Teleprompter on Steroids
Thanks to Janice Tomich, an expert on creating great presentations, at Calculated Presentations for today’s gem from her newsletter. If you need to oomph up your presentation skills, check out her newsletter!
How many of you own an iPad? I’ll share a secret with you, I covet one but haven’t bitten the bullet yet. But this app may convince me:
Essentially it is a teleprompter on steroids. Presentations can be recorded and played back for critiquing. Documents and text can be inserted on the fly. Presentation text can be set to scroll at different rates of speed.
A myriad of applications are possible with the use of Prompterous and an iPad.
- moving away from a lectern with iPad in hand
- loaning a scripted iPad to a client to practice
- playing back the audio numerous times to help with memorization
Prompterous also puts an end to shuffling notes or managing cue cards that are out of order.
Can’t wait to try it out for myself!
Your Friday Smile
Gotta love this article in Advertising Age – a brief history on screwups in social media history. It looks at 37 cases where social media went horribly wrong. Read it here.
Take Advantage of Market Trends
Trendwatching.com is one of my favorite companies – I love their briefings on market trends; they give me loads of ideas on how to grow business for myself and my clients. Below are their latest trend watching tips that you can use for your own business development today. Make sure you read tip #13 to get some ideas on how to apply the trends you’re reading about to your business.
- Know why you’re tracking trends
- Don’t get your trends mixed up
- Know a fad when you see (or smell) one
- Don’t apply all trends to all people
- Be (very) curious
- Have a Point of View
- Benefit from an unprecedented abundance of resources
- Name your trends
- Build your Trend Framework
- Start a Trend Group (even if it’s just you)
- Secure senior backing or be doomed
- Don’t worry about timing or life cycles or regional suitability or…
- Apply, apply, apply
- Have some fun
- Let others do some of the work for you in 2011
Source: www.trendwatching.com. One of the world’s leading trend firms, trendwatching.com sends out its free, monthly Trend Briefings to more than 160,000 subscribers worldwide.
Checking in with yourself
I have a new love in business. It’s Charlie Gilkey, founder of Productive Flourishing. He’s created a great toolbox of time management tools that I enjoy using with both clients and myself. He just sent out a great newsletter about a Mid-Month Review, which I am finding extremely useful for keeping myself on track. Here are his words of wisdom on why you need to do this and what it involves.
“A Mid-Month Review is a review that’s somewhere between a Weekly Review and a Monthly Review. The benefit of doing a Mid-Month Review is that it’s a chance to sync up our monthly perspective with the reality of the way the month has gone. It also happens to coincide with mid-month paychecks, and many of us need to look over finances and such anyway.
While this list of questions is by no means exhaustive, it’s a good place to start. Give yourself 30 minutes to an hour to work through them – it may help to print out this message:
- What have you accomplished?
- What goals or projects need to be adjusted or dropped?
- What are your priorities for the rest of the month?
- What bills need to be paid, and do you have funds in place to cover them?
- What projects/tasks have fallen off the radar?
- When was the last time you rewarded yourself, and when will be the next?”
I don’t think any of us can go wrong taking a moment to answer these questions. It will definitely make the rest of September more productive!
Women & Power – Why Don’t They Get It?
Just read this interesting article on Harvard Business Review by Jeffrey Pfeffer – Women and the Uneasy Embrace of Power. He discusses how, although women are graduating from college in record numbers, they are still not ascending to positions of power in noticeable numbers. He makes 2 recommendations:
1. Women need to be willing to make more trade-offs to attain power.
2. Women need to be tougher.
Needless to say, this article has provoked some great comments and discussion. Read it here and tell me – do you agree?
Do women need to be tougher?
How to Build Your Franchise
My latest column in Make It Business magazine lists the 3 things you need to have in place to grow a successful franchise. Read about them here.
Job Hunter Mistakes
This article from the Wall Street Journal is a good read! My favorites include the saltwater fish story and the sandwich eater – unbelievable! Put a smile on your Monday face and check it out here.
Who Can I Blame?
Anne is highly organized and works hard at her job. She has a good head for business and should be earmarked for leadership development in her company. But there is one major obstacle in front of her that needs to be addressed before she can be promoted to handle more responsibility.
Anne is bright and easily sees the big strategic picture for growing the business. But she is also judgmental and holds grudges. When co-workers do things she doesn’t approve of, she stops speaking to them. Instead of seeing her potential and what she contributes to the success of the company, people see someone who is “moody”.
When a mentor recently took her aside to speak to her about this perception and made suggestions on how to improve her professional reputation, instead of listening and taking the advice on board, Anne went on the hunt to find out who had “ratted” on her. She missed the whole point of the lesson the mentor was trying to teach her.
If you constantly blame other people and point out their faults, you are only hurting your own chances of success. Highly successful business people focus on what they can control and work hard to create success for themselves and the team around them. They take responsibility for building a strong reputation for themselves and realize that working well with others is a key component for good leadership.
Stake Your Independence!!
Thanks to my VA, Katrina at Getting Stuff Done for finding this gem of an article! It’s a few years old, but what a classic.
Too many entrepreneurs end up locked in a version of slavery called their ‘own business’. If that’s how you are feeling these days, then you need to read this article – An Entrepreneur’s Declaration of Independence.
Then close up shop and go home early!
Finding Peace Of Mind
“Set peace of mind as your highest goal, and organize your life around it.”
– Brian Tracy, Speaker, Author, Consultant
This quote has been my mantra since the beginning of 2010. At times I have a tendency to bury my nose in work and develop unhealthy habits that do not make me a happy girl. When I first read this quote, it felt like it was directed right at me.
I have met so many financially successful people who lack peace of mind lately. They are driven and often quietly miserable. Who says life should be miserable? That days should be long and hard? That peace of mind is something you should wait till retirement to achieve?
This lesson is something I have been trying to teach clients this year. Know what makes you happy and do more of it. Recognize your triumphs and celebrate them. Be proud of who you are and what you have achieved. Think about how to bring peace of mind into your life, rather than waiting for it to find you by accident. Act with deliberation. Be aware of the decisions you are making, rather than sleepwalking through them. Think first, before you act. For what do you have, if you do not have peace of mind?
Schedule some uninterrupted alone time this week to set some intentions for gaining peace of mind for yourself. They can be in the areas of relationships, work, health, dreams you have – whatever area you think you need to pay attention to. Keep your intentions short, but choose ones that you will focus energy and time on.
Don’t worry about what other people might think. Do what feels right for you.
