to do some research in the Main Public Library.

I was taking AP English at the time and had chosen to write a paper on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

It was near the end of April and the weather permitted everyone to walk outside with only a “modest” jacket instead of the usual bearskin rug that is typical fare for a Cleveland spring.

As I was walking downtown from the station to the library, I was lost in my own thoughts, thinking about the paper, the end of the school year, graduation, a summer job, college, etc… However, I didn’t have to think about where I was going. I had been to the library numerous times over the past few weeks, so the entire process had become automatic.

Suddenly, I heard someone call out my name. It was unmistakable. “Larry!”

I whirled around to see who had called me, but I could not find a familiar face anywhere in the crowd.

As I was about to return to my own mental tasks, I heard my name shouted out again, with far more fire: “Larry!!”

This time, I was able to identify the caller. He was a grizzled looking man in dirty clothes, standing on a milk crate and selling the “End of Days” to whoever would “wake up” and pay attention.

Who were this disheveled salesman’s prospects? The people whose names he called out, naturally.

As I watched him, he called out several other names, seemingly at random. And without fail, after every name he called out, two or more people in the crowd would break concentration with a startled expression on their face and look in this gentleman’s direction.

The lesson here is quite simple:

Get Your Audience’s Attention By Using Their Name!

If you are a sales person and you want to get your prospect’s attention, use their name.

If you are presenting to a large group and you want to insure that you have your audience’s attention, use the names of a few people in the audience. Those few will wake up and pay attention because you used their names.

And everyone else will wake up and pay attention as well, because you just might use theirs next.

Goal Setting Secret From Ann Landers

2009-12-01T09:00:00.006-05:00

Finding What You Are Looking For

When I was in college, I remember staying up late one night with some of my other housemates discussing some of the more philosophical, esoteric, and mind blowing topics that you can only discuss in college at 2:00 AM.

Somehow, the conversation turned to the Ann Landers column. One of my housemates made the comment, “I remember reading a question someone sent to Ann Landers. They asked ‘How come the thing you are looking for is always in the last place you look?’ Can you believe someone asked that question?”

Well, now that he brought up the question, I was mildly curious. Why was the thing you were looking for always in the last place you looked?

So I asked him, “How did she answer?"

My housemate said, “Because typically you stop looking for it once you find it.”

Attain Your Goals By Including These Two Elements

The answer that my housemate provided sounded logical.

Yet, when you ask someone what their goals are, chances are that they will come back with some very fuzzy, unspecified, vague, nebulous thing that can hardly be called a specific target.

So with vague, nebulous, unspecified fuzzy targets, how do you know when it’s time to stop driving towards your goals or how much further you have to go to reach them?

Without a goal that is specific and measurable, how would you know when you reached it?

If you don’t specifically know what you are looking for, how do you know when you can stop looking for it?

In the drive to attain your goals, it is too easy to redefine vague targets to match your effort instead of expending the extra effort to reach well specified goals.

When creating your goals, include as many details as possible and insure that your evidence procedure is measurable.

How Do You Discover Your Talents?

2009-11-27T11:35:00.000-05:00

During my NLP certification, my strategies instructor made a comment concerning talents and goals during our one of our discussions.

We were reviewing the NLP TOTE model (TOTE is an acronym for Test-Operate-Test-Exit), when suddenly our conversation turned to behaviors and outcomes.

That’s when our instructor said, “You know how our culture defines the difference between a talent and a goal?”

We all looked at each other in an inquisitive state.

Charles said, “If you hold your behavior constant and you change your outcomes until you find one that your behavior is really good in achieving, then we call your behavior a talent.

However, if you hold the outcome constant and you change your behavior until you get your outcome, then we call the outcome a goal.”

It depends on where you choose to focus your attention and your perspective.

Where are you focusing your attention right now—on your behaviors or your outcomes?

What process to you use to discover your talents?

And how many different behaviors do you use to accomplish your goals?

4 PowerPoint Sales Presentations Tips

2009-11-26T10:00:00.002-05:00

Just a few days ago, I answered a question from a Manta community member about delivering a PowerPoint presentation to a prospective client. They wanted to know the maximum number of PowerPoint slides to use when making a presentation about their company.

Some of the pointers I gave him are below:

Keep the focus on you, not your PowerPoint. You are the presenter. The focus needs to be on you, not your PowerPoint slides. So work on your message first and then create the slides.

2 to 3 minutes per slide is a generally a good rule of thumb. So, if you have a 1-hour meeting scheduled with your prospect and your PowerPoint presentation has 50 slides in it, you had better start pruning the presentation or you will be asked to leave before you are finished.

I once had the pleasure of doing a team presentation in front of a very large client with three of my colleagues. One was a department head scheduled to talk about our service and support strategy. One was a regional sales director for sales and major account management. One was a department head for product marketing. Then there was me, a sales engineer. I was scheduled to talk about the solution to a particular challenge that the client was experiencing at that time.

We had about 90 minutes of the client’s time. The product-marketing guy went first and spoke strictly from his PowerPoint presentation. After watching the presentation for 30 minutes, I realized that my esteemed colleague was using between 3 and 4 minutes per slide and that he was using the generic marketing presentation, which consisted of 95 slides!

If your client or prospect was gracious enough to give you a period of time to work within, that time is yours to either capitalize on or waste. Your prospects may be polite and smile through their displeasure, or they may show overt signs of disinterest such as doodling, falling asleep, and just walking out. But, when the allotted time is up, so are you, regardless of where you are in your presentation.

And whatever you do, don’t say, “Bear with me. I have just a few more slides to cover…”

Do your sales presentation with 10 slides. This was a rule of thumb suggested by Guy Kawasaki. He came up with this general rule as a suggestion for any entrepreneur looking for seed money from angel investors. He later generalized it even further to encompass people looking for a job.

Tailor your presentation to your audience. This is where every professional speaker will start. Incidentally, all good sales people start here as well. You are about to stand in front of your audience or you are about to propose a solution to your prospect – what do they want? How will their lives or their company be different from their interactions with you?

Most presenters, before delivering a major presentation, will ask the event coordinator about the group that they will be speaking to in order to understand the points that they need to cover. Good sales people will also conduct an in-depth analysis highlighting their prospects needs before presenting a solution. If you want to be a big hit or you want to make the sale, focus on what your client wants. Anything else is a shot in the dark while spinning on a Lazy Susan Turntable.

After posting the answer on the Manta board, I came across this posting from Chelsea Blacker on Search Engine Journal entitled The Perfect SEO Pitch. There are a couple of other items in the post that deal specifically with making presentations, but her point about the number of slides in a presentation re-emphasizes my point: you are in a sales situation. You need to sell. Your PowerPoint slides are there to support your presentation, not prop it up as it limps along.

For additional ideas on using PowerPoint in your presentations, I would suggest picking up a copy of Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson.

You Only Think You’re Free

2009-11-19T17:20:00.001-05:00

I was watching an encore presentation of “The Prisoner” the other night. This was not the 1960’s classic with Patrick McGoohan, but the re-imagination of the 1960 series with James Caviezel as Number 6 and Ian McKellen as Number 2.

In this re-imagined classic, there was a scene in episode 4 where 2 is trying to break 6’s will by controlling his emotions through some kind of designer gene therapy. 2 goes on to explain some of the TV pseudo-science behind the creation of this new therapy, and then explains to 6 why he is attracted to 415, another member of the Village. He tells 6, “your feelings have been manufactured”.

At another point in the film, 2 admonishes the village doctor, 313, for betraying 2 in his attempt to break 6. He tells her, “You will never know if your feelings for him were genuine or…” and then he looks skyward, shakes his head and walks off leaving 313 standing in the sun unsure of what is real.

What I found interesting about this episode was the idea that manufactured feelings were not genuine and that a random, raw and unintentional emotion was more real, a concept that seems to permeate our current culture.

However, everything that we do affects our emotions and feelings. All emotions are real, genuine and manufactured.

It’s really a matter of who is in control of the manufacturing process.

Who is responsible for manufacturing your emotions and how is it typically performed?

Ask yourself the question, “What initiated that last emotional response I felt?” Was it initiated by:

Someone injecting me with some new pseudo-scientific gene therapy drug?
The last Zoloft pill I took?
Drinking too much coffee, RedBull, or Monster energy drink?
Consuming too much sugar?
Running one too many miles?
Watching "Friday the 13th" and getting shocked when Jason whips out his machete?
Completing a project on time?
Making a big sale?
An unpleasant or pleasant memory I pulled up from the past and relived briefly?

Everything that we do brings some type of emotional response to our attention. And since we control our actions and our thoughts, we control our emotions.

Get out a 3X5 card right now, or a notepad, or open your favorite text editor on your laptop, and write down the answer to these questions:

What am I physically doing right now?

What am I mentally focused on right now?

What am I remembering right now?

And what are the feelings that I am experiencing right now?

Then write down the answer to this question:

Am I doing what I’m doing because of my emotional state, or am I feeling the way I do because of what I am doing? What did I notice that supports my selection?

You are the creator of your emotional state. Become aware of the events and activities in your life. Start designing and directing your emotional state to your benefit.

We are all prisoners of our own mind, which means we are about as free as we choose to be.

Be seeing you.

What Do Arnold Schwarzenegger And Dale Carnegie Have In Common?

2009-11-12T09:00:00.012-05:00

Session 9 Of The Dale Carnegie Course Is About Developing Mental Flexibility While Having Fun

About two months ago, I saw a blog post from someone who had taken the Dale Carnegie Course and at the time of the post, he had just completed Session 9. The post was relatively short and talked about building self-confidence by making people do things that seemed foolish or having people performing activities so that they could learn not to take themselves seriously.

Being an instructor for the program, I know that this session typically draws a lot of interest, comments, and quite a few giggles in the classroom.

But very few people really understand the amazing impact that this session can have on participants if the participants have the right mindset.

For those of you who have taken the course, you’ll probably remember Session 9 as the session where you really had to step outside of your comfort zone. For those of you who haven’t taken the course, you're likely to hear a lot of talk about it from your peers and co-workers who have taken the course as the session where they had the most fun.

Session 9, however, is one of the stronger sessions in the program that helps develop a person’s mental flexibility in dealing with real world situations.

What A Master Trainer Revealed About Mental Flexibility In Session 9

When I first took the Dale Carnegie Course, participating in Session 9 was quite a stretch for me. I had always thought of myself as a shy introvert person. And in this session, the instructor was asking me to do some things that no one in their right mind would do. At least, that was my perspective, which tells you just how limited my perspective was at that time.

Then I started my journey as an assistant. Each time I assisted in a program, I got a new and different perspective on this session. Not only did I see how the session affected some of the participants, but I also became aware of how restrictive my own views were and how some of those views needed upgrading. The real revelations, however, came after I went through my NLP certification and then after I completed my training as an instructor for the program.

During my Instructor Certification, I was fortunate enough to have two top-shelf Master Trainers. These individuals had in-depth systemic knowledge of the program; they knew how each of the different sessions operated together as well as the effects on the participants in their real world activities. I think that if you asked any of the other trainers or Master Trainers about these two individuals, you would come away thinking that these two individuals were the equivalent of Master Yoda and Mace Windu of the Jedi Knights.

Anyway, they gave me a holistic perspective of the program and revealed to me why we do what we do in Session 9. After completing the instructor certification process, Session 9 ceased to be the magical session that held a special place in my heart. Instead, it became the cornerstone for developing a special ability in people. That ability is the mental flexibility to put “you” on hold and assume a different role. If you have the ability to assume a different role, you can gain a different perspective on a situation. That perspective can provide you with critical information, something every strategic thinker, sales rep and manager desires.

Learning Mental Flexibility From Arnold Schwarzenegger In The Movie, Total Recall

One way to get a better view of this concept is to go back to the 1990 movie, Total Recall starring our beloved Govenator, Arnold Schwarzenneger.

If you will recall, this was the flick where Arnold played a lowly construction worker named Doug Quaid. Bored with his life, Doug bought a mental vacation to Mars from the company Rekall. However, after getting his “vacation”, he discovered that he was actually a top operative for the Martian government and his memories had been replaced so that he could work undercover to destroy the Martian underground resistance.

The challenge here was that Doug initially requested to take his mental “vacation” as a secret agent. So throughout the movie, we are never quite sure of what’s real. Was Doug living out his dream vacation totally encapsulated within his lobotomized mind? Or was Doug actually a dream role about to be assimilated by the more sinister operative as it resurfaced into the real world?

If you don’t feel like going out one dreary Saturday evening, then rent this movie, pop a bag of unsalted popcorn into the microwave, sit back and enjoy about 2 hours of fast paced action-adventure entertainment.

In the movie, however, one interaction really brings home this concept of mental flexibility that we explore in Session 9 of the Dale Carnegie Course.

When Doug goes into Rekall, he is met by a sales rep whose name is, and I kid you not, Bob.

Bob sells Doug on a trip to Mars. Actually, he facilitates the sale. Doug sold himself before he walked through the door.

While Doug is starting his paperwork, Bob says, “While you look over the paperwork, I’m going to familiarize you with some of our options.”

Doug, resistant to trying something different, says, “No options.”

Bob says, “OK. You’re the boss. Can I ask you a question? What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation that you’ve ever taken?”

Doug responds in an exasperated voice, “I give up.”

And Bob says, “You! You’re the same. No matter where you go, there you are. It’s always the same old you. Let me suggest that you take a vacation from yourself. I know it sounds wild. It’s the latest thing in travel. We call it the Ego Trip.”

And from there, it’s an all out downhill ride with no brakes.

The main concept to explore here, however, deals with taking a vacation from “you”.

The Myth Of "This Is Just How I Am" And The Power To Be Free

In the programs I’ve instructed, there's always been at least one person that, when asked to do something differently, would respond, “Well, this is just the way I am “.

In fact, when I look back on the first time I took the program, I see that I was one of those people. I was a shy introverted person and there was nothing in the world that was going to change that. That was just how I was.

While only one or two participants would actually say, “this is just how I am”, I found that the majority of participants would silently hold on to their self-perceptions like a drowning man clinging to a life preserver. When we asked them to try something differently, or when we asked them to get up and speak, they would passionately hold onto what they perceive as their “old selves” while hesitantly stepping out to try something new.

Because they would hold on to that definition of themselves, they measured their progress by how far they strayed from their point of origin and how much anxiety that small journey into unfamiliar territory caused them. Consequently, they only made incremental gains.

A few participants, however, released their self-perceptions and reached for something new. They effectively peeled off their persona and stepped into another role to become someone or something else. The paradigm shift, however, occurred not when they assumed another role, but when they realized that they could let go of the original role that they had lived for the majority of their lives. They realized that they were free to be whatever they wanted.

They became flexible enough to "take a vacation from themselves" and in the process, they attained the freedom to choose what they wanted to be.

Session 9 Mental Flexibility Exercises: Practice Being Someone Or Something Else

I remember facilitating one particular class where I had a participant who was paralyzed at the thought of participating in the Session 9 “festivities”. She just couldn’t do it.

So I took her through a quick NLP intervention using a disassociation process similar to the process used in the NLP Fast Phobia cure.

After having her separate from her “old self”, I told her that her “old self” was completely protected in a chair on the sideline and ready to be picked up again after the exercise. Additionally, I told her that her “old self” had given her permission to be anything that she wanted. She was now totally free to be or do anything for the next two minutes. And for the next two minutes, she was going to be the giant in the Jack and the Beanstalk story.

This girl, normally a shy and reserved person, got a devilish look on her face and she went absolutely bananas! She was wild! No one in the room could believe that it was the same person.

When she was finished everyone applauded wildly. No one could believe it.

When the applause died down, I told her that her “old self” was still perfectly safe right where she left it and she could now “go back to it”. She looked at the chair where she left her “old self” and then looked over at the center of the room where she had just been. Then, she pointed at the chair, looked at me and asked, “Do I really have to go back to ‘that’?”

This is the real power of Session 9. We provide people with the flexibility to choose the skills, abilities, demeanor and behaviors that they need to get the job done in whatever environment they happen to be in.

We give them an environment where they can experiment, and the coaching they need to take a vacation from “themselves” enabling them to realize their full potential.

So the next time you happen to be watching Total Recall, remember that Rekall isn’t the only place that can give you a vacation from yourself.

Try Session 9 in the Dale Carnegie Course.

See you at the party!

Learning To Recover

2009-11-08T21:17:00.002-05:00

Just the other day, I received an email from the McBassi and Company, a management consulting firm whose members were at one time deeply involved in examining the relationship between a companies stock performance and their investment in training their people. In fact, the CEO, Laurie Bassi first noticed the relationship when she was one of the governing members of ASTD.

At any rate, it appears that they are now a full service management consulting company helping executives select, train and groom the right talent for their organizations. And in spite of the economy, this is something that organizations need to do on an ongoing basis if they want to continue being an ongoing concern.

Anyway, here is the text of the message that I got along with an invitation to join a webinar at the end:

Learning to Recover

Recent economic data suggests that the economy has turned a corner and is moving into a recovery stage. Although the unemployment rate may continue to increase, unemployment is a "lagging indicator" and historically has often continued to rise even long after a recession has officially ended.

By all accounts, this recovery will be a "jobless" one for the foreseeable future. This will require that employers squeeze more productivity from their existing workforce. Just how will they go about doing that? There are really only three options: require people to work longer hours, get people to work harder (perhaps by using fear-based tactics - implicit or explicit), or help people to work "smarter."

In addition to being distasteful, the first two tactics are likely to be unsustainable. The third option - helping employees to work smarter - seems like the only sustainable path forward. But in order to work smarter, employees and their organizations need opportunities to learn something new. This doesn't happen out of thin air (or it already would have happened). Effective learning investments require time, money, or (most realistically) both time and money.

Organizations that have taken the path of least resistance and cut their training and development budgets are the ones that will find it most difficult to recover. [See our recent white paper, Training Investments as a Predictor of Banks' Subsequent Stock Market Performance for some startling evidence on this point.]

But having already shot yourself in one foot is not a good reason to shoot yourself in the other. If you work in an organization that has already made significant cuts in its investments in developing people, our advice is to argue long and loud to get that mistake reversed as soon as possible. Your organization's very future may depend on it.

Want to Know More?

McBassi & Company can help. We have the benchmarking databases, as well as the research base linking human capital investment to future performance, to help you build the business case for investing in developing people.

Upcoming Laurie Bassi Webinar

Our CEO, Dr. Laurie Bassi, will be delivering a free webinar for Learn.com later this month. The subject will be "Beyond Employee Engagement: Creating Actionable Business Intelligence for Improving Your Return on People."

Please submit your free registration and join us for the webinar on October 29, 2009. Registration is free - just click here.

About McBassi & Company

McBassi is a survey firm that helps organizations improve their performance through more effective management and development of people. We have proprietary research-based measurement methods, the analytic know-how, and a proven track record in serving as a catalyst for change and generating win-win results.

You can download a brochure describing McBassi and our services, or visit us on the web.

We can be contacted toll-free at 866.345.5730 or info at mcbassi.com.

Now as I look at their statement about a "jobless" economic recovery I begin to feel a little queasy. Especially since there are new areas that need to be explored, like the "Green Economy" or the rash of collaboration tools that now live on what we once knew as the Internet.

If we consider the economy as closed and only look at the job sectors that are currently in play, like the manufacturing or service sectors, then yeah, I can see this might be a jobless recovery and that would be ugly.

But there's a whole lot of future type stuff in the works and in order to make that stuff happen there needs to be a whole lot of people who can turn that stuff into something that is real and workable. And that requires training.

I also look at the rest of that paragraph where they mention that a result of this jobless recovery, employers will need to squeeze more productivey from the existing shrunken workforce.

They mention that there are three ways to do this. I'm not really a big fan of option one (work more hours) or option two (working harder) because I've done both. And I got to tell you, neither one really works over the long haul.

So the only option left is to work smarter, which means it's time to get trained, do some collaboration, discover what you don't know or how to leverage someone elses experience. But if you are going to get some kind of training, why not make sure that the training is an investment in your future?

Make sure that your training turns you into a personal ongoing concern. Turn your training into an investment in yourself, not just a method for getting the current job done more efficiently or faster. Look beyond the job at hand towards your future path.

Anyway, this sounds like it will be an interesting webinar. I don't know about you but I plan on being there. I hope you are, too.

5 Tips For Speaking With Passion In The Dale Carnegie Course Session 5

2009-11-08T21:15:00.001-05:00

Session 5 In The Dale Carnegie Course Is About Unleashing Our Potential

Just last week, I participated in Session 5 of the Dale Carnegie Course. We started the session with a warm up exercise called The Box Factory, and then we coached participants through delivering a presentation where they had to exaggerate their gestures.

In fact, they had to go beyond exaggerated gestures and show us what they were talking about. They had to physically act out the experience rather than just tell us about it.

In the second part of Session 5, participants leveraged their emotional resources to energize the delivery of their presentations. They had to speak passionately about something that was important to them. It could have been something that had an impact in their lives, influenced their thinking or played a part in forming their beliefs. But they had to speak with passion and conviction, and it had to be rooted in an incident.

Over the course of our time together, I began to notice something that made me reflect on the entire nature of this session. It reminded me why we were there to coach participants to move beyond their accustomed behavior.

After watching the participants deliver their presentation, I noticed that some gave their talk with constrained gestures, as if they had confined themselves to a “small box”. Their arms stayed within a certain area, their body was stiff, and their movements were constrained. The assignment, however, actually called for participants to move about unencumbered with big, exaggerated and sometimes even wild gestures. There were no stated session requirements holding them in this “box”, only the requirements that they brought in the room with them in the form of personal perceptions, rules and beliefs.

And I thought to myself, “Now this is interesting”.

Test Your Constraints – What’s Holding You Back From Effective Presentation Delivery?

When we deliver a presentation to an audience, we are constrained primarily by our perception of our capabilities. We communicate to the audience in a way that we are accustomed to and we refrain from exploring the entire dynamic range of our skills and abilities.

We don’t do what is effective, we do what makes us comfortable. As a result, we are left ignorant of the impact we can really have on our audience when we really flex our “behavioral muscle”.

Our own perceptions and past experiences are used to create an invisible box that constrains our communication effectiveness.

What we need is to have the wisdom to recognize that our invisible box exists, the flexibility to free ourselves from its constraints, and the courage to leave it behind.

This is the essence of session five. It provides us with a laboratory to recognize and break our own mental perceptions, our mental jail cells that keep us constrained physically and emotionally. In this session, we get an opportunity to move physically outside our perceived bodily constraints to explore more of our capabilities. And we get to move beyond our emotional constraints to explore who we really are and what we stand for.

Five Tips For Enhancing Your Communication Effectiveness

Here are 5 tips for presenters in this session to break outside the box:

Move your arms starting from your shoulders. When I see any speaker confining their gestures from their elbows down to their hands, it reminds me of those old westerns where the hero is tied up with the rope around his chest and upper arms. But his hands are free from the elbows on down allowing him to escape with just enough effort to provide some suspense. Be that hero. Remove the perceived constraints that are pinning your upper arms against your chest and start using everything at your disposal.
Raise your hands above your head. Make sure that the people in the back of the room can see what you are doing. That’s not possible if your hands can only move from your chest down to your waist. Remember that big, exaggerated movements make big impressions. The classroom is a laboratory where you get to experiment and try new stuff. This is not the place to practice constraint and control. To quote a passage from Top Peter’s book Re-Imagine, “If you dip your toes in the water, what makes you think you’ll get splashy results?”
Use your instructor or coach as a mirror. That is what they are there for – to help you move beyond what you are accustomed to doing to do what you are capable of doing.
Always root your presentation to an incident, an event, or a memory. The way to reconnect and channel that raw unbridled passion is to “get back in the kitchen” as Tony Robbins puts it. You need to be associated with the event as it happened. When you can get access to that state, you have access to the emotion and power that you had when the event occurred. Trust me, that passion and emotional impact will come through in your talk. When delivering your talk, however, maintain control by controlling how you access your memory or event. Some people will briefly disassociate (or step outside of the incident and look at it as if it were happening on a tv screen or a movie screen) in order to maintain control. Others will briefly blur their view of the event to throw themselves out of the incident. Still others will quickly step back, as if they are physically stepping out of the event before jumping back into it. There is no “right” way to control the flow of the incident. For you, there is only your way as long as you remember not to let the event get control of you. Maintaining control over how you access that incident allows you to control the energy and the pace of the delivery. Besides, you have to come out of the incident occasionally to see what your audience is doing any way, don’t you? Make good use of your “out of the experience” time to check in with your audience and insure that they are with you before going back into the incident.
Be flexible and ask “What if…” This session can get loud and rambunctious at times probably because as business people, we are trained to be reserved and restrained. So when some individuals get an opportunity to “cut loose”, it starts feeling good to them and they get drunk on the experience. Once you're drunk on the experience, it has control of you and you lose all of your flexibility to choose your outcomes. Remember that this is a laboratory for you to conduct your communication experiments. You are in control of the experience. Don’t let the experience control you. Ask yourself, "What would happen if I started in a loud booming voice and then dropped to a quite, intense voice? What would happen if I started with quiet intensity and gradually built to a fiery crescendo?" Realize that if you “get stuck” at one speed or one intensity level, or if you get lost in your memory while reliving your story, you never really learn anything. Always keep some physical movement, sensation or item that will act as your emergency out. Above all, remain flexible and learn from your observations.

As I reflect on Session 5 of the Dale Carnegie Course, it's only fitting that we start this session with The Box Factory exercise, a journey through an imaginary factory where we find containers of all sizes. However, any type of container ultimately limits our growth and the enclosures will come tumbling down around our heads when adequately examined. Our goal should be to make them vanish like a dream through frequent questions and constant challenges until we are free to explore our true potential.

Chief Learning Officer Magazine - Mental Muscle Power

2009-11-08T21:13:00.003-05:00

The Connection Between Learning Power and Physical Prowess Just Got Stronger

Over the past few weeks, I've noticed a rash of articles outlining the benefits controlling your health through exercise and diet, ranging from the effects of sugar on cellular activity to the effects of obesity on brain aging.

I ran across this article in CLO Media, publisher of Chief Learning Officer Magazine. It's a column written by Fred Harburg but sites a number of references, including a study done by the National Academy of Sciences. That study seems to indicate that continued rigorous exercise will cause new brain cells to develop.
Seems pretty wild.
Definitely give this a read before you go out on your next long run.
You just might go that extra mile.
Chief Learning Officer magazine - Mental Muscle Power
Recent findings in neuroscience indicate that those with the fittest bodies also are the ones with the best brains. There is a credible and growing body of information showing that exercise can make learners significantly better at learning...
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