Pull 'Em in With a Pertinent, Emotional Picture Story

Beautiful_hm “The most beautiful thing I've ever seen was the image on a screen that helped our doctor see my wife's cancer was treatable."


See the story leading up to this grabber of a punch line in GE’s ad for electronic medical records.


Notice how the husband's emotion-held-in-check voice reinforces the mood of the story.


Next time I try to get someone interested in my idea I'm going to recall the swift, sequence of events-as-photos that built up to this emotional and relevant main point and consider how I can cut away extraneous detail and evoke more than one emotion.


Say_ahh_hmDoctors_hm


For more ideas on swift storytelling in images see these. They evoke several emotions from heart-warming to surprise and light humor. I’d be proud to have created them and hope to emulate their "no extra detail" approach to pulling others in and holding attention. (I have no financial interest in the company) See links to this post here: http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2010/02/pull-em-in-with-a-pertinent-emotional-picture-story.html

Feel you flubbed the last speech you gave?

DavisonYou’ll feel much better after watching Phil Davison’semotional appeal for support.

His talk demonstrates that recommending the use of emotion is not sufficiently specific advice for a speaker. Also, having apparently apt credentials like a Masters in Communication, does not necessarily mean one has mastered the skill.


In the apparent absence of their use Davison demonstrates the vital need in preparing for a speech to:


  1. Discern, ahead of time, what most matters to your audience.

    1. Craft an outline for your talk with a main point, no more than three supportive points, segues between them – each supported by a few relevant and vivid facts or examples - and “bookending” the beginning and ending of your talk with the same point and a call for action.

      1. Praise the audience and/or individuals in it for specific, positive actions or beliefs that reinforce the stands you are advocating.

        1. Ensure that your metaphors and figures of speech are congruent and make sense.

          1. Practice in front of one or more people who are familiar with your audience and who will give you intelligent, candid feedback
          2. JanBrewer At least Davison probably made Jan Brewer feel better.


            Here's two speaker friends who continue to provide valuable insights about how to connect with your audience, move them to act and make a positive difference in the world: Bert Decker and Nick Morgan.


            One final thought. Even if you are not the president someone maybe recording your talk so don’t let something you pledge come back to bite you later. See links here http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2010/09/feel-you-flubbed-the-last-speech-you-gave.html

Five Ways to Bring Others Closer

Even though we know we are more likely to savor life and attract more opportunities to collaborate when we click with others, we often get in our own way – especially when we are distracted or worse.  Here are five concrete ways to connect with others.

1. Face the world as you want to be treated

We’ve all been startled by observing a passerby’s dour expression instantly transformed into a warm smile when someone they knew came into view. The fixed-face habit is increasingly common yet it limits one’s opportunities to make friends or just be treated well.

I envy those who naturally display an open face, yet, with practice, we all can. We don’t have to turn into grinning fools. Research shows, however, that even slightly elevated eyebrows cause the eyes to widen and – presto – one looks more open and less judgmental.

Strangers unconsciously project onto such people the qualities they most admire in others, believe those people care – and act more generously towards them.

Unknowingly, as a journalist I came to have an intense facial expression, especially interviewing people I found fascinating (that’s my excuse anyway) until I interviewed an expert on Paul Ekman’sresearch on reading faces. He gently suggested that it would only take a couple of months of practice to “transform” my face into one with the open expression he was exhibiting in our interview.

It took me much longer – yet his advice comes to mind every time I see a dour or hardened face. That person probably does not understand the missed opportunities for friendship and more – just from this one simple habit.

2. Tour your body for vital signs

When you are literally uptight–rigid in any part of your body - others instinctively resist or even react against you. This phenomenon is akin to bouncing a hard rubber ball on a concrete surface as compared to a soft carpet.

The ball bounces higher and faster against the hard surface than the soft one, of course, just as others react more against a body that is even inadvertently held tight against the world.

Whenever you are entering an unfamiliar or potentially volatile situation, loosen up physically. It will help you feel more at ease. Walk, stretch, and release tension from the places where you hold it in your body.

Probably –like many conscientious, hard-working people– you hold your shoulders higher and slightly more forward than is natural, with one of the tendons in your neck tightened up even more than the other. If someone can give you a quick three-minute shoulder and neck massage, you will relax – and look at ease.  Others will respond more warmly to you.

Here’s another quick way to feel and look comfortable. Take your “pointing” fingers and the ones adjacent to them and rub both sides of your face in small circles, beginning at the cheek bone, near the sides of your nose, continuing along that bone towards your ears, down to the jaw line and on toward the center of your chin.

3. We feel closer to happy people, especially when we are happy

Enjoy the bond-building boomerang effect that happens with contagious happiness (when you’re happy, you cause your friends to feel happier, and that makes their friends happier).  As the circles of friends around you feel happier their upbeat behavior will swing around back through those friends towards and around you, reinforcing your capacity to stay contented.

Plus those positive feelings that boomerang back to you in waves from others serve as an emotional cushion in your rocky times. I’m suggesting this as reinforcement for you to smile your way into a better way of feeling. When we feel down we close down and withdraw. This boomerang affect enables you and those you are around to open up to each other.

4. Worried? Don’t keep thinking about it. Act towards what makes you happier.

Women tend to worry more than men so it is especially important for us, when we start to feel anxious or depressed to mentally change the channel of thought to something – any small thing – that lightens our mood.

Consider this.  In any situation you only have three choices: 1. Change how you act, 2. Accept the situation, or 3. Leave.  The sooner you make a decision the less likely you deepen the rut in your memory of fixating on worrying rather than acting to change.

5. Meet new people to see fresh sides in yourself

Want to pull new people into your life?  Like to show an evolving new facet of yourself?  Get out of your orbit. Attend a lecture, sit at a lively café, join a civic, special interest or non-profit committee.   In short, put yourself in a place where you don’t know anyone well.

That’s when, “we are more free to experiment with ourselves, and less likely to have our new behaviors and roles reflected back to us by people who object, ‘But that’s not like you!,’”  says Melinda Blau, co-author of Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don’t Seem to Matter. . . But Really Do. She adds, “Strangers help us stretch beyond the relatively rigid boxes that the people who have known us the longest – our family and close friends – often put us into.”

This may be the surest way to turn the page for the next chapter of your life to be the kind of adventure story you now want. Even within one hour you can learn specific ways to stand out in your work or life.

See links here http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/2010/06/21/five-ways-to-bring-others-closer/

Which side of the Opportunity Chasm Are You On?


In a world that increasingly favors thinkers (vs. laborers) huge changes are happening, including these four, observes Arnold King:


1. The nature of marriage has changed: “Men & women look for complementarity in consumption rather than in production.”


2.  “Achievement-oriented men looking for interesting mates rather than for good maids.”


3.  There’s “greater inequality across households” - and that affects children’s well-being and opportunities.


4.  The chasm is widening: Increasingly the world economy favors thinkers over laborers.

How Groups Can Make Better Choices

If villagers living in the midst of poverty and war can be nudged to work better together with just three simple rules (honed via a parental competition study) and a reward (money, in this case) then maybe your group (team, board, committee, etc.) could too:

1. The village leaders (or your project leader) are elected by secret ballot.


2. The village (or your group) holds communal meetings – meaning open to all participants and no secret side confabs.

3. The results of all meetings are covered completely and accurately and that coverage is made available, quickly, to all participants. Here are two other posts you may find helpful:

How We Help Each Other Do the Right Thing…Sometimes


Disagree? How to Keep Talking Instead of Arguing


See links at http://www.movingfrommetowe.com/2010/01/19/how-groups-can-make-better-choices/

Make Your Meeting or Product Come Alive in Images

Like to literally see a story unfold? Want to make your complex product or idea simple to understand? Yearn to make your next meeting more memorable – and enable more people to experience it? Here are three vivid approaches offered by the masters of their visual genres.

1. Animating Your Story to Make it Come Alive

To see an animated version of a TV show, launched out of a radio programThis American Life, (still with me?) see Chris Ware’s coverage of the segment “Every Marriage is a Courtroom” and another segment here. What if you videoed a happy client using your product or service, then hired a cartoonist to created a Ware-styleversion to reinforce your message?Also consider a manga-style comic book version such as Dan Pink did with Johnny Bunko, along with a video trailer, of course. Lesson? Multiply the fun and/or helpful ways they see your message.

2. Drawing the Speaker’s Message to Compound Its Impact

Watch a graphically illustrated version (BigViz Book) of the last TED conference’s 50 or so speakers, brought to you by group cartographerDavid Sibbet and Kevin Richards.

3. Illustrate the Steps So We Recognize How and Why to Take Them

How about getting some pictorial help on “how to” do something new? View the “plain English”, explanatory videos at Sasha and Lee LeFever’s Commoncraft.

Follow-up Ideas: Consider hiring one of these talents or others to:

• Illustrate the messages presented by your speakers at your conference or meeting. Give the results to attendees as an ebooklet or vlog  – a free meeting momento. Then offer it online to anyone else for a modest fee (new profit center?) – or for free to attract members and media coverage. Find a sponsor to underwrite the costs.

• Create the visual story of a new product, service, program or innovation. Feature employees or customers in the creation and distributionof this story. Feature it on your blog and web site. Tell your key media about it.

• At a brainstorming or other meeting, keep everyone focused on the goal, not whip- sawed by the verbally dominant. Share a Sibbet-style visual group record of the meeting with team members and other stakeholders.

Like participating in a lively Pecha Kucha, these other visual methods can make collaborating and learning together more productive and fun.

You’ve Got Five Loooong Minutes to Grab Their Attention

It takes a tenth of a second to form an impression. So imagine how difficult it is to hold their interest for five minutes.  That’s a short time for you and a looooooong time to them. For practice in being memorably brief, find or start an Ignite group.  They are popping up all over, including in my hometown of Portland where an early social media mentor of mine spoke – Adam DuVanderBaltimorePhoenixPhilly and Seattle are hosting them too. As in Pecha Kucha gatherings you are limited to 20 slides, advancing automatically every 15 seconds.

But that’s in a meeting room where you can rely on Powerpoint.  The next stage in communicate-to-connect prowess is to start an Ignite group where slides and PowerPoint aren’t allowed. In fact, ban technology beyond a microphone, if needed.

Yes, images help, but use them to warm people up to your idea before you are with them – or to reinforce it afterwards.  Use precious face time to connect. Anyway, in most everyday situations where you want to ignite a fire under your idea, you won’t have technology on hand, except, perhaps your cell phone. Besides, the most authentic messages happen when we see you saying them  – and come to believe in both.

At your association’s annual conference imagine having two sessions each day where ten  (pre-conference sign-ups ) attendees present their message, one after the other, Ignite-style.

Add a Wisdom of the Crowds feature:  Video the sessions and post them on your association’s site or blog.  Then all members could sign in for the first month after the conference and view and vote for their top five favorites. That might provide meaty insights into what most matters to members.  Plus it’s a palpable way to motivate and honor members for their best and succinctly-presented advice.

Update: Yet if you must use PowerPoint then get Nancy Duarte’s groundbreaking book Slide:ology and turn the pages in awe at the beauty and practicality of her approach. Like presentation zen guru, Garr Reynolds I am so delighted by her approach – and her generosity in including free videos of some of the presentations in the book.

Easy Way to Organize Gatherings for Those Who Share Your Interest

Your hobby or work expertise or belief may be unusual, yet it’s likely that people near youshare your interest. Or they may just want to have fun. How can you find those kindred spirits? By hosting an ever-better MeetUp.

Also consider start a MeetUp to create a profit center for yourself. Or to honeskill or support a cause.

What’s a MeetUp? Let masterful Lee LeFever quickly show you.Imagine making money by making others happier. See a large one to get ideas.

• Perhaps, like Liz Ryan, you’ve built a successful online business out of serving clusters of local constituencies. UsingMeetUp you can offer your people a new service. Face-to-face gatherings. Through your MeetUp, individuals can chat with people they’ve met online.

• They can meet regularly in some format that they collectively choose, with your leadership. Suggest formats such amastermind or other kind of mutual support group, cross-consulting or speaker series.

• Forge an alliance of your local MeetUp chapters.  Get ideas from how other alliances work. Recruit and reward local organizers who host “our” gatherings.

• Let each “chapter” decide whether they want their MeetUps to be free or for-fee or a mix of both. Should your local leaders be paid or share in the revenue raised through a speaker series or set of seminars?

• Get input from your host leaders by arranging regular conference calls with them via a free service such as Skype or FreeConferenceCall. In true Me2We fashion you can facilitate their sharing of ideas for MeetUp formats and topics. Explore how these phone seminars and in-person meetings can complement the online offering that you, like Liz Ryan, offer your clients.

• Take a look at an online, for-profit model (in which I participate) that also supports face-to-face gatherings that are organized and hosted by members – biznik.

• Or start or join a MeetUp of your peers. I belong to the Bay Area Reporters and Journalists organized by Susan Kuchinskas.

Why explore these ideas?

Because, if your expertise or experience matches the interest of a distinct niche market, then the approach outlined in this post enables you to enlarge your circle of friends and/or make money in supporting others’ strong needs or interests.

How We Can Savor Learning and Inventing Together

Haven't some of your most meaningful memories been of times when you accomplished something greater with others? Didn't it bring you closer in the flow of camaraderie - even when someone in your group didn't act right - like you?'

What we learn from those times is vital in an information-flooded, connected world - and that's a good thing.

The most common and satisfying ways we learn and invent are not from sitting in a classroom seat being taught or trained. The world is too complex and fluid now to keep up with everything all by yourself.

That doesn't mean that we aren't sought-after for our mastery of a topic or skill. It simply means we stay relevant when we engage in projects with diverse others, learning and experimenting as we go. Like children we still learn best by observing, imitating, re-mixing, making fresh mistakes and, most of all, by playing and using our imagination - with others.

That's why the new book by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, The New Culture of Learning, two long time lovers of social learning-by-doing is so relevant today for students of all ages, in school, at work and involved with the causes and projects that most matter to us.

While their book is aimed at transforming learning in schools every concept I read can be equally applied to any part of our lives - lived well with others.

If you'd like to see the next chapters of your life as the kind of adventure story you co-create with others and want a bigger voice in the role you play - literally - read and share this book with those you think will make engrossing, imaginative playmates.

Some of my favorite quotes from this book:

* The new culture of learning gives us the freedom to make the general personal and then share our personal experience in a way that, in turn, adds to the general flow of knowledge.

* In the new culture of learning, people learn through their interaction and participation with one another in fluid relationships that are the result of shared interests and opportunity.

* Play is the tension between the rules of the game and the freedom to act within those rules. When play happens while learning it creates a context in which information, ideas and passions grow.

* The important thing about the Harry Potter phenomenon is not so much what the kids were learning, but how they were learning. Thought there was no teacher in this setting, readers engaged in deep, sustained learning from one another through their discussions and interactions.

* In a world of near constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change rather than a way of growing out of it.

* The challenge is to find ways to marry structure and freedom to create altogether new things.

* Study groups dramatically increase the success of college students in the classroom.

* The connection between the personal and the collective is a key ingredient in lifelong learning.

* When information is stable, the explicit dimension becomes very important. The speed of light, for example, is probably not going to change....The twenty-first centry, however, belongs to the tacit. In the digital world we learn by doing, watching, and experiencing... not by taking a class or reading a manual.

* Students learn best when they are able to follow their passion and opeate within the constraints of a bounded environment. Without the boundary set by the assignment there would be no medium for growth.

* Indwelling is a familiarity with ideas, practices and processes that are so ingrained that they become second nature. When engaging the learner, we must think about her sense of indwelling, because that is her greatest source of inspiration, but it is also the largest reservoir she has of tacit knowledge.

* Dispositions indicate how a student will make connections on a tacit level... how she is likely to learn.

* Learning from others is neither new nor revolutionary; it has just been ignored by most of our educational institutions...

... and, I would add, by most of our organizations.

From the people under 30 who grew up studying and playing in groups I have enjoyed playing and co-creating on everything from business start-ups to models of more effectively serving causes.

I hope that a version of this book is put up online for shareable input from us all - commenting, adapting, re-mixing the ideas, thus turning it into an ecosystem where we can hone our ideas on the new culture of, not "just" learning but also inventing and co-creating better ways to work and play together.

See the book here

http://www.amazon.com/New-Culture-Learning-Cultivating-Imagination/product-re...

You may also enjoy another book, co-authored by John Seely Brown, Pull.The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion

How to Learn Faster and Remember More



It’s sunny outside yet you’re stuck studying. You must know this stuff for tomorrow. It gets worse. Your smart aleck friend walks by saying “You know you’ll only remember ten percent of what you’re reading right now.” She’s citing an oft-repeated study that shows that, six weeks later, you’ll only remember four percent of what you are passively learning by reading.



PassiveContent

Yet that familiar study has been debunked. Or rather there never was a study that showed people remember:

10% of what they read


20% of what they hear


30% of what they see


50% of what they see and hear


70% of what they write and say


90% of what they say as they do something with the information


People do NOT remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, 30% of what they hear, etc.,” learning expert, Will Thalheimer emphatically explains.


So the percentages aren’t proven yet the levels for accelerating learning are. You do learn faster and remember more when you move from passive to active, meaningful, repeated engagement in what you are learning.


Your Useable insight


You’ll learn more and remember it longer when you:


• Actively and repeatedly practice what you are learning, as you are learning it, and when you continuously relate it to something concrete that matters to you.


• Teach others what we are learning.


So, skip the percentages and speed your learning by adopting themethods described in Dale's Cone of Experience. After learning this it may be helpful to sleep on it.



DalesConeOf

See links here http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2009/09/how-to-learn-faster-and-remember-more.html