Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

10 / 10 / 10

On a flight this morning, I was chatting with a gentleman sitting next to me. He shared a recent learning (he called it a "guidepost") he adopted recently. I thought it was interesting:

A mentor of his told him to think in terms of "10, 10, and 10" when making decisions in life:

Consider the impact of your decisions and actions, and how they will affect your life in the next 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.

I thought this was an interesting construct to help gauge the importance and relevance of decisions, and will begin trying to adopt this myself. In some cases, this may change my decisions, in others it may reaffirm them, but I think it's good food for thought in any case.

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More Power to the Point

Tinyslides_1 I do a lot of presentations in my line of work, and am always looking for ways to improve. A while back, I read the book "Beyond Bullet Points," by Cliff Atkinson, which provides a process that helps you dramatically increase the impact of your presentations. As the name implies, you get away from using bullet points in PowerPoint and use a storytelling approach to convey your points.

While I read the book a long time ago, I finally bit the bullet (so to speak) and decided to deliver my first presentation using this technique a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas. I was nervous about trying this totally different approach, as I was presenting to a bunch of internal auditors at a conference, and there was considerably less hard data on my slides than usual.

I'm happy to say the presentation went quite well, and I had the chance to tighten up the story for another rendition of the presentation this week in Toronto.

Why am I such a big fan of this approach? As the book says, if your slides say everything you want to cover then why do they need you to show up? Also, the message becomes more memorable - and much more poignant - if you display mastery of your topic by adding personal stories and interpretation to the message.

Beyond Bullet Points provides a very straight-forward approach to organizing and expanding your presentation content using a
screenplay approach. You approach your presentation like you are writing a script, and you create levels of detail to fill 5, 15, 30, and 60 minutes. This is great because it gives you an effective way to tailor your presentation to fit the time allotted without feeling rushed and, most importantly, without leaving out major points.

Once you have your script created, you use a then storyboard process to build effective visuals to support your story. Since there is so much imagery involved, you may find yourself struggling to find good images to use on your slides. I used a combination of photos I took, a few I found on Google, and some that I found in a photo clip art collection from Hemera that I bought on Amazon.

The book also provides links to a web site where you can download free templates (in Word and Excel) to help you build your script, and a storyboard slide template for PowerPoint. These templates make it very easy to organize your thoughts and get into this new presentation process.

If you create and deliver presentations with any sort of frequency, I highly recommend you try the Beyond Bullet Points approach.

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[Review]: Discovering Your Inner Samurai

I'm privileged to be a part of the Virtual Book Tour for Dr. Susan L. Reid's book, "Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Journey to Business Success1." This book is an interesting business book in that it grapples with a tremendous array of topics, all designed to help women conquer the trepidation, disillusionment, and other obstacles that must be overcome by a successful woman entrepreneur (referred to as a "Pren-Her" by Dr. Reid).

Now, a lot of the obstacles discussed in this book are the sorts of things that entrepreneurs of any gender can encounter, so there is tremendous advice here for any aspiring entrepreneur - not just Pren-Hers. However, Dr. Reid weaves in some powerful advice tailored to the "styles" and needs of women, exploring differences in bonding and communication styles, and the advantages of women's ability (and willingness) to "go deeper" into the emotional realm of business. For example, there is a chapter on "Womaning - Woman As A Verb" that I really enjoyed - it's a great exploration of how women build relationships. For such a short section in the book, it sure helped expand my perspective.

Keeping it real

Like most books that really "connect" with me, this book is full of wonderful stories of real life experiences. Dr. Reid talks a lot about her own journey through business and life (don't miss the early chapter describing her spiritual awakening). It's through these stories that she teaches us to connect with our "Inner Samurai" -- the voice in our heads that gives good advice and helps you remain centered in the heat of battle. She also teaches us to be more aware of this good voice, since it can easily be drowned out by our less helpful voices.

"Why do we think our thoughts are the truth? Because we form attachments to our thoughts. Instead of listening to our Inner Samurai, we form attachments to what the voice inside our head is telling us. When that happens, we're lost -- lost to focusing on past failures or future dividends instead of present joys. Lost to what really matters in life. We dwell within the domain of ego believing it to be real."
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Whip your office into shape

Hot off the presses: My friend Ariane Benefit of the Neat & Simple Living blog has just published the Neat & Simple Guide to Organizing Your Office. I bought and downloaded it last week (she's offering a special introductory price of $12.95 through February 1) and read it on the plane the other day.

If you're struggling with clutter and organizational challenges in your office, this guide was meant for you. You'll be led through some background about chronic disorganization, motivations for getting more organized, and why you may be "stuck" in a messy situation.

Organize to fit your style

Ariane takes you through an analysis of various working, thinking, and organizing "styles" and discusses how to tailor your organizational scheme to better support your own style. She provides a step-by-step guide to analyzing and dealing with the clutter in your workspace. Another useful section of the guide provides examples of various kinds of organizing tools (bins, shelves, stands, etc.) and discusses the merits and potential pitfalls of each tool. I found this section to be valuable and thought-provoking.

She also offers quite a collection of tips for filing, electronic organization, reinforcing and maintaining you systems, and other hints to help you achieve and maintain success in your quest for organization.

And if you still feel overwhelmed after reading the book, you may need professional (organizational) help. If so, Ariane has a brief discussion on selecting a professional organizer to get you on track.

One last comment on this guide: it just feels organized. It's loaded with useful pictures -- and the layout, graphics, and flow of the book are awesome.

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New tools for resolutions

Well, we all know that this is the time of year for New Year's Resolutions, and we also know that a lot of people's resolutions don't get very far. With that in mind, some friends of mine have come up with some tools to help with this. I'd like to share them with you.

Remarkable Resolutions

The first tool is from Kevin Eikenberry, and it's a free guide to creating Remarkable Resolutions. This is a a kind of "workshop in a box" approach, guiding you through 26 thought-provoking questions designed to help you achieve greate clarity and depth in your resolutions.

I say it's like a workshop, because the document is actually a workbook designed so that you can print it out and write our your thoughts and answers in the book. You can then use the workbook throughout the year to remind you what you identified as important, which things you want to achieve, etc. It's generally known that writing things down helps make ideas more "real" in your brain, and I found that writing my answers down also felt good - like I was taking concrete steps to plan for 2008.

Kevin's also sharing his answers and thoughts on these questions at his blog. Incidentally, Kevin is the author of "Remarkable Leadership" which I'm reading right now. It is an excellent book - I'll be reviewing it soon.

Aim for the Goal Post

Keith Ferrazzi (author of "Never Eat Alone") is also adding to the toolbox. He suggests getting some skin in the game by making your commitment public, and choosing three friends to serve as your accountability buddies. Knowing they are watching you will help you to stick to and reach your goals - he calls it "peer-to-peer pressure". Your friends can cheer you on and send you inspirational songs and helpful website links.

To help keep you moving toward your goals, Keith and his team have developed a Facebook application called "Goal Post." It is an easy and visual way to set your goals, choose your accountability buddies and keep track of your progress.

To get started, login to Facebook (or register if you aren't Facing already) and then search for the "Goal Post" application.

Some of you may know that I turned off my Facebook account a while back because I found it to be a little needy in terms of how much attention it expected me to pay to it. This Goal Post application is tempting me to reactivate... If you try out Keith's tool, let me know how it goes.

Both of these approaches will be useful in getting you to go beyond thinking about what you want to do, and into writing things down and developing a plan - and I've heard stats that most people don't have written goals. If you're in that club, maybe these tools will help you take that important step toward success.

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