motivateyourself.net

It was a great day yesterday, but a very busy and long day. It began with waking up before my alarm was set to go off due to the Holiday Inn in Bad Axe not having a good assortment of pillows. ***Note to hotels I can’t stress this enough…the way to build a base of pillows is to have some fluffy, puffy pillows mixed in with 1-2 solid pillows. Then I can put 1-2 solid pillows down as a good structure and then top it off with a light, fluffy pillow I can sink into. I can then take the 2nd fluffy pillow as my cuddle pillow (a very important feature in the REM cycle!). But this hotel was all fluff, no base, so with neck problems, I awoke around 7. But I digresse…

I was speaking in a very small school in Owendale, Michigan (about 120 students 6-12) so it also meant a small venue inside a cafeteria. I like speaking for these small towns because I find you get pretty solid audiences more often than not. The students tend to be very well behaved and Owendale definitely didn’t disappoint. After a rousing game of Simon Says to get people active and moving we had a pretty solid keynote. I’ve been really happy with the changes I’ve made to my intro over the past couple months and it seems to be paying dividends.

The big deal for me was this NEW workshop that I’ve been talking about in the past few Blogs. Yesterday was my first chance to unveil it with the student council and overall I was quite happy with the results. I believe I found a way to make it non-dry (does that mean it’s wet?) and that was to take a lot of the content I was talking about and simply get the students to provide their input on the subjects (what kind of members do your council members have? what are their roles? what are your rules for being allowed to join council? etc). It’s a fairly simple concept, but sometimes I can be a tad slow on the uptake!

I think this idea of audience input during my Constitution Workshop would typically work in most schools but Owendale currently has a VERY weak council. They only have 4 official council members and only hold two events a year so they have a lot of room to grow. The concepts I was discussing were totally foreign to them but from their feedback after the workshop they definitely seemed to feel it helped them dramatically. I asked them to be blunt and honest with their feedback…what did I do well? What could I change? When did I bore them? When did I excite them? I asked them to be brutally honest, but the only “negative” feedback I got was that they’d like to see more audio-video in the PowerPoint. Apart from that, they enjoyed the material and thought it would help them significantly down the road. The future Student Council President approached me after and seemed concerned that maybe she was taking on too much responsibility with the position for next year. I said…bottom line, if you can somehow manage to put on THREE events next year, you will officially become the most active Student Council President in Owendale-Gagetown history! There’s only room to grow from here!

Overall I was very happy with how my first ever PowerPoint Presentation, my typical event planning workshop and my keynote speech went at Owerndale. It was a really nice morning working with a great group of wide-eyed students. I’m really excited to see how they grow from here because there’s nothing but untapped potential at the school. This is why I make my program that schools pay for a 1-year consultation program so that once I leave the school we can still be in constant contact.

By 1:00 I was off and away. I had tickets for the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game that night at 7:30 pm and had to really high-step it to make it home in time. The drive is supposed to take 4 1/2 hours (not including stops for food, bathroom or the dreaded BORDER!!!!). My lunch break may have been the shortest of my life. In 15 minutes I managed to pull into the driveway of the McDonalds in Mariette, go inside, order my Big Mac Combo (with the super-sized fries of course), hoover the food down and be back on the road. 15 minutes!! Kids, don’t try this at home. The border took only 3 minutes–no pat down’s, computer searches or detainment–HOORAY! And those were my only real delays. The weather was great and the drive was smooth-sailing. I managed to get home at 5:45, just with enough time to bring my bags in and head back out the door with the tickets.

Leafs tickets are too expensive for me to afford so I can only ever go to a game when I get FREE tickets so it was nice to see our last place Leafs play and play well. A 2-1 Overtime Shootout win and the first time I’ve actually watched them win live in about 4 or 5 years! Of course with Overtime and a Shootout we didn’t get out of the ACC (Air Canada Centre) until almost 11. Following the hour long commute by subway and then drive back home I was here in my condo by almost midnight.

A busy and active day that lasted 12 hours but a really solid one filled with my own personal wins and even one by the Leafs. Now that I’m back home it’s time to play MAJOR catch-up to some correspondence and finalize a contract for a Conference in Montreal. It’s great to be back to the grind…

Has it really been that long since I’ve done 2 big keynotes in a day? I got home from Guelph today and just PASSED OUT! After being sick for a month and no real workouts, I am clearly out of shape and exhausted! For some reason I think I forgot just how draining the keynotes are. Over the past few months it has always been the same theme…1 keynote and 1 workshop per school visit and it looks like I was not ready for the after-effects of a 2nd keynote.

I was really happy with how things went at Centennial in Guelph today. There was a ton of talking through the staff advisor’s introduction and when she tried to silence the students, they just kept on talking. I started worrying that “here we go again” with a school of students that can’t respect their staff so I’m in bad shape! But they were GREAT! By the time we got 3 minutes in, you could hear a pin drop. There were a few parts in the speech where I actually took an extra long pause just so I could listen to the perfect silence. They were responsive when I wanted them to get involved and for the most part, quickly quiet when I got to the messages of my rants that they needed to listen to.

In the second presentation I had these two girls sitting in the third row to my left that just would not shut up! The real problem was that they hadn’t learned to master the whisper. They were talking at full volume having a normal conversation. I couldn’t believe that they had chosen to sit so close and speak so LOUDLY!!! With staff members just a few steps away I figured it couldn’t go on for more than a few minutes before a staff member would intervene. But alas, as is typical, the staff stood with their backs to the walls and did nothing to quell the gabbers. So at a small break when I was bringing volunteers up on stage I just went over in their direction, caught their eye and politely asked them to STOP TALKING!!!! I think they were so shocked that I noticed them at all that they sat in stunned silence for the rest of the speech.

This incident of talkers continues to confirm my hypothesis that audience members rarely realize how much a speaker on stage can hear and see and how much they are affected by them (both positively and negatively). So let me offer a few pieces of advice for anyone who sits in ANY audience of anyone in the future.

#!) DON’T TALK!
#2) DON’T TALK!
#3) If you’re going to talk, pick a back row!
#4) DON’T TALK!
#5) If you’re going to talk use a whisper or inside voice.
#6) If you’re a staff member and see students talking, think to yourself what you would do if they were talking during your class and then act appropriately.
#7) DON’T TALK!

I know I harp on the negatives, but I think it’s just because it’s tough to say that X student and Y student were smiling and laughing the whole speech. There were so many big, smiling, laughing faces that I can still remember vividly from my speech and who came up and talked to me after and it’s those students and their words of appreciation after that make me love my job. Besides, if I didn’t write about things like the comical loud talkers in the 3rd row, how much more blah would this blog be? It was a great experience at Centennial today and we discussed the possibility of running some workshops there in the months to come. I’m looking forward to coming back.

Time for some Z’s…I’m off to Michigan tomorrow for a couple days. I haven’t been there since October and it’ll be great to be back. See ya from America!

I know it’s been a week since I wrote last…I’ve been working feverishly to prepare for a NEW Workshop I’m going to unveil this week. It’s a PowerPoint presentation based exclusively on building the fundamentals of a student leadership organization. The focus will be on building the constitution and the members and purpose of the organization. This is the first ever PowerPoint presentation I’ve ever done so I’m really excited to see how it turns out. My big concern right now is that the material may be a bit too dry, but given the subject matter I feel like I’ve included a few really funny clips and bits that will hopefully break up the presentation. The bottom line for me is that I think the STUFF I’m talking about is the most important items that any student leadership group has to go through. So if I have to bore people the first couple times around while I get my feet wet and figure out how to spark some magic, then so be it!

I need to be up in less than 6 hours. Speeches tomorrow in Guelph at Centennial. This one’s been on the books for several months and after my success the week before in Oregon and Saskatchewan, I’m really looking forward to getting out there and speaking again. The other thing that’s GREAT about tomorrow’s speeches is that I get to go, give them and come back and sleep in my own bed on the same night. It’s nice to be going just an hour or so from home!

See ya from the road!

It was a great week away, but as always it’s nice to be back sleeping in my own bed. I feel like last week was a turning point for me as I gave myself a proverbial kick-in-the-butt and started blasting out new material and got to work on some priorities that I had been putting on the back burner.

In the weeks to come, I’m going to be working on a DVD/PowerPoint Presentation that will deal with the basics of putting together a student leadership group starting with constitutions, scheduling and proper meeting structure. Regardless of whether you’re new to student government or you’ve been an advisor for 40 years, I believe the DVD will have something for everyone. It will take into account the experience I’ve accumulated over 15 years of being involved and working with various schools of different sizes and regions. The DVD will probably deal with a bit more dry material than my current workshop that deals with marketing/promotions/FREE STUFF, etc. but I truly believe that if you don’t have the building blocks in place for a solid leadership organization, then it is destined to fail. If any advisors or students out there have any suggestions on content, I’m always happy to hear from you, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop me an E-Mail.

Also, look for this Blog to turn into a hybrid of a Blog and a V(Video)Log in the days and weeks to come. I tried playing around with the format of it today, but due to about a half dozen speaking requests that came in today and 3 contracts that needed taking care of, the VLOG was not high on my priority list. I’ll figure out the formatting in the next few days hopefully and once I’m shaved and looking clean, I’ll debut it on here and link it to my Facebook and YouTube. When I’m on the road, it will probably have to still be a plain old Blog but perhaps on long trips I’ll drag my portable webcam with me.

Exciting days ahead here at Motivate Yourself. Stay tuned and stay in touch!

I’m at the Portland Airport waiting for my 1st of 2 flights to get me back home to the T Dot (Toronto). It’s been a really solid week for me and I’ve been very happy with how everything’s gone. Despite 4 wake-ups before 6 am I managed to get 6 or 7 hours sleep each night which is HUGE for me! I even hooked up some G.C.P. (Grilled Chicken Pasta) for dinner 3 of the last 4 nights which is an immense improvement from my burgers/fries/pizza diet. Of course, 3 donuts at breakfast over the last 2 mornings and I think The Terminator may still be able to take me.

I was really happy with how things went at Rex Putnam High School in Milwaukie, Oregon yesterday. I had a ton of new material and jokes that I was trying out for the crowd and it really seemed to have favourable results. After my speech I had a huge rush of students coming up and asking for hugs, handshakes, etc. It was the type of post-speech response I always get at a leadership conference but rarely get in such large, wide-eyed numbers at big high schools.

My only complaint about the speech which is my typical complaint was crowd control. About 2 minutes before I was scheduled to begin there were about 1400 students in the gym and 2 teachers! Eventually the teachers made their way in, backs attached to the back wall, far away from any possible teacher intervention. STAFF AND ADMINISTRATION TAKE NOTE…if you’re going to have an assembly and pay $$$$$ to bring me in, let’s make the speech a success and let’s get those staff members mingled in with the crowd and disciplining the few people who ruin it for the rest. In my days there have unfortunately been few schools who know how to do it right despite my best efforts to teach and train.

Funny nightmare to pass along to you sadists out there…I dreamt I was doing a speech at an elementary/middle school when the Principal came up on stage and took my mic from me and said I was done due to “inappropriate content”. The Principal then sent out a massive E-Mail to every one of my 35,000 contacts to let them know that they should never hire me. I was done. My career was over. Luckily in the words of B.I.G……”it was all a dream”.

Sorry I couldn’t post last night but the wireless stopped working at my hotel before I had a chance to write. Ahhh the wonders of staying at Days Inn’s! I arrived in Oregon early this morning after a lovely patdown and rubdown from security at customs. I understand some men pay a lot of $$$ for that kind of service so this was quite the treat.

Where I’m speaking tomorrow is about 20 minutes from where a fellow speaker, Cara Filler lives so I had the chance to get caught up with her and have a homecooked meal. Until you’ve spent time on the road like her and I have, you can’t imagine how nice it is to not eat in another Applebee’s or McD’s sitting alone looking like a lost, lonely puppy. As amazing as dinner and conversation was, the best part of the trip may have been a road sign I was fortunate to see on a bridge on my way to her house that said, “No Shooting”!! Only in America!

I’ve been working all day (minus dinner) on some new material I’m really looking forward to busting out at tomorrow’s speech. As I mentioned a few days ago, George Carlin worked countless hours to perfect each word he used and that’s the kind of focus I’m trying to bring to each talk I give. Speaking for 1500 students can be a disaster for crowd control if staff and administration aren’t dilligent and if I’m not at the top of my game, so I’m really looking forward to the challenge tomorrow–especially to unleash some new material and new height jokes on my audience.

I’ve now been up for 20 hours and it’s time to grab some Z’s. Sidenote before I go…I’m just seeing on CNN about the tragic plane crash in Buffalo. I’ve flown in and out of that airport on several occasions as it’s the closest U.S. option for me and I’ve even flown from Newark to Buffalo on Continental Airlines. To make it come even more close to home, I was actually on that exact same flight in December on my way back from Las Vegas when I had a stopover from Newark to Buffalo. It’s certainly scary and chilling for someone like myself who flies often and takes that route. A reminder of our mortality. Makes you want to cherish every moment of every day.

Sorry to end on a sad note…more positive vibes tomorrow!

So is anyone out there? How many of you saw last nights post? How many of you will read this one? My guess is under 20 but we’re going to work on boosting the traffic!

I’m here in Saskatchewan in the small village of Paradise Hill. Got treated to a dinner at the school with the other speakers that are in town for Wellness Day. I was really impressed by the spread and the organization. Usually I come to a town and hit the local Pizza Hut, burn the roof of my mouth and call it a night. So this was great to be in a social situation gettng a home cooked meal.

I also had the chance to speak with a few of the other speakers. Any networking I can do in this solo job is always a benefit because all speakers can offer some perspective from marketing tips, to visa ideas, to general stage presence. It’s moments like this that are important to soak up.

But here’s the crazy and SCARY part! Three of us were hanging out in the bar of the hotel we’re staying at (one having a gingerale, one a coke and me with nothing…what party animals) until around 1 am local time and of the 3 speakers I was the OLDEST one!!! WHAT HAS HAPPENED?!!?!? When did I go from being the ridiculously young, looks even younger, getting confused for 15 year olds speaker to the guy who’s the senior in the social situation?? Have I really become this old?? Bring out the botox, I’m ready for my close-up!

Coolest part of the night? One of the speakers is a mentalist and he was showing me a few of his moves. Again, as a poker player I’m fascinated by the psychology of the game and the ability to read opponents. In fact, the book I have with me on the road is a book on poker tells written by Phil Hellmuth and an FBI Intelligence Agent. So this mentalist has me pick a card, stick it in the deck and put it in a box…I’m thinking he somehow forced my decision to pick the card but he assures me that it was my own free will. He spends about 2 minutes going through various questions for me (red? black? spade? club? etc) looking for my reaction to each word. By picking out my tells he was able to pick out my card. He swears there was no “cheating”, just simply an understanding of my smile, my finger tapping and my facial ticks. It’s the exact type of skill I’m trying to learn–as much for poker as for my daily interactions with other people. If I could get even half as good as this mentalist, then bring on Vegas! It’s an extraordinary skill and remarkably entertaining!

A great start to my week out west. See you tomorrow from Edmonton.

My last post was over 7 months ago…but alas I have returned! Not sure why I stopped writing in here…maybe a lack of comments from others? A lack of new ideas? A lack of interesting writing for you? There’s no real reason or excuse, just for some reason I stopped and once you stop doing something and get out of the habit, it can be tough to start up again (unless of course you are severely addicted, which needless to say I am not).

I enjoy writing on here if nothing more than as a personal diary to myself, but of course due to the public nature of this diary I have to tailor my message and put the positive spin on EVERYTHING! So sometimes it feels a little Fakie McFake of me and I think that zaps some of the fun out of writing. But I’m going to try to get back into this Blog, if for no other reason than to keep reminding myself of my adventures on the road.

I head out tomorrow morning for Edmonton, Alberta where I’ll spend about 10 minutes before taking a 4 hour drive to Paradise Hill, Saskatchewan. We’re talking SUPER rural Saskatchewan and I’m looking forward to heading back out to the area for my first time this season. If any of you have read any of my blog entries in the past you know how much I LOVE going to rural Saskatchewan, Montana and Idaho. Is it boring with very little to do? ABSOLUTELY and that’s what I love about it! My only explanation is that I spend my days typing at this computer and talking to clients and potential clients on the phone while I look out my condo window at my parking lot. To me…THAT is boring! So going out to these spacious lands where the roads seem to go on forever, it’s peaceful and what we are here on this Earth to experience.

So what have I been doing? Speaking as always. It’s been a slower season this year due to the economic recession across North America. Who would have thought that my industry would be affected by it, but believe me, it has! I’ve been working on my material and trying to focus myself on each individual word I say during my speech so that each word can carry as much meaning and humor as possible. It’s the way George Carlin became such an extraordinary comedian and philosopher and it’s certainly something I’d like to emulate.

Spare time? Well I’ve been spending it making a few extra $$$ on PokerStars and during a trip to Las Vegas. Maybe in my next life I can play poker fulltime, but in the meantime I’m going to enjoy Motivating students around the world first. As I’ve written about before, I just love the psychology behind the game. When played at its highest level it becomes contact chess…a very difficult feat to achieve. I love trying to think the way others think that I think they think–think ya follow??

I’ll try to write from the road. After Saskatchewan I head to Oregon for two days. The last time I was there in May I was literally in and out in 13 hours, so I’m looking forward to seeing the sights and enjoying the rain.

Do me a favour…if you read this blog, drop me a comment. It’s always great to know who’s out there and to hear from you! See ya on the road.