Facts touch or mind, but it is the power that comes from stories that touch hearts.  Everybody loves a story. Stories give us insight life and human nature.  They can make us laugh and they can make us cry.  Story telling will go beyond the bullet points and will make a memorable impression on the heart that can change a life.

As a speaker, how can you use stories to give your presentation the impact that you desire:

•   Tell inspirational stories to persuade, motivate or entertain.  Use stories to illustrate the point you want to make. Try to find stories that are relevant to the audience. For example, for software engineers, tell a story about the young engineer who started a company in his garage and how Microsoft changed the world.

•   Tell a story from your own experience. Make a habit of keeping a story journal and record your day’s experiences.  You will have a rich supply of unique experiences to draw from to illustrate your point.

•    Use gestures and acting techniques to bring your story to life. Don’t just tell your audience about a difficult client; get up and show them. Actions have a greater impact on the point you are making.

•    Use description and dialogue.  Take your audience into the story by using description and dialogue. Help them visualize and feel that they are part of the experience.

•    Practice your story until it’s natural. Use the pacing and rhythm to communicate your message to your audience.  Listen to a tape recording of yourself.  Check how you have varied the tone of your voice and your speed to create the biggest impact in your story.

Remember it’s not about you; it’s about your audience.  You have a great story and an important message to convey.  By concentrating on your audience, you will become more confident and relaxed. This will result in your audience feeling comfortable and more receptive to your message.

Sometime, each of us is demanded to be a public speaker because our work touch with many people or clients.  Simple tips to be a good public speaker are :

Before you start working on your talk or presentation, it’s vital that you really understand what you want to say, who you want to tell and why they might want to hear it. To do this, ask yourself: Who? What? How? When? Where? Why?
Who are you speaking to?
What do you wish to communicate?
How can you best convey your message?
When? Timing is important here
Where? What is the physical context of the communication in mind?
Why? In order to convert hearers into listeners, you need to know why they should listen to you – and tell them if necessary. What disposes them to listen?

And remember :
•    Use examples to bring your points to life
•    Keep your body language up-beat – don’t stay stuck behind a rostrum
•    Don’t talk to fast. Less is more here too. Pauses are effective.
•    Use a variety of tones of voice
•    Use visual aids.

Ad men seem to be the new lawyers/cops/doctors in terms of TV protagonists. The new TNT series Trust Me follows critical darling Mad Men in depicting the inner workings of an advertising agency. But as a seasoned marketer, do you buy into the new show’s authenticity?

I can’t really say for sure, having never worked in an advertising agency.

But being a writer who covers marketing, Trust Me seems to be shallow in terms of its reflection of the real advertising world. There are references to Clios, depictions of focus groups, talk of tag lines, and scenes where ad men incredibly sell half-cooked concepts to hardened clients. The latter also frequently happens on Mad Men, sometimes in the form of grandiose, borderline pretentious monologues. But the 1960s-set Mad Men uses the world of advertising to intelligently comment on a changing culture. Trust Me is primarily content to showcase neurotic/quirky banter and behavior.

It’s a bit of a disappointment, considering Trust Me, centered around a pair of Chicago ad men, has been created by a pair of former Chicago ad men, Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny. They may want their audience to trust them, but I’m not so sure that Baldwin and Coveny trust their audience. Thus far in Trust Me, there has been no reference to DVRs, no discussion of YouTube or Facebook, no mention of the evolving consumer mindset or debate over the breakdown of push marketing mentality. Advertising has been impacted and challenged by these breakthroughs for years, certainly before this show went into production. It wouldn’t be right to chastise Trust Me for being dated just because it was written and shot before the recession, but it’s obvious that the show’s writing was dated from the beginning. Even the show’s own method of advertising via product placements (a growing trend in the TiVo era) is more cutting edge than what’s depicted in the on-screen scenarios. The creators talked a little bit about this in an interesting Forbes interview.

My sense is that there’s a concern by the producers, the writers, and/or the network that what’s been happening in the real advertising world is too nuanced, too inside-baseball, for a general audience to digest in hour-long TV episodes. Maybe there’s a worry too that advertisers would be scared away from a show that too realistically depicts the trials and controversies of advertising.

But I argue that these challenging times make advertising an incredibly fascinating industry to study right now. It inherently makes for good human drama, and should make for great TV entertainment. In turn, honestly addressing these obstacles can make people better appreciate and understand the art of advertising, and the show could gain more viewers, or at least coveted critical acclaim, as well.

Again, I’m a writer who covers marketing. What do you readers out there who make a living doing marketing and advertising think of Trust Me, or for that matter, Mad Men? Do you think shows about advertising can change viewers’ perception of advertising for the better? And why do you think that advertising has become a focal point for not one but two TV shows in the last few years? Please post your thoughts.

m a r k e t i n g p o w e r 2 . c o m

* Registered US Copyright, Angela Butera Dickson, 2004

I am going to approach doing good business from a slightly different perspective. I am going to talk to you about the relationship you have with your mind and how the state of your mind affects every business decision you make. Unless you have a good mind you will never be able to succeed and keep growing your business, whatever that business might be.When I talk about business what I ultimately mean is making more and more money at what you do and feeling good while you’re doing it. Being able to focus, to really listen, to be creative, to be open to new opportunities, to form solid and respectful relationships is an art, and unless the mind is strong and steady, you will always fall short of your goals. So….by entering this process through the back door, we are going to look at the foundation and underpinnings of what it takes to create good relationships and good business.

Personally, I have gone to many seminars, heard lectures, and read numerous books over the years on time management, on improving corporate relationships, on being more productive and organized, etc. and I don’t think at this point there are too many more methods we can hear that we have not heard before. We come back from one of these talks, make another list and set another goal, and in truth we are no closer to improving our work situation and how we feel every day.
This is because for things to change we need to change the hard wiring. Each one of us is hard-wired. That means that because of our stuff, and every one of us has stuff, after awhile, we are programmed to react certain ways. What this means is that we do most things on automatic and this automatic way is the way each one of us is hardwired. One button is pushed and that automatically takes us to the next button.

Have you ever just been going in one direction, either in work or a relationship, and something happens or someone says something, and all of a sudden, you’re upset? A button is pushed and that button may or may not have anything to do with what is actually going on at the moment. The next thing we do is lash out at the other person who is totally clueless as to what is going on and yet for us it feels very real and very personal.

Now it’s okay to do things on automatic if they work for you and make you feel good, but if they don’t work, you’d be foolish to keep doing things the same old way. But this is precisely what most of us do.

So…the key is to change the underpinnings (the hard-wiring) not just slap some new method on the top. Because unless the underpinnings, the foundation of what we are doing changes, we will once again be sucked back into the old way of doing things. That’s because hardwiring has critical mass and momentum and will greatly outweigh anything we initially put on top of it.
Understanding How Energy Works

Let’s just spend a minute and talk about energy and how it works. This is not my airy fairy theory on energy but real physics; the stuff Einstein talked about.

Everything moves; nothing stays static. That means that the more times we do something the more critical mass it gains and the faster it moves. So, if we are doing something that doesn’t work and we keep doing it, it gains critical mass and speed; that is, it begins to have a life of its own. For example, if you are continually having a communication problem with your customer or client and constantly feel uptight and you do not address this in a healthy way and change the way you are doing this, this problem will continue to get worse.

When this happens, we get sick, don’t return the phone call, have an argument, lose the contract or worse yet, blame someone else for our misery and end up being a victim.

Instead of looking at someone else, the first place we need to look is at ourselves, the relationship we have with our self, and that ultimately is the relationship we have with our mind. Unless we understand the nature of the mind and how the mind is an integral part and root cause of everything, we can never make changes that bring new results.

We need to quiet the mind. We need to stop the incessant chatter that never gives us a moment’s peace and creates constant stress in our lives. Said another way – When you have a mind that never stops, you have a stressful life!
How Do You React to Thoughts?

Quieting the mind does not mean that we anesthetize ourselves. (I am not taking about a zombie-like state. If we want to do that, we can take drugs.) It also doesn’t mean we don’t have thoughts or things to do, but rather that we are not held hostage by those thoughts. Said another way, we do not feel compelled to chase after every thought that pops into our minds and we get to actually pick and choose what thoughts we want to pay attention to. Up until this point, everywhere the mind goes, we go. The mind is leading us around and we willingly follow. The tail is wagging the dog; the dog is not wagging the tail.

How many of you answer the phone very time it rings? Most people feel that when a phone rings they must answer it. But what does a phone ringing really have to do with you and your life? Really nothing. Also a phone that doesn’t ring – what difference does it make? Do we feel unloved when the phone doesn’t ring? And yet, most of us feel when the phone rings we must answer it.

What if I were to tell you that the nature of a phone is to ring – that is what it does – phones ring – just like the nature of the mind is to have thoughts. You do not have to answer the phone every time it rings and you do not have to chase every thought you have. A phone rings, a mind has thoughts, – that’s the nature of things.

What happens is that when we feel compelled to answer the phone every time it rings and chase every thought we have, we will absolutely be on overload and never get anything done. In other words, we will not be able to focus, not be able to complete one task before being distracted and heading off in another direction.

So, the first step is to recognize that we are on overload. Rather than do more, we need to do less. When our work feels unmanageable, we need to stop. If you keep pushing past this point, you will continue to feel even more overwhelmed MORE STRESSED OUT!

This is when you get sick, have arguments, make mistakes at work, have a fender bender. You begin to get little signs and signals from the universe, telling you to slow down, and if you don’t listen, the universe keeps upping the ante until you get it.
How Quick Do You Get The Lesson?

I have a friend, a CEO of a large company, who kept saying he needed to slow it down. He wanted more time with his family, more time for himself. He was literally on a roller coaster from morning to night. And then, finally, after saying this for years and becoming more and more involved in a non-stop life, he had a heart attack.

He was young, in his late 40’s, but it stopped him. He was confined to bed rest for close to a month; not allowed to work. When I talked to him he told me he knew that was only way to change the collision course and although he was not happy about getting a heart attack, he knew it had saved his life.
You do not need to get a heart attack to get it.

Has your mind ever been going so fast you think you are going to explode? That you couldn’t possibly hold one more thought? When this happens to me, I actually sit down in the middle of the floor. I’ve done this for years and it works. It instantly stops all the craziness.

I don’t know whether plopping on the floor is so physically ridiculous (I’ve been known to do this in full business attire) or sitting immediately centers you in your body and takes you out of your head. Either way, it stops a frantic mind and allows you to breathe.

For example, have you ever wondered why you feel rested in the morning after a night’s sleep? It’s not just because you put your body in the prone position. Do you know why you wake up and you feel peaceful and calm? This is because the mind has been at rest. In the morning, the mind is clear and clean and ready to receive as well as to process new information.

When you have so many thoughts in your mind, there is not room to receive any new information. Simply from a physics point of view, when the mind is going so fast and is so chaotic, even if new great information were coming your way, the mind’s franticness would push it away.
The Game of the Ego

What actually happens is a game of the ego. We think we are our thoughts. We pull the thoughts we like to us: “You really look beautiful today” and we push the ones away from us we don’t like – “So and so said something nasty about you.”

Pulling the thoughts to us we like and pushing the ones we don’t like away from us – this is what creates a frantic mind. So, when the mind is frantic, it is on overload, and we need to stop. Stopping, when we are overwhelmed is the first step to a clear mind. Instead of cranking it up (what we usually do), we need to slow it down.

And don’t get confused with what feels natural. What feels natural is being frantic. The more frantic we feel, the more frantic we become. This is naturally what happens, as this is the way we have been doing things for a long, long time. To do things differently and get a different result, we need to do something that doesn’t feel natural.

Sitting down in the middle of the floor is not what you usually do, but it will stop the constant chatter instantly. At least we have a starting point…
You Only Have One Heart

What we need to understand is that when we tell ourselves one part of our life has nothing to do with the other part, we are rationalizing. This is simply not the case. We are trying to make sense out of something that feels totally out of control. We learn to compartmentalize, hoping this will take away some of the pressure but it creates more, rather than less, confusion. This is because as much as we attempt to partition our lives, the irrefutable truth is: we have one life, we have one heart. If we close ourselves down in one part of our life, we will automatically be closed in another.

It is very difficult to have a good work life when you feel closed and shut down in your personal relationship, and when your work life is stressful, how can it not affect your personal life?

As much as we try and separate the different aspects of our lives, thinking one part has nothing to do with the other, that is simply not the case. Every part affects every other part. (Remember, you have only one heart.)

Another thing we need to understand is that our life is not any busier or more important than anyone else’s. We all have our stuff; none any better or worse than anyone else’s, just ours.

I have a client that asked me “Why is this happening to me?” I said, “Because what is happening to me is not happening to you. We all have our stuff. Mine is mine and yours is yours. What I have belongs to me and what you have belongs to you. And, if it doesn’t work, you need to change it.”

Critical here is not to think of yourself as a victim. We are not victims of an unmanageable life. It is not a random life handed to us that causes chaos and makes us frantic. We have created the life we have, and if it doesn’t make us feel good, give us a sense of peace, we need to change it.

The same way we take credit for the good things that happen to us is the same way we need to take responsibility for our problems at work and at home. We can’t just pick and choose what we want to take credit for.
A Conscious Choice to Change

And finally, we literally have to get tired of our story. You have to get really bored hearing yourself say the same things over and over. (Trust me, your family and friends get bored hearing the same story from you – they listen because they think they are supposed to listen.) So, only when you’re really bored with your story can the conscious process of change begin.

The reason we need to be responsible for the change is because things do not just automatically change for the better with the passage of time. Actually, if things aren’t going so good they usually get worse with the passage of time. That is because time is neutral; it does nothing but pass. Things that are good normally get better, but things that are bad, get worse over time.

The key here is for YOU to make a conscious choice to change and in order to do that you need to look at the problem from a new vantage point. Instead of looking to change this and that on the outside, you need to look to the mind, understanding it is the cause of what is happening.

Outside changes, whether changing jobs or relationships, will always produce problems. There is no way to avoid change; life is change. Remember, it is not what happens to you in life, but how you deal with it. And how you deal with it is a direct result of your mind.

Motivational experts get paid big bucks to tell professionals, striving for success, that they must constantly examine these factors.  How do you do that?  Follow the 5 tips that follow, and watch the changes.

1. Maintain a Positive Attitude – Let’s realize that life is only 10% of what happens to us and 90% how we react to it.  We’re responsible for our own actions and attitudes, and changing them when appropriate.  When you’re around people/things that are uplifting and positive, you feel that way.  You have more confidence in yourself, and know you can change whatever needs changing. If you can make your workplace such a place you’ll find happier workers and higher production. You might even find your employees look forward to coming to work!
2. Leave Personal Troubles Home -  Everyone has problems, but they don’t belong at work. Turn your attention and energy entirely to your on-the-job tasks.  This will actually be good for you because you’ll get a mental break from your troubles.
3. Create Positive Affirmations -  The reason for writing goals for your business is the same as creating positive affirmations on paper.  What your eyes see and ears hear, your mind will believe.  Try it!  After you’ve written them down, read them aloud to yourself – and do it every morning when you get into work.  You’ll be amazed at what happens.  Come up with a set of new ones every month.  Statements such as, “I’m an important and valuable person,” or “I know I’ll make good use of my time today.”  Repeating them out loud everyday at a set time will help reinforce positive actions.
4. Make Sure Break Times Are Really Break Times -   This is an area where most bosses/entrepreneurs fall down.  You become so intense about the project or situation you’re working on that you don’t ease up.  Thinking that it’ll be solved in the next few seconds, and then you’ll get a cup of coffee can lead you right up to quitting time.  Regularly adhering to a specified break schedule, even if you’re the boss, releases the tension.  If you work on a computer this is even a greater problem because before you realize it – you’ve been working in that same position for hours.  The best answer to this is to set yourself a reminder on your appointment calendar for every 2 hours, and let the computer reminder chime send you the alert to move around.
5. Exercise, Exercise, Exercise -      I know that lately it seems that “exercise” is the cure-all to every physical ailment or your love life, but despite that there is some truth to that ugly word.  By “exercise” I don’t mean that you should go out and join a gym and spend your lunch-time, 3-days-a-week there working out.  What is really beneficial and workable is that at those chiming alerts from your computer, get up and walk around your desk or room.  Maybe go outside and get the mail and enjoy the sunlight (if you’re an entrepreneur that has a home office), or just get up and do a few stretches.  Concentrated, tense thinking – typing – plotting plans – or whatever your work, makes all those muscles tighten up and knot up.  Then when we move we “ooh” and “ouch” because we’ve knotted up into a ball of tension. Periodic stretching, even at our desk, or just getting up and walking over to the window and getting a different view can help.  One of the greatest disservice modern business décor has done to us, is making our offices pristine, sleek, unencumbered spaces.  There is nothing more relaxing than getting up from your desk and walking over to a peaceful, serene, seascape or pastoral painting and just drinking it in visually.  Momentarily transporting your mind out of work and into that place does wonders.  A few good paintings and less shiny chrome in offices would benefit us all.

It only takes a little concentrated effort on our part to keep motivated and productive, which leads to success.  I know you’re going to hate hearing this, but it’s true anyway – and that is, “WHEN LIFE GIVES YOUR LEMONS – MAKE LEMONADE!”