Speak To Be Remembered and Repeated
by Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE
"Speak to be remembered and repeated." Isn't that the goal of every communicator—to be remembered and repeated?
This is a key idea I reinforce at every Fripp Speaking School. (The November event was such a success that three more have already been booked for 2007.) Actually, it is a key idea every time I have the opportunity to discuss speaking and presentation skills. Yes, it's easier said than done. Here are a few key ideas.
Speak in shorter sentences.
Edit your sentences to a nub. Remember, Jerry Seinfeld said, "I will spend an hour taking an eight word sentence and making it five." In comedy, the fewer the words between the set-up and the punch word, the bigger the laugh.
Don't step on your punch word which should be the final word or idea in the sentence. (Yes, this works for Jerry and his comedian brethren, and it also works for business communicators.)
Choose the best punch word. For example, in the sentence, "You have to make an important decision today," your punch word should be "decision." So switch it around: "Today, you have to make an important DECISION!"
If you have a sentence with two important words or phrases, put the more important is at the end. "Today, YOU have to make an important DECISION." Or, "The important DECISION today is going to be made by YOU."
Perfect your pause. Deliver your punch word and then pause—and pause—and pause. Give your listeners time to digest what you've just said. Get comfortable with silence, and don't be tempted to fill it with "um's."
Repeat your key ideas more than once.
Say something memorable.
Let us look at a few recent examples from the memorial for 60 Minutes' Ed Bradley.
Fellow 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft said, "I learned a lot from Ed Bradley, and not just about journalism. I learned a lot about friendship, manners, clothes, wine, freshly cut flowers—which he had delivered to his office every week—and the importance of stopping and smelling them every once in awhile."
Surprise guest Bill Clinton said, "Ed Bradley was a brilliant, insatiable, curious traveler on a relentless quest to get to the bottom of things. He was like the great jazz musicians he so admired. He always played in the key of reason. His songs were full of the notes of facts; but he knew to make the most of music you have to improvise. We'll never forget what his solos were: the disarming smile; the disconcerting stare; the highly uncomfortable stretches of silence, the deceptively dangerous questions, and the questions that would be revealing, no matter what your answer was. Watching him was mesmerizing — because you knew you were watching a master at work."
Patricia Fripp is an award-winning keynote speaker, executive speech coach, and in-demand sales presentation skills trainer. www.fripp.com, pfripp@fripp.com, (415) 753-6556
(489 words)
We offer this article on a nonexclusive basis. You may reprint or repost this material as long as Patricia Fripp's name and contact information is included.
*SINewswatch would like to thank Patricia Fripp for granting permission to reprint this article.
How to Discover Your Life’s Purpose from Today’s Leading Experts
Do you know your life’s purpose? Most people, at some point, wonder what theirs is. We search for meaning and hope that our lives carry special meaning. We sense, at a deep level, there is MORE to life. We can feel it.
Discovering your life’s purpose is more like putting together a big puzzle then it is finding a needle in a haystack. Like a puzzle, you need to fit the right pieces together and in time a picture starts to emerge. The picture that emerges will be made up of your special interests and talents and preferences. It will represent the whole of your life. Every piece is needed.
Unlike a puzzle you buy off a store shelf with all of the pieces already contained in the box, the pieces to your life purpose puzzle come to you one at a time, over a period of time. You will get each new piece when you are ready for it and not a day sooner. And unlike the puzzle you buy off the store shelf which supplies a picture of what the finished puzzle should look like, your life purpose puzzle has no such guide available. The picture that emerges will be one of a kind and each new piece will add depth and meaning to the whole.
The following experts have written about discovering your purpose in great detail. Below is a condensed version of their formulas and philosophies for discovering your life’s purpose.
Richard Bolles
Richard Bolles is most famous for his yearly job-hunting book, What Color is Your Parachute.
His formula for discovering your life’s “mission” is as follows:
1. To stand, hour by hour in the conscious presence of God, the One from whom your Mission is derived.
2. To do what you can, moment by moment, day by day, step by step, to make this world a better place, following the leading and guidance of God’s Spirit within you and around you.
3. a) to exercise that Talent which you particularly came to Earth to use – your greatest gift, which you most delight to use,
b) in the place(s) or setting(s) which God has caused to appeal to you the most,
c) and for those purposes which God most needs to have done in the world.
Whew! That’s a mouthful. Basically he is saying we all come here with a purpose to somehow SERVE our fellow man. We are given unique talents that, when leveraged, will be HOW we serve our fellow man. Our talents will provide the vehicle through which we express and share our gifts with others.
Special note: In What Color is Your Parachute the following quote can be found which offers a simple formula for discovering your purpose:
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Fred Buechner
Jack Canfield
Jack Canfield is America’s Success Coach and co-founder of Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Canfield sums up purpose this way:
“You were born with an inner guidance system that tells you when you are on or off purpose by the amount of joy you are experiencing. The things that bring you the greatest joy are in alignment with your purpose”
He states what you are here to do is what will give you the greatest amount of joy when you are doing it. In his book, The Success Principles, he offers the following Life Purpose Exercise:
1. List two of your unique personal qualities, such as enthusiasm and creativity.
2. List one or two ways you enjoy expressing those qualities when interacting with others, such as to support and to inspire.
3. Assume the world is perfect right now. What does this world look like? How is everyone interacting with everyone else? What does it feel like? Write your answer as a statement, in the present tense, describing the ultimate condition, the perfect world as you see it and feel it. Remember, a perfect world is a fun place to be.
Example: Everyone is freely expressing their own unique talents. Everyone is working in harmony. Everyone is expressing love.
4. Combine the three prior subdivisions of this paragraph into a single statement.
Example: My purpose is to use my creativity and enthusiasm to support and inspire others to freely express their talents in a harmonious and loving way.
Finally, he states that without a purpose in life, it’s easy to get sidetracked on your life’s journey. It’s easy to wander and drift, accomplishing little.
But with purpose, everything in life seems to fall into place. To be “on purpose” means you’re doing what you love to do, doing what you’re good at and accomplishing what’s important to you.
Richard Leider & David Shapiro
In their book, Repacking Your Bags: How to Live with a New Sense of Purpose they write:
“Purpose is your reason for being, your answer to the question, “Why do I get up in the morning?” It is the spiritual core that helps us find the aliveness in all our day-to-day experiences.”
They go on to say, “You use your purpose to set your course in life. It’s the qualities around which you center yourself. Without a clear sense of purpose, you are at the mercy of shifting terrain of the outside world. Having a purpose, though, enables you to refind your direction and then direct your way there.
They offer the following formula for discovering your purpose:
(Your Talents + Your Passions + Your Preferred Environment) x Your Ideal Vision of Life = Lifestyle Rich in Purpose
Discover your unique talents and passions. Understand which environments you like to work best and put these things together in a way that serves the vision you have for Life.
How to Discover Your Life’s Purpose
The first step in discovering your life’s purpose is to believe there is a purpose to your life. The second step is to keep asking what that purpose is.
Nothing is going to drop from the sky announcing a grand purpose for your life. That is something you get to decide. You’ll discover your purpose when you put the unique puzzle pieces of your life together in a way that makes sense to you.
Each of the experts above has their own formula for discovering your purpose but they all have these things in common:
1. When living on purpose you are living from your center, your spiritual core/you are somehow connected to God
2. Living on purpose requires you to discover what makes you unique; talents, passions and values
3. Living on purpose requires you to leverage what makes you unique for the sake of serving others / making the world a better place.
4. When you live on purpose, your life will be filled with meaning and joy.
Discovering your purpose is a worthwhile pursuit and once you discover it your life will feel very on track. You will still need to do the work to bring your purpose to life. But your actions will be filled with meaning. There will be a depth to your life.
As Joseph Campbell writes in The Power of Myth, “We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.”
©2006 Cari Vollmer / LifeOnTrack(tm) / LifeOnTrack.com
Note: Would you like to "reprint" this article? You sure can! Please leave it complete and unaltered (including author information). Send me a copy of the reprint to info@lifeontrack.com. (Make sure all links are live if placed in an e-zine or on a web site.) Thank you!
*SINewswatch would like to thank Cari Vollmer for granting permission to reprint this article.
Become a Human Pace Maker
| Email bombardment, back to back meetings, long hours, time intense deadlines are increasing the pace of work and life. To thrive in a relentless and accelerating pace is not about becoming motived to keep going and ‘cope with stress’, but rather being able to increase your capacity, to sustain and enjoy high pressure, without experiencing the consequences of fatigue, muscle strain or burnout. Pressure can make you work more effectively - for a finite period of time. However, if you operate in the wrong ‘work-pace', the pressure will quickly wear you out. Traditionally, motivation has been all about: 1. Setting high goals/targets 2. Becoming exceptionally excited about those goals/targets 3. Then working like crazy, at any cost, to achieve them Although you may reach your goals/targets this way, that work-pace is not sustainable. (You may have experienced going to motivational seminars, getting all fired up, and then feeling that excitement drizzle away a few days/weeks later). The key to sustained motivation and work output is being able to change between your work-paces to create sustainable energy and focus output. To use an analogy, think of a professional athlete. They have four main training paces: Sprinting, Jogging, Walking and Resting. They understand that to perfect their sprint time and technique, they cannot do sprint after sprint or they would quickly fatigue. Instead, they Sprint – Rest – Sprint – Rest. However, if they were training to increase their cardio-endurance, their training mode might look more like: Walk – Jog – Sprint – Jog – Walk – Jog – Sprint – Jog – Walk – Rest. They punctuate their training pace to have the energy to meet their goals. In your working life, do you get to work and automatically go into Sprint mode? Perhaps other people’s needs, questions or problems put you into Sprint mode? If so, it is no wonder that by the afternoon you may feel exhausted – because your working-pace hasn’t shifted gears. In the workplace the 4 paces can be characterised as follows: * Sprint: Working at your full pace. Good for short bursts of up to an hour * Jog: Staying busy at 85% pace. Can maintain this pace for up to 3 hours * Walk: Working at 50-60% pace. Can work at this pace all day * Rest: Non work time. Like a pit stop for a racing car, being in Rest mode for anywhere from 1-15 minutes at a time is enough to refuel your energy, relax your body and refocus your mind - without losing your work-pace momentum. Overt the next 21 days, take control of your work-pace by considering the following: 1. Recognise the pace that you work at for most of your day. Do you move between work-paces or do you stay in top gear the whole time? When you eat, are your still Sprinting or are you Walking or Resting? Do you try to multi task at every opportunity and keep a Sprint mode? Do you stay in Rest or Walk mode for too long and find it difficult to get going into Sprint or Run mode? 2. Make the effort to punctuate your pace. Instead of starting your day in Sprint mode, warm up with Walking pace, Jogging and then Sprint. Meaning, rather than start with high intensity work, ease into your work-pace for a few minutes in low demand, single focus tasks and then build your work pace up. Remember to include the Rest mode to allow your body to recover from the output. It may only take 10 minutes to make this transition from Walking to Sprinting, but at least your work pace will have the opportunity to ‘warm up’ 3. Set your own pace. Don’t let other people’s agendas, time urgencies or intense personalities determine what work-state you operate in. Decide how to punctuate your own pace instead of responding to everyone else’s pace. You can help control your pace by preplanning your agenda (‘to do’ list) the night before. Try anticipating interruptions and work them into your agenda. Expect that you will lose time and create ‘time buffers’ throughout the day so that you don’t have to work like mad to catch up when your are stopped to answer questions o handle an unexpected situation. Notice the situations when you give others the power to dictate your pace and reclaim it back. Having the courage to say ‘no, I can’t help you right now, but I can in 45 minutes’, or ‘actually, I need to take a 5 minute break before we continue’ helps you take control over the pace which you work. You are allowed to Walk or Run - even if others want to Sprint.
|
