Category — Life Skills

In a recent article in Marketing News, a publication of the American Marketing Association (yes, I’m a member), Marilyn Kennedy Moats makes a keen suggestion in her column about careers.

Always solicit negatives.

I think that there is wisdom in this idea and that it renders three personal benefits:

1. You really do have a chance to improve. (If you’re not a lifelong learner, you probably won’t get much out of this blog!)

2. You have a chance to get more of what you want. An article in Wall Street Journal last fall noted that the people who get ahead aren’t those that produce more, but those that produce more of what their bosses want. If this doesn’t make sense, read “Point B” above.

3. You have a chance to reduce tension. Unspoken differences are often the most debilitating, and since most managers are not very good at providing feedback, this will help a lot of them over the hump. They will feel better when they’ve actually stated their issues. You will get more of 1 and 2.

Peace.

I hope you know this, but if you EVER publish you’re email address somewhere on the Web, you WILL get loads of spam. Crooks send out “bots” and “crawlers” and various programs designed to harvest any and all email addresses, and once you’re on one list, you’re only going to get on more as they steal from each other.

Here are two easy ways to thwart the evil:

1. Write it out. “roger at sign roger courville dot com” is an extreme example.

2. Purposefully mis-spell it. name@yourdomain.com becomes name@yourdomai.ncom or name@yourdomainc.om

Spam kills productivity. Hope this breathes a little life into it…

A privilege of SkillPath trainers is the great price of auditing other SkillPath seminars…no charge (there is always your time, opportunity cost, and submitting an eval form for the betterment of all, but that’s another post).

Yesterday I attended How to Become a Better Communicator, taught by a delightful Jo Massey. Jo’s philosophy for teaching communications is to just do it, practice, and practice some more. And indeed, there was plenty of hands-on stuff in this packed day. Especially interesting was watching people stand to speak, even in small groups of three or four. They were often terrified, though this isn’t a surprise; studies have suggested for a long time that folks hate speaking. Especially without ‘feeling prepared.’

One tip I thought Jo presented is useful even to a veteran speaker like me…

If you find yourself struggling with eye contact, concentrate instead on the bridge of their nose. It will appear to your listener like you’re making eye contact, and take a little pressure off you.

I’d add…

From a distance, you can also look over the tops of the heads of your audience (at least in some parts of the room). It accomplishes the same thing.

Nothing beats a dead-on eyeball connection, but this should help ‘the rest of us.’

Peace

It takes a lot for me to want to take the time to write a full, postage-bearing letter to someone. In a day where we can complain in a few brief seconds via email, writing a letter should get some attention, right?

Seth Godin just had a reader send him a breakdown of various degrees of apology.

And it makes me think of two recent experiences that I wish had different endings.

Case One – Simon & Schuster: While out Christmas shopping in mid-December I bumped into an book-on-CD by Franklin Covey that I wanted to hear. I learned long ago that even if I don’t have time right then to read/listen, I go ahead and buy the book…it saves a huge amount of time relative to tracking it down later.

Anyway, the production of this resource was, by contemporary standards, fifteen years behind the times. It was a straight reading of the book. No track divisions, chapter titles, or (even slight) adaptation of the content for someone who is listening vs. looking at a printed word. After much trouble, I did find a customer service form on Simon and Schuster’s website that allowed me to submit a query as to where I might send some feedback. I didn’t want to complain so much as tell them how to improve my experience the next time I bought a product from them.

A few days later I get a reply saying ‘send your response to me’ and I’ll forward it to the right person.

I did. And nothing. Nada.

One follow up note: while I know it’s not possible to cover EVERY online base, but you’d hope that S&S, a division of Viacom who claims multi-media expertise would snatch up misspellings of their website name like the one I discovered when I fat-fingered it. The only reason I don’t post it here is because the folk who camp on those don’t deserve any extra traffic.

Case Two – Cafe Press: I bought some fun stuff for my crew for Christmas, and the order showed up wrong. I’ll spare you the whole story here, but should you doubt it, give me a call for all the gory details. In short, a call to the customer service was not only unhelpful, they were rude.

Maybe it was a bad day. Christmas in retail is a tough gig, and e-retail is no diff. But that’s why we hire grownups, not children.

I wrote the CEO a letter. And nada. Nothing.

So what would I have needed? In the first case, I don’t even need an apology! Just a ‘thx for the feedback…we’re always trying to make our products better’ would have sufficed? In case two, would you expect a call from the CEO? No. But even a form letter would acknowledge that someone there gave a rodent’s gluteous maximus.

So the post in Seth’s blog is timely and personal. Check it out. It leads to one of my favorite quips.

“Professionalism isn’t what happens when everything goes right. It’s what happens when something goes wrong.”

This is the first, inaugural tip, that new subscribers at webseminartips.com receive…

“When should you leave the date off the opening presentation slide?”

TIP #1: Leave the date off the opening presentation slide when you don’t want to have the recording look ‘out of date.’

If your objective is to give future potential users access to the recording/archive of your Web seminar, consider the ‘shelf life’ of that content.

Some content can be useful for a long time. But in a culture that often thinks yesterday’s news is old there is a risk that they will think your content is out of date.

The good news is that when I presented to SkillPath this week I appropriately attributed some content to Stephen Covey. The bad news is that I didn’t attribute one other tidbit.

The truth is, one of my favorite isms is “Sometimes the enemy of the best is the good.” Story of my life.

Since I didn’t pen it first, I should have given credit to Frank Vandersloot, CEO of Melaleuca, a company whose products Angi and I have loved and used for a long, long time.

Sometimes the enemy of the best is the good

…a keen reminder that we get to choose precious few things to really pursue. And in a world of deafening noise, there is no choice but to focus if there is any choice of cutting through the noise.

What’s keeping you from real value? Real success?

I am pleased to say that my trip to chilly Kansas City (KS) this week was a pleasant one. I went thinking ‘win-win-or-no-deal’ as SkillPath and I got to know each other.

I bumped into them via an absolutely delightful FOF (friend-of-friend), and she summed them up in one word: integrity. I can appreciate that.

While I’m sure they could still boot my booty back to Beaverton, I have a hunch that what Debbie says, which matches what I observed, will prove a valuable relationship.

Do you sometimes have a statistic or some research that others might like to quote as part of their presentation? Check out this subtle way to market yourself…

Create a slide (or slides) that pleasantly depict your statistic. In other words, do the work for the other person of creating a nice looking graphic, chart, or visual representation of the point being communicated.

Then make sure your LOGO is on the slide, preferably on the master slide. Most people are happy to provide you that authorial attribution.

Then make sure your LINK is embedded in the logo.

Then put your contact information (name, phone, email or website address) in the PowerPoint slide properties. (right click on the document, select ‘properties’ and the ‘custom’ tab).

Finally, begin the name of the slide deck as Steal_these_slides_title.ppt! This instantly communicates to them that they can repurpose the content.

Voila! More exposure for you.