Fast Results through Powerful Communication
There is no faster way to scare the living daylights out of someone then telling them that they have to give a speech. For extra points, you can tell them that they’ll be speaking to a large audience — which depending on the person could mean more than 50 or more than 1000 attendees. Why do people associate fear to speaking? What’s the big difference between a speech and a conversation?
If you ever want to kill your mood or quickly go into depression, then spend your life seeking approval from others. When you look to others for a way to feel good, you’ll find yourself doing things to impress them in the hopes that they’ll complement you. At the same time, you’re handing the power to control your feelings over to them and taking it away from yourself.
When most people see the term “system” they associate it to something complicated or in the personal development world, something you need to buy. In reality, systems are simply a set of steps to follow and creating systems is a powerful way to become more efficient by minimizing the duplication of effort.
I have systems for a lot of the things I do professionally – and I’m always tweaking them and adding more. Sometimes my bigger systems have smaller ones within them. For example, I have a system for creating a new course and within that, there are systems for creating the audio program for the course as well as the course workbook.
When you’re really pumped about a project, it can be hard to pull yourself away from it — even for a good or productive reason. Let’s face it, progress is progress and sometimes we don’t want even sleep to get in the way of progress, especially when we’re dedicated to reaching our goals. But when we do this, mainly to keep our momentum going, we end up sacrificing efficiency. Whether it’s resting or setting aside time to fix an issue that keeps coming back at us, we eventually hit the point where a pit stop is necessary.
Okay, the first thing that popped into my mind when I came up with this idea for a Million Dollar Month was “am I crazy?” After all, I’d have to average over $32,000 a day to pull this off and much more if it takes me a few days or weeks to get things rolling. A lot of people think I’m setting myself up for failure or disappointment, but to be honest, I doubt either will happen but I’ll get to that later.
The end of the calendar year (just like birthdays) tends to be a time of great reflection for many of us. We look back to evaluate the past year and at the same time look forward to the new year and what it can hold for us. So of course, I’ve been thinking a lot lately on both the past and future.
With the Toastmasters year coming to a close, many clubs are racing to get those final goals completed and choose their officers for the coming year. It’s an exciting time but it’s also a time where people are looking into their own futures as speakers. So it got me thinking about my involvement with Toastmasters over the last couple years and how much fun it’s been to work with so many people from this great organization.
I’ve had a number of Toastmasters clubs contact me through the years for everything from permission to link to an article on this blog to inviting me to speak at their club if I’m ever in their area. The two topics that seem of most interest to them are how make their clubs successful and how to speak outside of Toastmasters.