While flipping through headlines with Feedly (ok, while ‘x’ing out dozens of articles in the blink of an eye, without reading them, using Feedly), I stopped at this Life Hack article: 11 Simple Ways To Avoid Burnout

All great ideas, but it was #5 that made me laugh.

Write a Manifesto

Wow, I typically use the word manifesto in the pejorative sense. Just the word manifesto makes me think of some long pedantic pontification. (what’s a ‘p’ word that means narcissistic?)

I know people who write emails so long you’d think their ISP was paying by the byte. Those are manifestos by my reckoning—low on “the point” and high on “droning nonsense I can’t follow.”

Of course, there’s Ted Kaczynki’s Unibomber Manifesto—seriously, could this thing be any more boring? The papers should have run it sooner if that’s all it took to shut him the hell up.

The United States Declaration of Independence is a manifesto. I had to look that up as an example. I happen to like that manifesto. Sure, it’s not exactly bedtime reading but it’s worth having a copy on your iPhone in case you need to win a bar bet.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) – vive la liberté – yeah that one is cool

Communist Manifesto (1848) – hated it.

The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986) – Uhm, I heard about it…yeah…

Your Personal Manifesto

Maybe a personal manifesto isn’t such a bad idea after all. At least if it ends up a turkey you’ll be dead someday and won’t care if people blog mean things about it.

Write your narrative. What are you about? What are your real values? Values that go so deep to who you are that they don’t require explanation—they just are.

A personal manifesto can help bring focus to your job, your family life and the impact you want to make on the world.

It can even help you realize—or remember—the impact you intend(ed) to make.

With the weekend upon us, it’s a great time to reflect and work on yours. Have a chat with a friend and talk through it. Make a mindmap. Get out some crayons and just draw pictures. Do what it takes to bring those ideas back to the top. They’re probably buried under layers of GoldenBuddhaSchmutz so it might take some effort to prime the pump. Don’t let any of that stand in your way though. The world is waiting for you to do what you were put here for.

Technorati Tags: goals, Maifesto, personal development

Related posts:

1. Build Your Personal Brand: Transform Your Verbal Identity Just as a product tells us something about its...
2. The Dark Side of Multitasking   Are you suffering from the effects of continuous...
3. Five Components Required to Create a Personal Brand No two people are exactly the same. You are uniquely...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The most common question I hear from people seeking public speaking advice in and outside of my Toastmasters’ groups is “How do I get rid of the butterflies I feel every time I go to speak?” My answer is the same every time. In the eyes of the other person I see either a look of relief or a look of dread.

So what’s the answer?

First, let me explain the nature of these pesky little creatures.

What you see and what you hear travel to two different places in your brain for processing.

First, the emotional response center of your brain receives the signal. It’s programming is simple: it wants to fight, flee from, feast on or get “friendly” with the subject.

When the subject is an obvious threat (e.g., a hungry lion), this part of the brain takes over and you RUN! When our ancestors learned how to make decent weapons (and train with them), some could override this response and harness the desire to fight. They’d move in to kill what was now an inferior threat.

Second, your big neocortex gets the signal and gets to be all logical. It thinks about the existential nature of the subject. It might even wax poetic and ask “to flee, or not to flee,” if you weren’t already hightailing it to the closest cover.

That’s right, the way your brain is wired, you don’t even get to be all “high minded” until you’ve pooped your pants and you’re running full speed away or pulling your sword out of the chest of whatever you just impaled.

Back to the butterflies…

Those butterflies you feel in your stomach are a sign that your Amygdala (that’s the emotional center of the brain) has gone to work. When perceiving a threat it puts adrenalin in your blood, along with some other hormones that take very quick control of your digestive system.

What’s the threat?

In Toastmasters it’s other people watching you speak.

OMG: strangers and people I know!

At work it’s your co-workers, your boss and people who dare look at you.

RUN!

Yep, your amygdala isn’t all that smart. It can’t tell the difference between a lion and your co-worker with bad hair. It can’t even tell the difference between an avalanche that’s about to bury you and a work deadline that’s a month away.

Given the right setting, they’re all a threat so the amygdala is just trying to do its job.

It doesn’t matter how logical you want to be.

The neocortex doesn’t have even the slightest amount of control over the amygdala and the amygdala gets to take action on what you see and hear before the neocortex even has a chance to think about it.

This means that you will always have that emotional response.

You will always feel the butterflies.

Getting rid of them isn’t really an option. The only way through this is conditioning.

Look up how Police Horses are trained to see just how effective such conditioning can be.

You need to experience the fake threat repeatedly.

You need to let the butterflies go Mardi Gras on your 25 feet of intestines.

Just let it happen and come out the other side so your amygdala can see that your perceived threat was not the same as a lion. Over time you’ll still feel the response but more as a gentle reminder from your amygdala saying “hey, I love you and just want to see you safe.” Now you have the freedom to make a choice about what to do next.

You don’t NEED to run.

You don’t NEED to fight.

What do I say when people ask “How do I get rid of the butterflies I feel every time I go to speak?”

The answer is “It’s not about getting rid of the butterflies. It’s about getting them to fly in formation.”

I hope now you understand why.

Technorati Tags: Emotional Intelligence, EQ

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

If you could pay attention through payments on a special card, what would your balance look like?

Overdrawn?

Creditors beating down your door?

The word attention comes from a Greek word which means “to attend". To me that really brings home the fact that paying attention to something is not the passive act many have reduced it to in their vain efforts multitask.

If you want more proof that the brain can’t pay attention to one thing at a time, read the book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School and its numerous references to recent, peer-reviewed studies and direct brain-research which shows that the brain simply can’t pay attention to more than one thing at at time.

It’s not a matter of training, or having enough IQ points. The brain is simply not wired to do it.

So what can you do?

A friend of mine seems to recognize a tendency I have to shift my attention at odd times. I’ve been described as a weird cross between a hummingbird feeding and Tigger. When this happens she’ll say, very clearly and without a hint of meanness, “Hey, over here. Use your words.” Sometimes my eyes roll around a bit as I grab hold of my mental rudder but it works and I do appreciate it.

Though I can imagine other people I know messing up the approach and me getting very annoyed.

How about you? Have you learned the hard way that you can’t really pay attention to more than one thing at a time? I hope the woman in this article learned her lesson…

Do you have any tactics for keeping focus on important things? Share your ideas and experiences below.

Pic: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Credit-cards.jpg

Technorati Tags: Attention, Brain Rules, multitasking

Related posts:

1. That’s Right, it’s SMART Goals Time With 2010 upon us (I am so ready for...
2. The Dark Side of Multitasking   Are you suffering from the effects of continuous...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

In the realm of personal branding there are two camps: One believes that you create a personal brand through the way you dress, cut your hair, pad your resume and all that nonsense which ends up giving the concept of personal branding a bad name. The other sees personal branding as a process of revelation. Issues which you may consider to be “style” become the natural outlet for one’s core identity.

If you’ve seen me speak in public in the past couple of years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard me tell some variation of the following story. I use it to illustrate the point of using life as a means of revelation.

In the early 1900s reconstruction efforts in an area of Thailand required the demolition of an old abandoned temple. In the temple was a large stucco statue of the Buddha, painted gold. Destroying the statue wasn’t an option so the incredibly heavy statue was moved to a warehouse where it stayed for another 20 years.

In 1955 it was decided to move the statue into a newly constructed building. During the move, the crane’s cable broke and the statue fell in the mud. While examining the statue for damage, it was noticed that some of the stucco had cracked and fallen off.

The statue was actually made of solid gold.

All of the stucco was removed revealing the largest gold statue known to man. It stands almost 10 feet tall, weighing over 5 tons and can be visited in Bangkok today.

Here’s the point: the gold painted stucco gave off a false appearance (presumably to conceal the statue from the Burmese about 200 years ago), but it did not change the essential nature of what it was.

All the hurts you’ve experienced in life is the schmutz that covers you just like the stucco on the statue.

• An elder says something mean and hurtful
• You get beat up at school
• Someone cheats on you

Schmutz. Schmutz.Schmutz.

You think the schmutz is helping the problem. You pack it on. It seems to reduce the hurt. You tell stories about the schmutz to anyone who pretends to listen. You say to yourself “because of this schmutz, no one will ever hurt me like that again.”

Eventually you’re totally covered with schmutz and you think that’s who you are. Maybe at this point you’re dissatisfied with what’s happening in your life so you paint the schmutz gold so others can now see how well you’re doing, how strong and independent you are and how you’ve got it going on.

None of it changes who you are but it does seem to do a great job at hiding the essential nature of who you really are. It prevents you from doing the good, and making the impact, for which you were put on this Earth.

Public school systems, human resource departments and governments love to apply GoldenBuddhaSchmutz on people too. Well-meaning friends give you advice that’s rarely authentically directed at you but is some random pontification to help fill the silence.

GoldenBuddhaSchmutz is sneaky stuff and it’s pretty sticky.

The thing is, you’re under no obligation to wear any of that.

While chipping it off and leaving it behind may not always be as easy as it sounds, the only other option is not to chip it off and leave it behind.

Which choice is really all that good for you?

Technorati Tags: personal branding

Related posts:

1. Avoiding Burnout While flipping through headlines with Feedly (ok, while ‘x’ing...
2. Create Your Own Self-Brand for More Success Has someone else ever decided for you: who you are,...
3. Brand Teamwork: Power in Numbers Your personal brand is about you. It defines what...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Everyone starts somewhere. Invariably, that somewhere is “the beginning.” The beginning may look different on the surface from one person to the next but absolutely no one is born playing violin, writing novels, doing taxes, hunting down all the Jedi in the universe, pounding on opponents in heavy weight fights or winning bouts on The Iron Chef.

So while being a 3rd don black belt is super-cool, that same person started with a white belt, no belt or their pants down around his or her ankles (literally and/or metaphorically speaking). The same can be said about you for everything you’re good at today.

And what’s wrong with that?

There’s energy in newness.

I know people on Elance who created an account and then bid on jobs saying “I’m so new, I’m going to bed over backwards to give you a better experience than anyone else bidding on this job.”

I once worked at a communications hardware company that sold millions of 56K modems months before they finished inventing everything necessary to ship the product.

I’ve personally stood in front of company CEO’s saying “this has never been done before and that’s why we should do it,” and they said yes.

And find me someone who worked on the NASA Moon launch team with experience sending rockets to the moon.

Inexperience doesn’t mean incompetence. We just elected a President with no real executive experience. Of course, now that he’s there it’s his job to step up and do what he needs to do and learn what he needs to learn, and deliver.

Watch the movie Julie and Julie (I know, there’s a book too). I presume Julie Powel at least knew how to boil water and pop stuff in the microwave, but was probably not ready to bone a duck when she started her blog. That wasn’t enough of a reason for her not to start, but I see people much further down the road look at blogging, consulting, writing, building a shed and all sorts of other things with an amazing level of fear…due entirely to their lack of experience.

No matter what it is that you’d like to do. If you think you’re missing something before you can get started, ask yourself how that lack is actually an asset. Reframe how to see lack and turn it into something you have that’s a gift.

Technorati Tags: Assets, Branding, Marketing

Related posts:

1. The true nature of social media As the Internet continues to grow and expand social...
2. Coke Gets a Clue Once upon a time, companies registered domains for everything....
3. What If You Charged Admission For What You Do? I could write a lot on the book The...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I could write a lot on the book The Experience Economy, but there’s one thought that really hit me from what I read. What if, instead of charging for your product or service, you instead charged an admission and gave the rest away for free?

How would this impact how you interact with your market?

How would this change your focus on the customer?

The best example of this contrast is a theme park like Disney World (or Disney Land) vs a carnival. Whether or not you personally like Disney World/Land isn’t the issue…their cash flow statement clearly shows that plenty of people do.

When you arrive at Disney you pay an admission to enter the park. At a carnival you often go in for free.

At Disney, once you’re inside, the rides are free. At the carnival you buy tickets and then spend them to get on the rides individually.

How does this change the experience? Are the rides really all that different? I can find trolley rides with robots at either venue. Roller coasters,  rides that spin, rides that go up in the air…functionally it’s the same thing right?

But it’s the experience that changes the context.

I’m guessing that in many cases, the net outflow of cash from your pocket is about the same. Whether you pay for everything a la carte or in a lump sum at the door, what you pay is probably equal.

At Disney World I go through “It’s a Small World” every single time and never calculate it from the “cost per ride” as part of the original admission.

At a carnival, if I had to pay 15 tickets for it, I’d be pissed. My focus is turned from the experience of being there to a critique of the worth of an individual ride.

Heck, the Tilt-A-Whirl isn’t worth 15 tickets to me these days.

Wooden roller coasters? They kill my back. There’s no way I would pay to get on one…and yet, when I visit King’s Dominion, near where I live, I get on their wooden roller coaster every single time. I swear I can feel my vertebrae clack together. It has nothing to do with getting my money’s worth and everything to do with immersing myself in the experience.

Anyone who witnessed me shoveling the snow for the past couple of weeks may have realized that this is how I roll. Snow down my back from a big wind gust? Soaking wet from climbing on top of SUVs? All part of the experience. Love it, even when I’m in agonizing pain from the exertion.

The last three times I’ve been to Sea World, I’ve spent an entire day feeding the dolphins. (I had to pay for all those sardines too.) The last time I was there I paid another $150 to take a “behind the scenes” tour.

So I paid admission to pay to feed dolphins and pay to look at tank filters for a bunch of sharks.

Sign me up.

I wasn’t the only on there, doing exactly the same thing, either.

I can’t think of a single story of an experience I had from a carnival or fair I’ve been too, but I can describe lots of awesome experiences I’ve had with friends (and some I’m sworn to never share…cough cough…Pleasure Island at Disney World). I’ve ridden the chocolate factory tour ride at Hershey Park more times than I can count (and I don’t think it’s ever changed) and I can vividly remember some of the people I rode with and the fun times we had.

I’ll pay a lot for an experience but I’m kind of cheap when it comes to paying for the individual components that make up that same thing.

I don’t think I’m alone in this either.

So how about you? What would your own business look like if you were to charge admission for it and give away a part that’s currently charged for? If not your business, how about some other businesses out there? Leave your comment below and share your ideas.

Technorati Tags: Branding, Business, Marketing, The Experience Economy

Related posts:

1. The true nature of social media As the Internet continues to grow and expand social...
2. Turning Lack into an Asset Everyone starts somewhere. Invariably, that somewhere is “the beginning.”...
3. New FTC Rules and the Absurdity of “Typical Results” Starting on December 1, the FTC is dropping a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

That’s right. Now that Kevin Smith has raised a ruckus online over being kicked off a flight for being too fat, other passengers are raising a stink.

Literally.

Hmmmm…too soon?

I find this story amusing. A man was kicked off a Jazz Air flight. His smell was later described as “brutal” by another passenger. If you’ve ever flown to Japan beside a woman bathed in horrible cologne, you can image the bar for “brutal” is pretty low too. Odd, considering that I saw a Discovery Channel show that said your sense of smell is weak on an airplane.

So if this guy was brutal in the air, what did he smell like on the ground?

Wow.

This raises some interesting issues though. What if this guy started tweeting about being kicked off a plane for being too ripe? Would he end up getting props on TMZ?

So if you take off your shoes on the plane (which is a good way to avoid blood clots in your legs, I’ve read), are you going to get booted too?

What if you chew too loud?

I hate it when people clack their teeth on a fork…can I get them kicked off?

Are we seeing a trend start here and is it good or bad?

Technorati Tags: Jazz Air, Kevin Smith, Smelly, Southwest

Related posts:

1. That’s Right, it’s SMART Goals Time With 2010 upon us (I am so ready for...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Shout out to LeeAnn Prescott at VentureBeat for reporting on this. The gist is that Twitter has experienced a 9% boost in traffic since Google’s real-time search was introduced. I guess the point is that search is far from dead and it still does make sense to pay attention to keywords, trending topics and to join into the right conversations at the right time. Of course, plenty of boneheads misunderstand the key points to what it means to join a conversation and simply spam the world with their junk.

At some point, I’m sure we’ll see some “expert Internet Marketer” come out with a tool that exploits all this, and will ruin the fun for everyone else.

Much like Tag and Ping went from being a cool trick to an absurd way to bring blogger.com to its collective knees.

Technorati Tags: Google, Marketing, real time search, twitter

Related posts:

1. Using Authority Sites To Quickly Dominate a Keyword Phrase In the Search Engines This is just an example of what is possible...
2. The true nature of social media As the Internet continues to grow and expand social...
3. What’s 2010 Look Like for Yahoo? If Google is the Godzilla of the search market...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This ad ran in Time Magazine (June 30, 1947). That’s right, the headline reads DDT is Good for Me. 

When I make jokes about this, I’ve actually had someone respond with “well yes, but the benefits of DDT in Africa can’t be argued with.”

Really?

I understand that Malaria is a horrible affliction, but if you’re going to keep score, then put everything up on the board. According to research published in the Journal Science, The Lancet and other peer-reviewed publications, those same people who are being “saved” by DDT are going to also have to deal with the following:

• Disruption in semen quality, menstruation, gestational length, and duration of lactation
• Premature births
• Reduced birth rate
• Diabetes
• Neurological disorders
• Asthma
• Cancers
  • Liver
  • Pancreas
  • Breast
  • Blood
  • Testis
  • Lymphatic System

This doesn’t even begin to cover the effects on the rest of the ecosystem. You can look that up for yourself.

With Malaria resulting in over 800,000 annual deaths, it’s obviously a major issue and it needs serious attention. However, just because DDT is easy and cheap to manufacture in massive quantities does not automatically make it the right solution.

Once DDT is in the ecosystem, it runs its way through all forms of life. Studies indicate that its impact is felt by anything made of living cells.

That’s, like, everything, right?

Which leads us back to the DDT is Good for Me ad. Perhaps you’re looking at the copy of the ad and thinking how silly it is. Aren’t you lucky that no one is spraying DDT in your backyard? Think again. With the way this stuff moves through the ecosystem, any yard is your backyard.

If an ad ran like this today, would you simply accept what it said? Would you just assume that some government agency, with its highly-compensated staff, is running its own studies to make sure every line of such a series of claims is true?

Who really is looking out for you?

Technorati Tags: advertising, DDT, Time, Truth

Related posts:

1. Give the gift of clean water In spite of the tradeoffs, I’m thankful for the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

What if everything you thought you knew about motivating yourself and others turned out to be wrong?

What if the old “carrot and stick” approach has been, time and time again, proven not to work?

What if those tried-and-untrue tactics were also proven to hinder results and decrease performance?

What if a Nobel Prize was awarded in economics to one of the people who has proven that old school management and motivation does not work in any creative thinking setting (which is anything outside of the most mundane of assembly lines)?

Well buckle up because according to the decades of research condensed into Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink, it’s all true.

In some remarkable tests, which can’t be satisfactorily digested here, carrot and stick incentives reduce creativity and productivity to a remarkable degree. In professional settings, this assumes an employee is being fairly compensated as a baseline. When an “incentive” is then applied to that person’s work the results are worse, regardless of the size of the incentive.

As many people are struggling to recover from tough times, the findings (and alternatives) found in this book should get serious consideration from everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to motivate yourself, start a business or hold one together. How you manage motivation (an oxymoron) is a critical element in your results.

Have you read this book? Do you agree? Disagree? Think Pink is a loonie? Sound off and leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags: Daniel Pink, Drive, motivation, Results

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.