As a bagpiper, I play at gatherings as varied as weddings and resorts at sunset. This winter a friend of mine, a funeral director asked me to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. No friend or family members could be found. My friend and a minister had kindly offered to provide a simple service at a pauper's cemetery in rural Kentucky.

They asked me to play. Yet I was not familiar with the backwoods. Driving out to the service I got lost and harried, looking for signs. I finally arrived an hour late. The minister had already left it.

Only the backhoe and the gravediggers remained. They were quietly eating lunch.  I felt badly and apologized to them for my tardiness. Yet I was resolved to honor this man in his death, thinking of the many forgotten people like him who had no one to acknowledge their life at the end.

I got out my bagpipes, walked to the side of the fresh grave and looked down.  The vault lid was already in place.

I paused, looked up at the sky, then held up my bagpipes and began to play.

After a few minutes of playing I glanced over and noticed that the workers had put down their lunches and were listening. Suddenly I felt the numinosity of this moment, a connection will this man and all those who are alone in their passing, so I played with all my heart.

Two songs later I started Amazing Grace, letting myself scan the countryside. That’s when I saw the diggers were quietly weeping. Soon, so was I. When I finished, I quietly packed up my bagpipes and started walking back to my car, feeling much more at peace with the world.

As I opened my car door I heard one of the workers exclaim, "Sweet Mother of Jesus, I never seen nothin' like that before... and I've been putting in septic tanks for twenty-two years."

~ I adapted this from an oft-repeated, apparently anonymous story, shared with me by three subscribers to this blog.

Lesson: Tell a story with a poignant (or other emotion), unexpected twist at the end and it may stick in others’ minds so much that they can’t help sharing it with others.

See the Power of Surprise in Stories of Varying Lengths

1. Some stories with a twist at the end are told in a couple of sentences, sometimes evoking a humorous twist, as when Jon Stewart said, “I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”

2. Others are longer vignettes like the Bagpiper.

3. Some dip us into another world, in books like Blue Zone, short stories such as O. Henry's, especially his Cabbages and Kings and gripping movies such as Body Double, Body Heat, The Sixth Senseand (my favorite) The Usual Suspects.

Regardless of the length we loved to be surprisedand to share that experience.

Craft Your Repeatable Story to Live a Bigger, More Adventuresome Life in 2011

What phrase, vignette or story could you tell, with an authentic and surprising twist at the end to underpin your description of those you admire, the cause you back, or your profession or product or service you sell?

Make Yourself Memorable

Want to make your story or description so compelling it helps you get what you want in your work or life? By phone, let me help you craft that captivating message. See what others have accomplished in just one hour of coaching. Or consider bringing me to speak at your meeting.

If you found this post helpful you may also be interested in these:

• Become More Frequently-Quoted

• Clever, Kind and Connected (What's your slogan?)

• The Most Vivid Labelers’ Influence

• The Gift That Taught Me How to Design

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663156/the-gift-that-taught-me-how-to-design?par...

See rest of links to this post here http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2010/01/want-them-to-remember-and-repeat-your-story-1.html

My friend Colleen Wainwright calls "anxiety, my old friend."

We women generally worry more than men. For example, "While men are bearing the brunt of the job losses, women report much higher levels of fear and worry about their families’ financial security than men do" and women worry more than their husbands about prostate cancer coming back.

Yet it is vital to recognize the difference between worry and fear. How, forexample,  can we know when a fear for personal safety is justified and when a worry is sapping our spirit and making us see the world simply as a dangerous place?

“Our fears are fashioned out of the ways in which we perceive the world,” wrote Gavin Becker, author of The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence.

Better to learn how to recognize when someone’s hostile or other less apparently dangerous actions are, in fact, a danger to you, so you can act to protect yourself, and not let unfounded fears and worry contaminate your life.

What can we do? Revise FDR’s advice, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” by using our gut instincts well, with this variation: “There is nothing to fear unless and until you feel fear.”

Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain or death.

Said DeBecker in a National Public Radio interview, “When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections. When you feel fear, try to ‘link’ it back to a past situation where the feeling that was similar to see if your fear is, in fact, justified.”

When you feel it, take notice to find the link back to see if you need to take action. How rational are our fears? In the 1960s a study was done on what single word evoked the greatest psychologically strong reactions of fear. The study included words like spider, snake death, rape, murder and incest. Shark evoked the strongest reaction.

But why? Sharks rarely come in contact with us. Three reasons: the seeming randomness of their strike, the lack of warning for it and the apparent lack of remorse.

Yet man is a potential predator with far more abilities to approach, disguise and deceive. While the media often portray human violence as random, de Becker points out how it seldom is, and how you can anticipate the patterns in most cases, if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and take action.

DeBecker’s book describes how you can better protect yourself by learning to recognize and act on the intuitive signals you pick up but reject as unfounded.

Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture.

Worry, anxiety, concern and wariness all have a purpose, but they are not fear. Any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really should not be confused with fear.

Worry will not bring solutions. Worry distracts from finding solutions.

See it as a form of self-harassment.

To free yourself from worry sooner, understand what it really is. Most people worry because it provides some secondary reward such as:

• Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.

• Worry allows us to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something. Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.

• Worry is a cloying way to have a connection with others. Worry somehow shows love. The other side of this is the beleif that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about that person. As many people who’ve been worried about know well, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.

• Worry is a protection against future disappointment. After you complete an important project where the success of your approach won’t be known for some while, for example, you can worry about it. Ostensibly, if you can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens.

But how would you want to spend the time while you find out: worrying, playing or initiating another action on another endeavor?

For some people, worrying is a “magical amulet”, according to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman. Some people feel it wards off danger. They truly believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening.

Most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur. This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen.

The connection between real fear and worry is similar to the relationship between pain and suffering. Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life. Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life. Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens your life.

When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?”

To be free of fear and yet still get its gift, consider these techniques:

1. When you feel fear, listen.

2. When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it.

3. If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.

We Choke on Anxiety

Anxiety, unlike real fear and like worry, is always caused by uncertainty. it is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence. If you predict you will be fired and you are certain that your prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired, but about the ramifications of losing a job.

Predictions in which you have a high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever you need to do.

You can reduce your anxiety by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty. It is worth doing, because the word anxiety, like worry, stems from a root that means “to choke,” and that is just what it does to us.

Our imaginations can be fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law: “Only that which is absent can be imagined.” In other words, what you imagine -- just like what you fear -- is not happening.

“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.

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

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.

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.

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

A gang rape of a teen girl, took place over several hours at a high school, with onlookers who did nothing. It happened just last month in an adjacent county to where I live. Among the many reactions to this horrific incident, here’s the first that’s positive and proactive for women, albeit an action than can seem self-serving.

A local author is co-offering a free self-defense class. As someone who chronicled her recovery from violent abuse in her book, Skinny, Tan and Rich: Unveiling the Myth, Maryanne Comaroto will teach emotional self-defense techniques. Her colleague will teach physical self-defense techniques.

Comaroto’s core message is “TLC: Trust yourself, love yourself and control yourself." Reflecting the insights in security firm founder Gavin DeBecker’s excellent book, The Gift of Fear, Comaroto suggests that, “One of the things we typically don’t do is trust our intuition. It’s the first indicator we maybe in danger.“

That’s the money quote for me, one I hope each of us has grown into knowing and doing by this stage in our lives.

Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain or death. Said DeBecker in a National Public Radio interview, “When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections. When you feel fear, try to ‘link’ it back to a past situation where the feeling that was similar to see if your fear is, in fact, justified.”

While the media often portrays human violence as random, de Becker points out that it seldom is random. In fact, you can anticipate the patterns of impending danger in most cases, if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and take action. DeBecker’s book offers specific criteria for how you can better protect yourself by learning to recognize and act on the intuitive signals you pick up but reject as unfounded.

Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture. Worry, anxiety, concern and wariness all have a purpose, but they are not fear. Any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really should not be confused with fear.

Worry is a form of self-harassment.

Worry will not bring solutions. Worry distracts from finding solutions.

To free yourself from worry sooner, understand what it really is. Most people worry because it provides some secondary reward such as:

• Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.

• Worry allows us to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something. Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.

• Worry is a cloying way to have a connection with others. Worry somehow shows love. The other side of this is the beleif that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about that person. As many people who’ve been worried about know well, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.

• Worry is a protection against future disappointment. After you complete an important project where the success of your approach won’t be known for some while, for example, you can worry about it.

Ostensibly, if you can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens. But how would you want to spend the time while you find out: worrying, playing or initiating another action on another endeavor?

There is a Pay-off for Worry But Not a Healthy One

For some people, worrying is a “magical amulet”, according to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman. Some people feel it wards off danger. They truly believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening.

Most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur. This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen.

The connection between real fear and worry is similar to the relationship between pain and suffering. Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life. Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life. Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens your life.

When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?”

To be freer of fear and yet still get its gift, consider these techniques:

1. When you feel fear, listen.

2. When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it.

3. If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.

We Choke on Anxiety

Anxiety, unlike real fear and like worry, is always caused by uncertainty. it is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence. If you predict you will be fired and you are certain that your prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired, but about the ramifications of losing a job.

Predictions in which you have a high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever you need to do. You can reduce your anxiety by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty. It’s worth doing, because the word anxiety, like worry, stems from a root that means “to choke,” and that is just what it does to us.

Our imaginations can be fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law: “Only that which is absent can be imagined.” In other words, what you imagine -- just like what you fear -- is not happening.

“Enthusiasm is not the same as just being excited. One gets excited about going on a roller coaster. One becomes enthusiastic about creating and building a roller coaster.“ ~ Bo Bennett

Getting enthusiasm is a little like learning to breathe.

Nobody can tell you exactly how to do it, but without it you’re in big trouble. No one but you can discover that compelling purpose or exciting goal that ignites enthusiasm inside you, but you can learn a great deal from noticing how others use it to get more done while savoring their life.

This is what I’ve learned from some real life experts on enthusiasm; what’s more, I’ve tested them in the laboratory of my own life.

"It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living." ~ Oliver Wendall Holmes

1. Enthusiasm is born on the inside

In the daily grind of life you can lose touch with what really matters. There are so many routine decisions to make, so many challenges to be met, and so many burdens to carry, that you may get dispirited and act out an unbecoming side in yourself. However, as you connect with the enthusiasm planted deep within you, you’ll feel it begin to grow and grow. Soon, you’ll be back on track.

Hint: It’s not the first mile of a long and arduous journey that gets to you — you’re excited about getting started. And it’s not the last mile — you’re thrilled about getting there.

The miles that can drag you down are the long and tedious ones in the middle where you can’t see where you are coming from or where you are going.

“None are so old as those who have out-lived enthusiasm.”~ Henry David Thoreau

2. Enthusiasm grows when you focus on opportunities, solutions and allies - not problems, circumstances and critics.

Life for you will always be as you choose to see it. Focus your attention on the problems and circumstances that surround you, or keep your eyes on the solutions and opportunities.

I read a story that illustrates this approach. Several farmers in Pennsylvania were sitting in a café, complaining about the increasing cost of electricity and the unpleasant task of disposing of all the waste their cows generated.

But the Waybright brothers and their brother-in-law, who run the Mason Dixon Farms near the town where I went to college, Gettysburg, decided to quit complaining about all the manure the cows were generating, and to do some generating of their own — electricity.

They built a power generator that runs on methane gas produced from heated manure from the 2,000 cows. Generating much of their own power, they cut their annual electricity bill from $30,000 to $15,000.

As you might guess, most of the other farmers laughed at the project and called it “Waybright’s folly” (and other even less flattering names). They were satisfied to see their problems and to seek out their Congressmen to complain about their miserable circumstances.

But no one’s laughing anymore.

In fact farmers and agriculture ministers from around the world beat a path to the Mason Dixon farms. Soon the Waybright brothers were selling some of their excess power to their once jeering neighbors.

Enthusiasm — with all the good things that go with it — comes when you turn your eyes from the problem or circumstance and focus on the solution and opportunity. Cash can buy, but it takes enthusiasm to sell – or otherwise sway or collaborate.

“Enthusiasm is the yeast that raises the dough.” ~ Paul J. Meyer

3. Enthusiasm thrives around positive people

Like smiling, enthusiasm is contagious. Worse yet, negativism and pessimism are far more contagious. It is always easier to believe the worst than to hope for the best — especially if you are struggling against overwhelming odds. It’s even worse when you’re tired, or have just suffered a severe setback.

Don’t waste your creative energies on people who are always putting you and your ideas down. Seek out positive, competent individuals where you can give each other candid feedback – and a boost. Enthusiasm is contagious. Unfortunately, so is the lack of it. .

4. Enthusiasm recharges itself on momentum

Jerry Reed’s popular song of many years ago is apt: “When you’re hot, you’re hot!”

William Shakespeare put similar sentiments into the mouth of Julius Caesar: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries.’”

Enthusiasm comes from the inside out, not vice versa. It’s when you feel most enthusiastic that you need to throw yourself into life’s biggest challenge. Celebrate your greatest victories by plunging into even greater challenges. Take full advantage of the momentum you gain with each hard-earned step.

Nothing feeds enthusiasm like success, and nothing can hold back enough enthusiasm.

See links here http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2010/09/how-do-you-become-genuinely-enthusiastic.html

To heal a bitterly divided nation, Nelson Mandela characterized “our” goal of bringing the World Cup to South Africa in his motto, "One Team One Country."

Want to instantly shape how others feel about you or something that really matters to you? Set the context by making a vivid comparison.

Those who are fighting for more nutritious school lunches did exactlythat recently. "A McDonald's burger is safer than your kid's school lunch.  The government has given schools meat that would have been rejected by many fast-food restaurants across the country."  Wow.

Yes, negative comparisons, even more than positive ones, stick in the mind. It was back in college when my friend Jim told me his hometown, Stockton, was sometimes called “the armpit of the west.”

Make comparisons using analogies, similes and metaphors.

Here’s a rebutting analogy you may not forget yet wish you could, “It's absurd that we only have an oral tablet to treat vomiting. It's like treating diarrhea with a suppository.”

Metaphors are the most powerful of these three attitude-changers. Security expert Michael Spearman gave a metaphor. He characterized the prevalence of nonworking cameras in housing projects as "Using cameras without having anyone monitor them is like buying a condom and then punching holes in it.”

Mixed metaphors aren’t effective behavior-changers yet often a source of humor:

“When Frank smells blood, you’re toast.”

“It’s a long road to open a can of worms.”

The more vivid, credible and relevant your comparison the more likely it is that others will repeat it. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity hastens acceptance.

What comparisons have influenced your beliefs and behavior?

Now, want to trick your mind (or other’s) into making smarter choices?

See links to this post here: http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2009/12/index.html

True Love was the name of college friend Jim’s beloved Alfa Romeo. Why? Because, as he admitted repeatedly, “It never runs smooth.” Ah the power of naming something.

What will we dub this decade? What will you name your new effort? “I want to define myself before someone else does,” George W. Bush said as he took office. Similarly yet perhaps more successfully you want to make your brand name so memorable that other’s less flattering nicknames don’t become more popular.

If, for example, you want your product to seem swift and reliable then give it a name that has an “e”’ in it to evoke speed and a “b” for reliability. So suggest linguists. That’s why that vital gadget Obama won’t give up was not named Strawberry (“straw sounds slow”) but alliteratively dubbed the Blackberry. Avid users soon adopted the irreverent, stickier name - Crackberry. Yet many made-up names, especially hybrids of other names, sound bland and forgettable, especially those for scientific or medical companies and products.

Qualcomm may be intended to mean quality communication yet it evokes a soulless corporation to me. And the angular typeface looks like it was designed by an introverted mechanical engineer.

And does Verizon make you think of “horizon,” as in forward-looking. Does it remind you of anything? Does it evoke a positive emotion – or any emotion at all?

(No, I am not talking about the actual service you may have experienced.)

Or does to Intel instantly cause the image of “intelligent” and “electronics” come to mind?

Does Cialis sound “sensual” or remind you of “relationships” as the company intends? Or, only slightly less euphemistically, “a couple’s desire to engage romantically?" Any doubt that a committee involving their pr and legal department concocted with that phrase? Like Viagra, when companies spend millions on advertising many of us finally got the point. Ahem.

Sometimes, but rarely, a company needs to hide behind its name.

While psycholinguists were involved in naming Prozac and Zoloft, neither relate to a real world image, are easy to remember, nor do they evoke an emotion – positive or negative.

Perhaps the big corporations are trying too hard – or are wary of taking on the risk for naming so they subcontract it out.

That doesn’t mean you have to.

As a usually upbeat person I’ll stop this rant now.

Memorable Labels Can Shift Perspectives, Then Opinions

Here’s a simple secret to creating names that stick in the minds of your kind of customer:

Evoke a familiar image that has an emotional, commonly-viewed trait that reflects and reinforces  the Main Differentiating Benefit of your service, product or company.

As a Fallback Evoke the “Familiar Effect”

At least use the name of a familiar object upon which you can project your own emotional brand image – like Apple, reflecting the crisp, clean, simple and “tasty” design of Apple’s products. (What do you think if the rumored name of their new product?)

Or make up a name that easily and emotionally evokes the image that highlight the main benefit. Spicy Baconator sounds like a hearty serving of something with bacon in it. This name reinforces themouthwatering intensity of the double cheeseburger photo that appears next to it.

Warning: Be sure to say the name out loud to avoid embarrassment. I’ll bet PETA has taken a lot of ribbing for its first blog title.

And some names are just too precious- even for their upscale, ever-so-politically correct (0rganic only) market.

For more ideas on naming see the blogs Igor,Business Naming Basics, Strategic Name Development and The Kitchen Sink. Notice how much easier it is to remember the names of the first and last blogs I just listed?)

Find links here http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2009/12/index.html

Also consider perusing these related posts:

Save Your Unborn Baby from Embarrassment Later in Life

The Art of Naming: How to Make it Positively Stand Out

Where Do You Want People to Focus Their Attention When With You?

One for One: Creating Slogans and Subtitles

You’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

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. See links here http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2010/09/feel-you-flubbed-the-last-speech-you-gave.html