Distributing Handout Material

Here is a neat idea when distributing handout material for attendees: offer a second copy to everyone and, in a short note, invite them to share the information with someone who could benefit from it!

Two other timely blogs for your perusal:
* for the time-pressured: www.BreathingSpaceBlog.com
* for the info-whelmed: www.CommunicationOverload.com

The Length of a Keynote

How long should keynote speakers’ presentations last? Obviously that depends on many factors including the objective(s) of the host organization. Sarah Braley, writing for Meetings and Conventions offers results from a poll of 125 meeting professionals:

30 minutes: 18%
45 minutes: 41%
60 minutes 29%
90 minutes: 12%

Theme Ideas Handbook

Jerry Busche has assembled a resource of themes for your futures meetings at BizMotivation site where he offers a "Theme Ideas Handbook" available for download. The handbook contains more than 600 theme ideas, adaptable for meetings, conferences, or other events. Here is a brief sampling of some of the ideas:

* Teamwork in Action
* Brown Bag Briefing
* They Said It Couldn’t Be Done
* Delighting the Customer
* Treating Customers Right

Breathing Space as a Title

One afternoon, while I was speaking on the phone to a mentor, the mentor mentioned that he needed to "get some breathing space." I wrote down those words.

The phrase became one of the powerful guiding forces in my life. From that conversation, I devised the Breathing Space Institute, wrote the book Breathing Space, and have since given nearly 800 hundred lectures for audiences across the nation and around the world on managing the daily pace with grace, mastering information from any communication overload, and, of course, having more breathing space.

Your Reputation is at Stake

Every time you retain a speaker to address your group, in many respects you're putting your reputation on the line. What if the speaker is ineffective? What if the speaker bombs? Worst of all, what if the speaker offends - or grossly offends - members of your audience?

You don't want to take a chance, and no one can blame you. You want to select the best possible expert for the program in mind whether it's a conference, convention, annual meeting, quarterly meeting, executive retreat, roundtable session, or any other arrangement. You want to be able to know, with confidence, that your staff or members, executive team, top management, owners, shareholders, or other constituents will be not simply satisfied with your selection, but pleased.

Now envision this. The evening before your special event, the expert presenter you have retained calls to say, "Hi. I arrived a few minutes ago and went immediately to the meeting room. I checked out the facilities, and everything seems fine. I'll be back at the room well in advance of my presentation tomorrow, rested and ready to go."

You put down the phone and think to yourself, "Thank you, thank you, thank you. Here is a speaker who takes care of the little things. Here is a meeting pro."

Next, imagine arriving at the meeting room, seeing that your presenter is already set up and is graciously greeting any early arrivals. Now you're thinking, "Here's somebody who goes the extra mile."

If I may toot my own horn for a moment, I go the extra mile every time.

Critique Your Literature

Attracting people to your meeting can be a challenge. Have you critiqued your own marketing literature of late?
* As you read your Web content, blog, brochure, or other marketing literature, following each assertion made, ask yourself the question, "According to whom?" To be convincing, the answer has to be someone who is held in esteem by the people in your target market.
* Stellar marketing materials could be handed to an individual who's never heard of you and enable him to quickly and accurately determine what you offer and why it’s worth investigating.
* A person of average intelligence should be able to quickly understand based on your marketing materials what the meeting will deliver. If not, they need to be rewritten.

Learning at Any Age

Matthew Blakeslee writing for Discover says, "If old dogs haven’t been able to learn new tricks, maybe that’s because no one has known how to teach them properly. Until quite recently orthodox neuroscience held that only the brains of young children are resilient, malleable, and morphable—in a word, plastic."

"This neuroplasticity, as it is called, seems to fade steadily as the brain congeals into its fixed adult configuration. Infants can sustain massive brain damage, up to the loss of an entire cerebral hemisphere, and still develop into nearly normal adults; any adult who loses half the brain, by contrast, is a goner. Adults can’t learn to speak new languages without an accent, can’t take up piano in their fifties then go on to play Carnegie Hall, and often suffer strokes that lead to permanent paralysis or cognitive deficiencies. The mature brain, scientists concluded, can only decline."

"It turns out this theory is not just wrong, it is spectacularly wrong. Two new books, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Ballantine Books, $24.95) by science journalist Sharon Begley and The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psychiatrist Norman Doidge, offer masterfully guided tours through the burgeoning field of neuroplasticity research. Each has its own style and emphasis; both are excellent."