“A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” pioneer Steve Jobs I agree with Steve Jobs. That’s why, as soon as I discovered a startling statistic from…
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Start with a Story
A new client told me, “I don’t have any stories.” I told her, “We ALL have stories. Stories are simply the intriguing things that happen to or around us.” She came back with, “But I…
Creative Projects in Your Head Help No One: 35 Quotes to Inspire You to FINISH What You Start
“One day you’ll wake up and there won’t be any time left to do the things you’ve always wanted to do.” – Paulo Coelho. When people tell me they’re thinking about staring a creative project,…
Down with Elevator Speeches
“Enough about me. What do you think about me?” – Bette Midler in the movie Beaches While speaking at an INC 500 event, I introduced a new approach for replacing elevator SPEECHES with elevator CONNECTIONS. An entrepreneur named Colleen raised her…
How Can I Motivate People to Pay Attention to Me?
“Let’s address the elephant in the room. ‘YO Elephant!’” – humorist Gene Weingarten An executive hired me to help him with his habit of “over-talking.” He knew it was undermining his impact and…
Avoid Platitudes Like the Plague
“Let’s give them something to talk about.” – Bonnie Raitt song lyric I recently spoke at a conference where two co-authors shared their findings after taking 2 years to interview people who were at the…
Tongue Fu! is #3 in South Korea!
Tongue Fu!’s popularity in South Korea, where it is the number 3 business book, and its use by entities ranging from the US Embassy in London and the US Navy, has reminded me of the fact that the…
What Can Ukulele Player Jake Shimabukuro Teach Us About Communication?
I’m here speaking in Waikiki and chanced upon an excellent PBS-Hawaii documentary last night about Jake, a virtuoso who has “hit it big,” yet remains grounded in his values. Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings…
Got Focus?
Do you know one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a result of researching, writing and speaking about attention, concentration and focus? If we want to truly FOCUS, we must first truly SEE. Yet, to really…
How Malala Yousafzai’s Story Has Inspired The World
“The role of the musician is to understand the content of something and to being able to communicate it so it lives in somebody else.” – Cellist Yo-Yo Ma This morning, 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai became…