Throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor

 It happened 15 years ago. It was the scariest thing I had ever done in my life, and probably the most important. I made a choice. I took a chance. I quit making excuses, and I have never regretted that decision I made.

In my senior year of high school, I developed a stuttering problem. It was not a physical ailment, it was a mental one. I became absolutely petrified of speaking in front of an audience. Whenever I had to speak, I would trip on my words, go light-headed, drip sweat from my brow, and pray for it to all be over as quickly as possible. To say it was something I did not like is an understatement. To say it was something I felt I might never be able to do and would never attempt was a more realistic assessment and I was absolutely fine with that. I would rather hide in fear than to go through the pain and agony of speaking in public.

That changed when my daughter entered the public school system. I did not like some of the decisions the school board was making in regards to my children’s education and I realized that I could 1) sit at home, complain, and do nothing, 2) speak up and look like a babbling idiot which wasn’t really a pleasant proposition, or 3) I could go through the painful process of learning the skills I needed to become an effective communicator. So for my 33^rd birthday, I attended a local Toastmaster’s meeting.

It was intimidating to watch people comfortably give impromptu talks, deliver beautifully prepared speeches, and then listen graciously while other people offered advise and critiques. I chose to hide in the back of the room and do as little as possible ,which is where I stayed for the next two months. Eventually, I ventured out and tried to take on a few roles and after 4 months of attending, I found the courage to deliver my first speech. It was a dreadful attempt. I was physically ill for two days worrying about it. When I spoke, sweat literally dripped from my face onto my note cards, and I had to add lib the ending because the ink started running on my hand-written speech. After it was over, I decided to quit.

Three weeks later, a friend convinced me to go back and give it another try. Time went by and I forced myself to deliver a second horrendous speech and again I quit. This went on for 9 months but for some strange reason I kept letting myself get talked into coming back. It took me two years to deliver the 10 manual speeches, but by the end of it all, I had developed some great friendships and knew I could control my fear enough to appear somewhat competent if I ever had to speak to an audience.

I stayed with the program for another year and a half and discovered that I was learning a great deal more than how to speak in front of a group. I learned to listen, to positively evaluate others, and to effectively think on my feet. I learned to manage a meeting, and then a  club, and eventually an entire area of clubs. I learned to develop leaders and maybe how to draw out the best in some individuals who were as desperate for a different life as I had originally been. But most importantly I learned that nothing is truly impossible if you are willing to persist and to keep trying.

For me, Toastmasters helped me better listen to and communicate with my daughters, clients, and co-workers. For me, Toastmasters gave me the confidence to speak publicly in order to advance my business and my career. For me, Toastmasters taught me to never give up on a lost cause who still was willing to do the difficult work of trying to grow and to change.

I mention all of this tonight for a few reasons.

1)    I know some people who are frustrated by life and by the challenges of trying to improve their future. It can be done if you just keep coming back and keep making an honest effort. “The pain of the change is soon forgotten once the rewards of the effort have (begun to be) realized.” - Zig Zigler I think

2)    No matter how far you have come or how good you think you are, there are still paths that can lead you farther... if you are willing to seek them out.

3)     Most limits in life exist only because you choose to place them upon yourself. These limits are often masked as excuses, poor timing, and bad luck.

4)    If you need skills to change, it doesn’t matter what you like or enjoy, go develop those skills. You may discover once you have gained competency, you actually enjoy those things you once dreaded (like writing, public speaking, and web design).

5)    Becoming a CTM in Toastmasters was more difficult than earning my college degree or my Eagle in scouting. Maybe because of this, I value it even more than I do those other two accomplishments, and I know for a fact it has done more for my career and my personal relationships than anything else I have ever attempted.

6)    There is a new Toastmaster’s club that meets the 2^nd and 4^th Monday of each month at 1:20 in the afternoon at Keiser University in Lakeland, Fl. It is a club that is open to students, faculty, alumni, and anyone else over 18 who is looking to improve the quality of their life and their potential for a better career. Please feel free to visit and participate.

“In 20 years you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do, than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore! Dream! Discover!”  (Mark Twain) and quit making excuses to remain trapped by your fears and habits in a world of frustrating mediocrity.

Parking on a Friday Night

Last Friday night, a friend and I went to downtown Stuart for dinner. The parking lots were rather full and as I turned into a particular lot, she was amazed that I immediately found a parking place.  I believe her comment was “Oh, do you manifest parking places too?” No, I just knew there was one waiting for me. There always is.

Some people go through life looking for full parking lots and find them. They spend hours driving around looking to find ways to see full lots. They are so focused on finding spots in exactly the right place, they will block traffic for ten minutes waiting for someone to pull out and make room for them. Most of the time they go home complaining about the lack of parking, the selfish people who beat them to a spot, or how much they didn't accomplish because they spent all day driving in circles.

Other people pull into parking lots and immediately find parking places. They know there are places available and so they drive to one, accept it for what it is, and are willing to walk an extra 45 seconds in exchange for not having to drive around frustrated. These people usually get to where they want to go faster, happier, and maybe a tad bit healthier.

I am always amazed how people choose not to find success, not to find love, not to find happiness because they are so busy finding excuses that they never see the opportunities right in front of them.  Just because the opportunities don’t come gift-wrapped with big bows and our name written all over them, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. 

It's time for some FUN!

FUN!!!!

Fun???

Fun. It’s that magical thing that gives meaning to life. It’s that thing that keeps the batteries recharged. It’s that missing ingredient that we seem to forget about when work, life, and school seem to be demanding all of our time. During the times when we feel we have too much to do, fun is the first thing that we willingly sacrifice. We feel guilty to take time out for fun and forget that an hour or two of fun will make us more productive in everything else we do.

I had a work-study who made a technically nice flier today. The information was well presented but the flier was BORING. I asked him about fun, and he couldn’t remember what it was. I have a grad student whom I mentor who was feeling overwhelmed this afternoon by life and years of study. She is making less than A’s this month because her work is flat and predictable. I mentioned that she needs to go have fun and she doesn’t feel she has time for it. A former student today was talking to me about feeling depressed because she works and takes care of her three children and can’t figure out what is wrong with her life. She too couldn’t remember fun and laughing outside of her existence with her children.

 I too had forgotten about our need for fun because I was swamped with grown-up responsibilities, until this past weekend. I spent some time with friends, rode around Stuart, FL for two days on a GoPet, and smiled and laughed like I haven’t in years. I came back to school this week with renewed energy, focus, and enthusiasm and have gotten more done in the past three days than I have in the last three weeks.

Life is short. Work and family can be demanding. Everyone expects more and more from us and so we hide in video games and YouTube and television and Facebook just to escape the pressure. But it doesn’t help does it? Instead, go fly a kite, laugh like a kid, buy a new toy, or something else you used to do when you were young. Fun is still there, you just have to rediscover it. And when you do, you’ll find that you actually have more time and energy than you’ve had in years because you are more creative, productive, and energetic.

Work hard and play hard is more than a mantra. It is the recipe for success in everything you do. Talk to you later, I am off to ride my very own GoPet around town for a few hours.

PS, - If you don’t know what a GoPet is, e-mail me (greg@getagopet.com), or visit http://www.GetaGoPet.com. I got so excited about having fun again that I am becoming a distributor for the company this evening, but that is a new blog and web site that will just have to wait until tomorrow.

Ten Easy Ways to Sabotage Your Career

1. Be conceited, ungrateful, or arrogant. Watch the leaders in any field and to a person, they always find time to say thank you, to share, and to listen.
   
2. Be vengeful, negative,  and deceitful, especially in public places. It’s always easy to find faults, but it takes talent and discipline to find solutions. Employers and clients need solutions not criticism.
   
3. Treat your online activity like the boy’s locker room. Everything you say or do online can and may eventually be seen by the people whose respect you need to earn. Acting and posting as if you are in eighth grade shows an future employer you are not yet mature enough to represent his or her firm.
   
4. Put cute messages or extremely long musical numbers on your answering machine. When a client or employer wants to speak to you they don’t want their time wasted. I know an excellent designer who has lost at least three interviews because you can’t leave her a message until you’ve sat through 90 seconds of a poorly recorded message. “I don’t have time for this. Next!”
   
5.  Dress and act as if you don’t care. If you don’t care enough to iron your shirt, to comb your hair, and to put a little polish on those shoes, then you don’t really care about the company for which you are hoping to work. It’s a matter of respect.
   
6. Go to the interview, presentation, or meeting unprepared. Research the company/client. Be prepared to not just answer questions but to ask intelligent ones as well. Reorganize your portfolio to show your future employer /client the work which is relevant to their business. Being prepared shows you care and are willing to earn the opportunity to work for the firm or individual.
   
7. Treat the receptionist like a peon. He or she doesn’t really count anyway and has no influence in the company. Right?
   
8.  Make people wait and be impatient if you are required to do so.  I remember my firm once lost a $10,000 web site because my sales person was ten minutes late and didn’t even bother to call. “If you don’t respect the value of my time, then you don’t respect my company.”
   
9.  Place your company information on a vehicle and then drive like a jerk. I seldom respond to vehicular advertising except when I make it a point never to work with a particular company because their driver cut me off in traffic.
   
10.  Don’t bother hand-writing a thank you note and following up with a phone call. Taking the time to say thank you isn’t really that important anymore and neither is the person who gave you an opportunity to work with them.
    
11. Send out mass e-mails and thank you notes. Everybody loves being treated like a number, so why not reaffirm this by showing some real insincerity. It's better to personally thank a few individuals at a time, by name, than to try and thank everybody with a generic mass mailing.

Yes, I know I can't count. Giving more than I promise is another one of those nasty habits I'm working on. :)

Stick a Fork In It !

One of the first things that I identified as a requirement when I started trying to develop my Latin American businesses was the need to attempt to communicate in a language that my customers understood.  In 1990, the first of the mass fax programs were now affordable as were the early attempts at translation programs. So I learned the software, spent  three months developing my leads list, and started faxing out monthly sales letters to the top 500 retailers in the Caribbean, South, and Central America. I translated these into Portuguese and Spanish with the help of the computer and started being referred to as the “fax man” when I finally met these future clients at trade shows.

One of the companies I represented was Retroneu , a higher end flatware company.  The top tier of their product line was branded as the “Landmark Collection”, bridal registry flatware that retailed for $150 - $200 per place setting.  I wrote a marvelous sales letter explaining why every top retailer should be carrying the magnificent  Landmark collection in their bridal departments.  I then proofed the letter, ran it through the translation software, and faxed it out.

Unfortunately, the program didn’t recognized the word Landmark and substituted its best guess which was “heap”. The literal translation for heap is mierda  (sp?).  So I sent out a letter to the merchandise managers, owners, and buyers of the major  Latin America retailers explaining why they should be carrying “un magnificante colleccion de mierda,” loosely translated as a marvelous pile of excrement.  I received more than 3 dozen responses within the next 2 days explaining my error.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that mistake did more to endear me to customers/prospects than almost anything I had done to that point. I became human. I was making an effort to communicate, however poorly, in their language. I opened more new accounts in the next few months than at any other time during that particular part of my sales career because I wasn’t another  indifferent salesman trying to make a sale, I was just another human trying to make a connection.

The reason I share this, is that it amazes me how many people don’t do things because they are afraid of making mistakes.  We learn the most from making mistakes, but sometimes during the process, we also make wonderful friendships because we care enough to try.  I’m sure that I’ll make plenty of mistakes as I try to be part of the transition from traditional marketing toward personally connecting with and listening to our individual, human customers. But I guess I’d rather look foolish than to be left alone and out of business. 

Flowers are red young man, Green leaves are green

"And she said...

Flowers are red young man
Green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen"

In forth grade, we were given an art project to paint a spring picture. My creation was a grand collection of color and movement, flowers and clouds and colors.  In my mind, it was a fabulous, abstract piece work. The art teacher , in front of my entire class,  announced that it was the worst painting any forth grader had ever made and required that for homework I look up in the encyclopedia what a Tulip was really supposed to look like.

Since I had no artistic ability, I decided to try out music. The second day of class, the instructor played a series of notes and asked if each one was higher or lower than the proceeding one. I had never studied music, and so I didn’t really understand the terms.  My music instructor, again in front of the other members of my elementary school band, informed me that I was tone deaf  and should pursue other activities. Can't paint, can't play music, I must have no creative talent.

I discovered photography when I entered high school, and considered myself fairly competent. In my senior year, when asked about my future plans, I stated that I either wanted to be a photographer or maybe even a teacher. My parents, teachers, and guidance counselors all sang the same chorus to this. Photography is too competitive and you’ll never be able to provide for a family on a teacher’s salary. Join the military or get a degree in Business. I chose the latter.

I did well in business. I grabbed onto using technology to be more productive with my Apple 2e and fell in love with the prospects of what could be done. I ended up opening the Latin American markets for 20 mid-sized US manufacturers using Compuserve, an internal fax/modem, and then e-mail and the Internet. I had great adventures, but was never completely happy. 

The devaluation of the Peso and the destruction of the Mexican middle class, a run on the Brazilian banks, the depression in Puerto Rico caused by new policies in regards to the pharmaceutical industry, import restrictions in Venezuela with a new government in place,  textile tariffs in Argentina, and then the Asian Flu. Wallah!  In under 6 months, the business was gone.  Such is life.

While trying to figure out what to do at 38 years old and having lost my motivation to go back into sales, a bumper sticker in a parking lot led to a conversation with a stranger that led me into a Web design firm. Circumstances forced me from just designing in the back room, back out in to the world of sales and recruitment. A midnight talk with a janitor led me to seek interns at a local college, which one day led to that school asking me to teach an Introduction to Computers class.

Today I am the program director for Graphic Arts and Multimedia Design at Florida’s second largest private university. I usually have more freelance photography, illustration, consulting, and web work than I can take on. But mostly importantly, I love my job, I love my life, and I can draw a Tulip any way I damn well please. I can only wonder what would have been possible if I had been born with a little creative talent and some education along the way.

"But the little boy said...
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun,
So many colors in the flower and I see every one."

-Harry Chapin, Roses are Red

Go Ahead, Make my Day! I may make it worth your while.

How often have you been made to feel special? Really special ? Important, valued, respected, and appreciated? If you’re like me, then most likely it just doesn’t happen often enough. It’s funny how in our rush to collect contacts, to get noticed, to drive traffic, we often forget the most important thing: the human element. Who cares how many followers you have or friends you have if you get nothing from them? But if you aren’t getting anything from them, it is probably because you aren’t giving anything to them.

I went to a SND meeting for the first time last Friday, Stephen Komives  met me at the door. When I met him at the door, he said, “Hello, Greg. It is great to see you here today. Let me get your badge for you.” The enthusiasm and sincerity were real. I don’t know if he took the time to research a little about each of the 1^st time visitors that were at that meeting or not, but it certainly made me feel like he was genuinely interested in me, as a person.

Following a post or a blog, I sent a friend request to Bruce Ramsay  because his comments really seemed interesting and useful. I received an e-mail back that stated “Greg, you're an amazing person. It is my honor to be friends.” Wow, talking about making someone’s day! Yes, I want to be fiends with someone who is that thoughtful.

Of all the people I follow on Twitter, three have extended the hand of friendship with a direct message, just to say hello. Guess who I follow most closely?

And finally, from my campus president 5 minutes ago, “First of All – YOU ROCK and your students ROCK!  I love these. “ It is because of comments like these that our program is always willing to help out other departments on campus, the front office,  and the Chancellor’s office. Thanks, President Rogers.

The point is, the reason social networking became such a popular phenomenon is that we all got tired of feeling like, and being treated like, a number. We wanted to express ourselves, be noticed, connect with new people, learn and experience new things. But without the connection, are we accomplishing any of that?

It doesn’t take long to say thank you. It doesn’t take long to let someone know you appreciate them. It doesn’t take long to turn a chance meeting in cyberspace into an ally, a loyal customer, or even a good friend. Take the time to say thank you, take the time to recognize each contact as a valued, human being. It’s that little step that will do more for your career or business than all the friend collecting and retweeting in the world.

Here are a couple of other blogs that you might also find useful.

• Web 2.0 is better than ME 2.0
  
• Customer Loyalty — Why You Need It and How To Get It 
  

So, when was the last time an online friend made you feel special? How do you let your online contacts know how much they really mean to you?