Who's the boss? You are!

I just got back from a fabulous quickie trip to San Diego where I delivered a training at a gorgeous resort to a group of fun and willing participants (welcome, ECGMC blog visitors!).

It's always satisfying to work with an organization that's on the ball, organized, well-prepared and cares enough about their own people to make sure everything is in place for them to get the most out of a training or conference.

What can you do to help the process along and make sure that you're able to do your part in giving the most value to the group you're serving?

Survey the organization

I have two questionnaires: one is about the company in general and how my presentation fits into the overall theme of the conference or training, and the other is a questionnaire for individuals who will be attending my workshop, to find out what their public speaking needs are.

These two questionnaires form the bulk of information I receive about a speaking engagement. I also speak in person with the organizer, and some speakers will contact individuals by phone or e-mail to get more personalized information.

Note: my questionnaires used to be documents that I e-mailed out, but they are now electronic (I use SurveyMonkey.com) to make it easier for participants to complete them and for me to analyze them prior to the workshop.

If I'm speaking to a beginner-level crowd, I don't want to be giving them advanced information. If the group doesn't express a lot of fear of public speaking, I don't want to spend a lot of time on that issue. A simple questionnaire gets me at least part of the way to knowing my audience.

Be clear about your needs

If you need a microphone, say so. If you need the room set up a particular way, say so. If you need the organization to make copies of your handouts, say so. Guess what: things don't happen unless you ask.

Some of my clients fear being perceived as "pushy" if they ask for a specific room setup or equipment. They feel that they're imposing upon the organizer by asking for what they want. What they're forgetting is that it's not for them; it's for the audience.

We set up the room a certain way, use a microphone, bring handouts or provide certain activities so the audience learns better and retains the information that is shared. That's all. It's not about being a prima donna. It's about serving your audience. So ask away!

Stay in touch

I was lucky to be working with a group whose contact person was vigilant about making sure everything was taken care of well in advance. But this is not always the case; in fact, I would say it's rarely the case.

Once you've made your requests and set your standards for the presentation, it's up to you to follow up and ensure that things are happening as you requested. You have to play organizer as well as speaker or trainer if you want to be sure that i's are dotted and t's are crossed.

In this case, the organizer had given me contact information for the conference director at the resort, so I called him the day before my presentation to confirm that everything was arranged and that I could stop in to see the room where I would be speaking.

Check your room as soon as you can

I discovered that I would be able to see my room the day before the workshop, but that it wouldn't actually be set to my specifications until late that night. I had already planned on peeking in on my way to breakfast and then setting up at least a half hour in advance, so I made sure to be there early the next day (the workshop was at 8 am, so there wasn't a lot of wiggle room in the morning).

When I peeked in the morning of the workshop, the audio-visual crew happened to be there hooking up the equipment and the rest of the room was exactly as I had requested, so I was able to start setting up right away. Part of my setup wasn't complete and they took care of that quickly.

You're the boss. Take charge of your event.

Arrangements for your speaking engagement will not always go this smoothly. We don't always get the gigs and clients we dream about! But keeping the process moving forward will ensure that you're doing your part in making the engagement as successful as possible.

Don't let your audience down. Be there for them from the minute you're engaged to speak!

For some guidelines to follow for your next presentation, you can download my Presentation Readiness Checklist and Presentation Tools Checklist, and other resources on my Shop page.

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

Following up after networking events

In San Diego today and starting early. I hope my workshop is going well!

Jane Pollak has a great post on how she follows up after networking events. I especially like how she culls the cards that are not a fit for her instead of hanging onto all of them forever (like I do). When you're done over there, check out more networking posts here on Speak Schmeak:

Networking follow-up

My three rules of networking

Networking: Exit a conversation

What not to do when networking

Talk benefits, not features

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Are you the first you?

I'm off to San Diego to lead a training on Saturday, so I'll just leave you with a brief quote today:

"I'm not the next anyone, I'm the first Maria Sharapova."

~ Maria Sharapova

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

Note to self: Never do that joke again

As a follow up to this post about bombing, here's some more Eddie Izzard technique.

I've never seen a comedian make so many jokes about his own jokes not working. And of course, when the audience doesn't get one and he acknowledges it, he gets even more laughs.

At one point in his show "Glorious," he plays two characters who have a 2-minute conversation about why a joke didn't work.

But the funniest approach was, when a joke bombed, pretending to write a note to himself:

"No one got that. Never do that piece again."

"Lost everyone. No one understands."

"No one ever gets that one."

"Where is that bit going?"

As a bit in itself, the "note to self" redeems a failing joke and gets additional laughs in the process.

Most speakers don't try this hard to be funny. But if you're clearly telling a joke and it bombs, there are ways to redeem yourself, besides the old rule to act like you weren't telling a joke. Why not show that you can take the hit and have a little fun with it?

Now I realize I keep talking about Eddie Izzard, but I've never posted a clip. So here's a bit about an evil giraffe from "Glorious."



If you can't see the video, click here to view it on YouTube.

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Does your appearance enhance your performance?

"If you come out in jeans and a t-shirt, you better be good. If you come out in a big shiny suit, half your work's done." ~ Graham Norton

Graham Norton is a comedian known for his flashy style, and he has the luxury of wearing whatever he wants as a performer; however, he makes a good point here. If there's no flash, there better be lots of substance. That doesn't mean a flamboyant dresser has no substance; it just means that he is using more avenues to create a persona.

When Graham walks out onstage in his shiny suit, you already know something about him. You already have an expectation of what's going to happen. You are already being entertained! His "costume" is part of the fun of his show.

Lots of speakers wear suits. I don't. It's just not my style. And luckily, I live in Southern California where suits are rarely mandatory.

I dress appropriately for the groups I speak to while still expressing my own style and personality. It's important to be real, to be me, and to be authentic. After all, what kind of a role model am I to my audiences if I don't practice what I preach?

I like to be colorful, especially in my earrings. I like to be comfortable, hence the flat shoes. I also have a visible tattoo on my left wrist, which is actually overlooked much of the time because it's perceived to be a bracelet. I would never, in a million years, consider hiding it.

My earrings and tattoo are not over the top or distracting, and they are still me. I'm willing to take a risk and step outside of the typical "speaker" mold. When I walk onstage, the audience already knows something about me: they know I'm unique and will probably deliver something different than what they usually experience from speakers.

How do you express your uniqueness through style?

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Be a host, not a guest

I always suggest getting to know the audience and the venue in advance as part of our research and preparation. Checking out the venue in advance is frequently overlooked by beginning speakers, and here's why it shouldn't be.

Whether it's the day before or a half hour before your presentation, visiting the room where you'll be speaking accomplishes one important thing: Making the room your own.

Yes, you will also discover the layout of seating and tables, the equipment and sound features, the lighting, and other aspects of the room that you can then arrange or rearrange to your liking. Viewing the room in advance also reduces the general anxiety of facing the unknown.

But making the room your own is also an important part of preparation.

When I feel like it's "my" room, I feel more like a host than a guest. I feel more welcoming to the audience. I want to greet them and welcome them to my space. I even feel more nurturing toward them, like I want to care for them the best I can while they're in my room.

If you haven't visited your room, not only are you walking in cold in terms of what the room looks and feels like, you're also putting yourself in the position of a guest rather than a host.

It's hard to be welcoming to your audience when you haven't been welcomed yourself.

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Trust your gut

I recently took a speaking engagement that, from the moment I accepted it, did not feel right.

The time between getting a commitment from the organizer to the date of the presentation was too short. I also cut short a business trip so I could fit it in.

After surveying the participants, I decided on a different course of action than usual. Instead of customizing my traditional public speaking presentation for the group, I created an almost entirely new presentation. In a too-short time frame, with a trip in the middle, while having house guests and undergoing bathroom renovations. I was still working on the timing in my hotel room the day before the presentation, which was a bad sign.

I was scheduled at the end of a full day of training, into a tight time slot. When I arrived, early, they were already a half hour behind schedule and exhausted. I didn't have an opportunity to meet or talk to anyone before I started as I usually do. Did I mention that this was a Sunday?

As I began my presentation, I noticed several people in the hot and stuffy room struggling to stay awake.

At the end, there was no time for questions, although I offered to stay and talk with people individually. But they were all in such a rush to get home to their families and other obligations, that they pretty much all grabbed their stuff and left.

I was unsatisfied. The presentation was just okay, in my opinion. The evaluations were positive overall, but could have been lots better.

There are things I should have done differently. And there are things the organizers should have done differently. But the bottom line is this: I never should have accepted the engagement.

Am I being too hard on myself? No. I should have gone with my gut on this one.

There have been plenty of speaking engagements over the years that were not ideal, but I knew I could and should make the best of the situation. This was not one of those times. Good learning experience, though!

Have you ignored your gut and paid the price?

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One more fire update -- with photos!

How about another update?

It's been two weeks since the fire. My burns have healed up nicely and are mostly ugly and itchy. Bub has not been so lucky. Some of his were not healing at all and have only just started to get with the program.

First of all, they didn't "declare" themselves for a few days, so it wasn't clear right away that he had a lot of second degree burns. And then his skin just refused to heal. I don't want to go into details about what the therapists had to do to make his skin start repairing itself. It's been pretty brutal.

It's been frustrating and he's still in a lot of pain, and he has to spend every day wrapped in bandages with his right leg elevated. But they have started to see improvement, and his treatment is now every other day or every two days instead of every day, which is nice. His left leg came out of bandages late last week.

Our big cabinet is still black and sooty inside, and no I haven't started cleaning the books yet. When we know for sure when the cleaning crew is coming, I will be motivated to get that stuff out of there.

The good news is that the cleaning/painting crew should be coming soon. They've got some cool system for getting the smoke smell out of the house and for cleaning and painting the damaged areas so it's like new. We were due for a paint job in the kitchen, having lived here for 16 years.

I took all the toxic and flammable items to the hazardous waste drop-off site last weekend. It's a relief to have all that stuff gone; I actually got a little choked up as I drove away from the site. We've already replaced our fire extinguisher, although we should really have two.

I've been hearing from a lot of people who didn't have fire extinguishers before and had a lot of rusty flammable cans in their kitchens, who are making the same changes we are. I'm glad to hear that they are taking action so this bizarre thing doesn't happen to them!

Our friends are so awesome, and even though we really didn't need anything, people have generously offered us food, places to stay, help with cleaning, and laundry facilities.

I had mentioned to one friend in an e-mail that one of the sadder things we had to throw away the night of the fire was a beautiful pile of apricots and nectarines we had just bought at the farmers market that morning. When I saw her a week later, she arrived with a lovely gift bag full of fruit! That's one of the sweetest things anyone has done for us.

Now for the pictures! To spare the delicate sensibilities of some of my readers, I've put up a page where you can see Bub's gory burns. Cuz I know some of you want to see them, you dirty rascals. These are from last week. Enjoy. . . or not!

Original post

First update

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Play to your strengths, but make sure it serves the audience

Twice in the past week, I've had clients tell me about aspects of their presentations that they do because they're good at it. Not because it suits the audience's needs, or even that the audience particularly appreciates it.

It's okay to do what you're good at and what you enjoy doing. After all, why give presentations if you're not having a good time?

But keep in mind that, just because you are skilled at some aspect of presenting your message, it doesn't mean your audience is benefiting from it.

Pay attention to the audience's body language. Pay attention to the feedback you're getting in your evaluations. Do they start shifting in their seats and looking at the clock when you're reading from your book? Do they seem halfhearted when you have them do your favorite icebreaker exercise?

Read the audience before, during and after your presentation, and if something isn't working, ask yourself why. Can you cut back on the amount of time the activity takes? Can you revise it so it's more audience-friendly?

If you can't make it work after trying it several different ways, dump it.

Keep trying new things, and by all means, do what you love. But if the audience isn't responding, then it's not worth it to you or them to hang onto an ineffective activity.

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

How do you read Speak Schmeak?

There are three ways you can keep up to date with Speak Schmeak:

1. Come to this site every day to see if I've posted.

2. Get updates delivered to your inbox by entering your e-mail address into the box in the sidebar.

3. Get updates in a reader by clicking on the little orange square button in the sidebar.

What's a "reader," you ask?

If you like to read a lot of blogs and want to organize them all in one place (either online or on your desktop), you need a feed reader, aka newsreader or aggregator.

Popular web-based feed readers include Google Reader (that's what I use), Bloglines, My Yahoo, and others. Search for "feed reader" in Google and you'll find a bunch.

The cool thing about a feed reader is that all your favorite blogs are in one place, and you can instantly see which ones have new posts. You can save posts that you like, share them with friends, organize them into folders by custom categories, and more.

Here's a snapshot of my feed reader (click on the image to see it full-size):

On the left you can see part of the list of my blogs. Titles in bold have new posts. In the main window is where I read the post.

It's super easy and saves me a ton of time. If you don't yet have a reader and find yourself going to several blogs a day, then it's time to set yourself up!

Tell me in the comments: How do you read Speak Schmeak? Feed reader? E-mail subscription? On the Speak Schmeak site?

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

Are you playing like a champion?

What's your excuse for not giving it all you've got as a speaker?

"I do fine without practicing." (Oh yeah? Says who?)

"I didn't have time to prepare." (I bet you found plenty of time for Facebook or Pinterest.)

"I'm not 100% today." (Your audience still needs 100% of you.)

"I'm just not good at public speaking." (So learn how to improve.)

"Everyone else does it this way." (And you're just like everyone else?)

"It's not an important presentation." (Then don't waste the audience's time.)

As you know, I love athlete analogies, and here's another one. I saw it on the t-shirt of a young woman at the track where I work out. She was running laps with her soccer team and clearly pushing herself.

"No excuses. Play like a champion."

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

Public speaking interview with Francisco Saraiva

Francisco Saraiva, the president of Oporto Toastmasters in Portugal, has been doing a series of interviews with public speaking experts on his blog FranciscoSaraiva.com.

One thing I'm enjoying about reading the interviews is that, while some questions were the same across the board, Francisco had read each person's blog or website and asked some personalized questions as well.

While you're there, check out his about page. Fun and concise at the same time!

Read my interview here!

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

Get plenty of sleep before your presentation

When I'm at the final stage of preparation, practicing my presentation, I like to take a day off in between practices to let the content and chronology settle into my brain and embed itself into my memory.

I always felt intuitively that this rest period helped me retain the information better, and now I find that there's research to back up this practice!

There is still not a complete understanding of how our bodies benefit from sleep, but recently there have been more studies confirming that sleep improves the brain's ability to organize and retain different kinds of information.

Here's a quote from one article I read:

"Researchers have uncovered new evidence that sleep improves the brain’s ability to remember information. Their findings demonstrate that memories of recently learned word pairs are improved if sleep intervenes between learning and testing and that this benefit is most pronounced when memory is challenged by competing information.

. . . This work clarifies and extends previous study of sleep and memory by demonstrating that sleep does not just passively and transiently protect memories; rather, sleep plays an active role in memory consolidation."

This article talks about how different stages of sleep preserve different types of memories:

"Sleep apparently rearranges memory within the brain. 'We presume that it's organized into a more efficient storage location,' Walker says. 'That means you can recollect that information the next day much better than the day before.'

Sleep has this effect only on procedural memories, that is, memories associated with a physical procedure such as playing a piano or riding a bike. These memories are normally used without conscious effort for motor skills that can't readily be described in words. Furthermore, it's only light dreamless sleep that works this magic.

By contrast, deep dreamless sleep consolidates, or crystallizes into long-term memories, newly formed declarative or episodic memories, such as what you had for dinner yesterday or the fact that Paris is the capital of France. Sleep stabilizes these memories and prevents them from decaying over time."

This is just one more reason not to wing it, and to give yourself plenty of time to practice, so you can have "off" days and enough sleep to let your presentation sink into your memory.

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Are you done learning?

On the final episode of Top Chef, one of the contestants was using an innovative cooking technique. Renowned French chef and co-owner of the three-star restaurant Le Bernardin, Eric Ripert, having been enlisted as sous chef to another contestant, went over to observe more closely. He said,

"As a chef, the day you don't learn any more, it means you're so egomaniac you're blind."

When's the last time you learned something new in your field?

Or do you think you already know everything you need to know?

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500

I didn't notice it on the day, but I just realized that my June 12 post was my 500th!

How have 500 posts come out of me? I have no idea, but I'm going to do my best to keep 'em coming and hopefully providing something of value to you, my readers, every day.

Thanks for motivating me to keep writing!

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

Take two Prozac and call me in the morning

Here's another interesting article about the medicalization of behavioral problems and social anxiety issues.

Some quotes from the article:

"But therapy has its critics: 'Shyness has become an unhealthy state of mind for individuals living in contemporary Western societies,' according to a University of Sussex report. 'Insofar as its behavioural symptoms imply a failure to achieve certain cultural values, such as assertiveness, self-expression and loquacious vocality, shyness is increasingly defined as a problem for which people can, and should, be treated.'"

---

"At the University of East Anglia, Dr Ray Crozier, an expert on shyness, makes a similar case about the medicalisation of blushing. He argues that, in many cases, there is nothing inherently wrong, painful or unhealthy about blushing, yet it is treated both with surgery and drugs. More often than not, he says, the problem is in the eye of the perceiver.

'Shame and embarrassment are powerful experiences that lead people to find a way to escape from them. But anxiety about blushing is not caused by inherent properties of the blush, and something important would be lost if blushing were eradicated.'"

Previous related posts:

Public speaking: fear vs. phobia

Shyness, social phobia, or none of the above?

More on shyness and social phobia

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

How do you know when you've nailed it?

A quick "hello" and welcome to new readers who are finding me on Alltop!

Today I gave a short presentation on using stories in public speaking. I had an opening story planned out when I was preparing last week, but what better story to illustrate storytelling than that of our house fire? So I used the fresher story instead.

As my opening, I told the story building up to the point of waiting for the firefighters and discovering that our skin was burning.

There was a loud groan and some laughter when the group realized that they weren't going to hear the end of the story. At that point, they weren't even sure it was true.

I went on to talk about why stories are important in public speaking and how to use them, and then wrapped up with the remainder of the fire story (finally!), lessons learned and a call to action to use more stories in their presentations.

Why do I feel that I nailed this presentation? Because the audience was engaged the whole time.

Why was the audience engaged the whole time? The story and its relationship to the topic.

But not just any story: It was my story. It was a real story. And it was an emotional story.

A few tips for using stories in your presentations:

1. Use your own, or those of your clients or other people you know.

Using a stale story that's been circulating through e-mail or around the Internet is a surefire way to bore your audience. Stories connect the speaker to the audience; help them relate to you by using your own experiences as much as possible.

2. Use humor.

You don't have to tell jokes. Find the natural and organic humor in your story. Your audience will be able to relate much more to the real humor in the situation than to a canned joke.

3. Be descriptive.

Act things out. Describe colors, shapes, smells, tastes, and anything else that brings the story to life and creates a mental picture for your audience. (Yes, I acted out the fireball.)

4. Evoke emotion.

Tell a story that makes people laugh, cry, feel angry, feel excited, feel anticipation -- just make them feel something.

5. Prepare in advance.

Telling a story is an art. Your beginning, middle and end have to be crystal clear. If you forget part of your story or don't tell it in an organized way, your audience will be confused about how it applies to your topic. Your message will not be received. Practice your story!

Especially gratifying was when the speaker who went after me spontaneously added a story to the beginning of her presentation. Yes, she was winging it, but the story fit her presentation and it was a great effort to add some pizzazz to her opening.

How do you know when you've nailed it?

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It's not about you

Andrew Zhan sent me this video the other day, and I loved it. It's got a profound message. It's not geared to speakers, but the message is applicable: It's not about you.

There are times when audience members don't seem to be engaging with you. Sometimes they seem indifferent, and sometimes they seem downright hostile.

If it's a large percentage of the audience, you might be doing something to encourage their behavior. But in general, when it's a few people, it's not about you. Don't take it personally. We all have our issues, our distractions, our preoccupations.

If you can meet the audience where they are, and understand their possible barriers to hearing and retaining what you have to say, you will connect with them on a deeper level, and your message has a much better chance of getting through.

Watch the video and think about how you can apply this message to your speaking -- if not your life.



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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

New public speaking resource

Alltop.com is a site that aggregates all the top content from around the Web onto one page, for any topic you like.

Now they've added a page for public speaking and communication at speaking.alltop.com.

You can find links to the last five posts for all your favorite speaking blogs there, including Speak Schmeak!

Thanks to Andrew Dlugan for making it happen!

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em. . .?

We've all heard this advice: Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em; tell 'em; tell 'em what you told 'em. (After reading and writing that several times, I'm not sure that's really English any more.)

The problem with this advice is that it's simplistic. It's also boring.

On the one hand, this is a classic way to structure a presentation. On the other hand, if you really step onto the podium and "tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em," you are going to put your audience to sleep rather than energize them.

The flaw in this advice is in the first piece: Tell 'em. Because it's simplistic, many speakers take it too literally. They stand up and spend the first couple of minutes (if not sharing their lengthy bio and explaining why they are the perfect presenter to be sharing their infinite wisdom with you) outlining the presentation. Or they put a PowerPoint slide of an agenda on the screen. Snooze.

Instead, before the "telling," should be the "engaging." An opening that evokes some kind of emotion in your audience should always come before the telling. In fact, a strong opening can transition more smoothly into your introduction and give it additional interest. Here's an example:

"In 1990, I was hit head-on by a car while driving my scooter. I wasn't wearing a helmet; my head and the car's front end met in the middle of a busy intersection. I was lucky that nothing was broken and that I didn't suffer a more severe head injury. Recovery was slow, and soon after the accident I started having panic attacks.

I couldn't sit in a crowded restaurant. I couldn't tolerate the middle seat at the movie theater. Elevators made me anxious, and my biggest fear was sitting inside an airplane for ten hours. With a trip to Europe already planned, this was going to happen, whether I liked it or not.

I went to a therapist who specialized in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She taught me breathing, visualization and relaxation techniques. I started to find myself reversing the panic attacks. If I felt one coming on, I could close my eyes, visualize a calming scene, breathe deeply, and conquer the anxiety. It was a powerful tool.

However, I realized that I could also CREATE a panic attack, just by thinking of the trigger. So now, I could sit in the middle seat at the movie theater, but I would start worrying, 'What if I have a panic attack?' By letting the idea get comfortable in my mind, I could create the panic attack out of thin air. Now I had the tools to combat the attack, and I also had the tools to create one from scratch.

Your mind is extremely powerful. It creates fear where there is none. However, you can control the fear and anxiety you experience around public speaking. You have the power to turn negative and fearful thoughts into positive ones. Today we're going to talk about how to do that."

You can still "tell 'em." Just "engage 'em" first. Tie your opening story, quote, question or statistic into your introduction, and you've just found a way to keep your audience on the edge of their seats rather than struggling to keep their eyes open.

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On The Everything Page you'll find everything you need to build visibility, credibility and influence through engaging presentations that move your participants into action: freebies, low-cost products and courses, and 1:1 coaching!

Fire update

Thanks everyone for your comments and e-mails. We're doing very well. Here's the original house fire post for reference.

My small burn is healing up nicely, and Bub's burns (which are more extensive than mine and included "partial thickness" burns as well) are still being treated and are improving. They pulled off all the dead skin today from his blisters. Ewww.

We learned that there is new terminology for burns: they are now called "superficial," "partial thickness" or "full thickness" instead of first, second or third degree.

One thing I didn't mention yesterday is that the reason there were rusty items under the sink is that there was a plumbing leak. A damp cabinet is a perfect environment for a metal can to rust or corrode, leading to the structural weakness which caused our spray paint can to explode. I hope you're all checking what's under your sinks!

We can't dispose of our hazardous materials until the weekend, which is a drag. Every time I open the cabinet and smell that paint smell, I have a moment of panic. Last night a dish made a noise as it settled in the sink, and we freaked out. The pilot light on the oven is still off, and we're a little scared to turn it back on.

After the insurance adjuster comes today, we can start cleaning. We hope to get a professional service to clean, especially the worst black sooty areas, because those folks know how to get rid of smoke smell. My cookbooks (100+) are all covered with soot and fire retardant. Yuck.

Our cats handled the whole thing so well, we're quite shocked. They were real troupers and were not traumatized at all!

What's interesting is that, while I'm looking for good links on fire safety, none of the major sites say anything about stuff under the sink. Everything I'm finding about fire safety in the kitchen is about cooking fires.

Anyway, here are two:

U.S. Fire Administration

FireSafety.gov

Here's a good checklist that does include some information about keeping flammable items outdoors and away from heat sources.

Tomorrow I'll get back to some public speaking stuff. For now, it's all about cleaning, burn treatment, and on top of that, getting ready for a TV appearance tonight!

Second update

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A lesson in fire safety

Tonight as we sat watching TV, we heard a big boom that blew open the doors under the kitchen sink.

As we were bending down looking into the cabinet, trying to figure out what happened, fumes (that we later learned were from a rusty spray paint can that had exploded) traveled across the floor to the oven and to the pilot light, causing a fireball to burst out of the oven, burning us both.

We're okay. :-)

Bub has first- and second-degree burns on his arms and legs. I have one small second-degree burn on the side of one ankle. We both lost arm and leg hair.

Destruction-wise, Bub used the fire extinguisher to put out the resulting fire and now that stuff is all over the kitchen. Plus, another small fire started inside our main cabinet with all the cookbooks and cat food, and now there's a mess to clean up in there.

We did spend a couple of hours in the emergency room for the burns and being monitored for smoke inhalation and whatnot, and we have some follow-up treatment to the burns, but everything is good. Painkillers are doing their job. I had to shave Bub's head because so much of his hair was singed. He was due for a haircut, anyway.

We managed to corral all three of our cats into our neighbor's house, and she took care of them while we were gone. The firefighters left all of the junk from under the sink in a trash bin outside, which now we're going to have to figure out how to dispose of.

The windows are all open and the fans are on, and the fire inspector let us come back, so it's smelly but safe. (By the way, aren't firefighters, EMTs and ER staff cool? They are just so calm in emergency situations. It's really hard to stay in a panic around them.) We might even go to bed sometime tonight, but we're still pretty wound up.

So here's what we learned:

1. Don't keep old, rusty cans of solvents and spray cans in the kitchen. Get rid of anything that's corroded, and especially corroded and flammable. It was the pressure inside the weakened can that caused it to burst. Add a nearby pilot light and you've got the "perfect storm."

2. Keep the fire extinguisher OUTSIDE of the kitchen so you don't have to run THROUGH the fire to get to it.

One thing for sure: it's a good thing we were home. If we had been out, the place might have just burned up.

So some Sunday plans have gone by the wayside, but we're fine, the cats are fine, and we've got a relatively small mess to clean up. Pretty good turnout, considering.

First update

Second update

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Public speaking blogosphere review

I've pointed you to Andrew Dlugan's blog before, but today I want to mention his "Week in Review" Saturday posts that gather interesting content from around the public speaking blogosphere and plops them down all in one place.

It's a great way to get caught up on valuable public speaking posts on a wide range of topics, and you know they'll be good because Andrew has done the filtering. I don't know how he has the time to do all of that screening, but let's just be thankful that he does!

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Some random news

If you've checked out my services page before, you might have noticed my Annual Mentor Package (formerly called Annual Retainer Package). And you might have thought it odd that this package only included three coaching sessions! Ooops!

That's what I get for cutting and pasting and then not proofreading carefully. It's been fixed. Coaching is unlimited. Now that's what I'm talkin' about.

Also, I'm going to be a guest on a local television show called "Secrets of Self-Improvement" this coming Monday. I don't know yet when the show will air, but I will post clips sometime soon.

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Are you bershon?

This cracked me up.

I never was. I'm afraid you won't find a bershon picture of me anywhere. I was always a big ham with a ridiculous toothy smile. OR, my mom would inevitably snap a photo while I was eating, talking or chewing gum (I was doing one of those things -- and still am -- almost constantly). Is there a Flickr group for photos of people in mid-chew?

Thanks to Laura Bergells for bringing this to my attention (note that her link to Michael Bierut's post no longer works, but the post I linked to above is the same one).

I wonder if Matchstick knows his sister (pictured) is bershon?

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PowerPoint disaster

My least favorite presentation at the World Tea Expo was a report that could have been really interesting and engaging had the presenter chosen to take a different approach.

Instead, it was an example of everything that can go wrong when a presenter relies entirely on data pasted into PowerPoint to make his presentation.

Each line was capitalized like a book title:

APTI Germinates, Morphs Into STI

The slides were packed with bulleted text, each line divided by colons, semi-colons, commas, parentheses and random punctuation into mini-points within points (yes, you're seeing an exclamation point next to a comma):

The 'Faith' Germinal Years: Multi-Unit Chains? How About Profitable Single Units!, Coffee BuZzzzz

Lots of bullets included completely cryptic text that made no sense until explained:

Why Bother? No Choice Soon = Science (testing) Advances, Media 'Instant Messaging' Globally, Risk Management, Sustainability No Longer Altruistic

Then there were the lines using abbreviations and ampersands to make more room to fit more stuff:

Sales of tea USA $10 Billion 2010 (now conveniently "$12B" or "we predict $10B") & 1,500 Tea Outlets

And in general, there was just too much text per bullet, per slide (the busiest slide had twelve lines of text plus a title):

An Ironic Mechanism for Global Crisis Support: The International Energy (fuel, capital, health) Drought Macrocosmically Reflects Upon Personal & Business Energy Shortages -- The Power of Tea to Unite, Energize, Focus & Revive is Infinite

On the one hand, the speaker read pretty much directly from the slides, so technically, we could have taken the slides as handouts and not wasted time sitting there.

On the other hand, much of the text was so mysterious that we never could have understood it without the explanation.

Overall, a disappointing way to spend an hour.

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Stories and analogies

One reason Dr. Tea's presentation was effective at the World Tea Expo was his use of statistics, stories, analogies and examples.

He started out by telling us that Americans drink "115,000 cups of coffee every 15 seconds of every minute of every day."

He gave examples of how coffee addiction is like cigarette addiction.

He equated the "intoxicating smell of coffee" with the sirens' song. (I have to agree with that one. . .)

He told his own story of being addicted to coffee.

And he had several "catch phrases" to make his points. "There's no money in good health," was used to illustrate his point about the lack of attention to tea as a health panacea in scientific research. He would come back to it occasionally to remind us of this point.

Another was, "You look younger with every sip," in describing the hydrating effects of tea vs. the dehydrating effects of coffee.

Overall, it was a colorful and engaging presentation: statistics and data balanced by stories, analogies and examples to bring life to the numbers and charts.

(If you're wondering why coffee dehydrates and tea hydrates, yet they both have caffeine, it has to do with the L-theanine in tea, beta brain waves, alpha brain waves and stuff. Here's one article that talks about it.)

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The grandmother cliché

Way back when I started this blog, I wrote about clichés, and specifically the expression, "It's not your grandmother's [insert item here]."

Yesterday, I read this in an article: "I use the 'grandmother' rule. Put simply; present anything so that your grandmother would understand it."

And today I read this: "You can learn a lot about marketing from grandmothers. And you thought they were just great for baking cookies."

I remember both of my grandmothers as hardworking women, employed outside the home, who were physically active. Neither of them ever wore their hair in a bun or knitted a shawl. My mother's mother was still working full time shortly before her death in her 70s and I don't believe she ever baked a cookie in her life.

My grandmothers were both intelligent and savvy women, and wouldn't have had trouble understanding anything you could dish out as a speaker.

These days, grandmothers are even more savvy, educated and hip (not that there's anything wrong with the knitting, baking, nurturing-stereotype granny).

So why allow these stereotypes to persist in your writing or speaking? If I were in the room and a speaker used one of these clichés, I'd have a pretty hard time listening to anything else he said. And imagine all the grandmothers in the room who he'd be insulting.

Be careful how you stereotype people in your presentations. We're (for the most part) pretty sensitive to gender, ethnic and religious stereotypes these days, but there are some groups out there that it's still considered okay to make fun of or treat as though they're some sort of myth rather than real people.

The only thing that grandmothers all have in common is that they're women who've had children who've had children. Period.

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Tea made me a very sexy man. . .

Over the past weekend we attended the World Tea Expo (see posts here and here from last year when I was a speaker there). So much better in Vegas than Hotlanta. Thank you.

This time I was merely a participant, scoping out products and attending educational seminars as the "vice president" of my husband's company which is in the process of opening a tea shop.

There was the usual mix of engaging speakers, dreary speakers, and horrible PowerPoint.

I'm going to post more in the next few days about the Expo, but for now, I wanted to share a fun story from one of the seminars.

"Dr. Tea," aka Mark Ukra, the passionate and slightly eccentric owner of the Tea Garden and Herbal Emporium in Los Angeles, gave an inspiring talk on "converting the coffee culture" on Friday.

He shared his story of being addicted to coffee for many years, drinking up to 15 cups a day. He said that, when he switched from coffee to tea, women started complimenting him on his skin. Then, his relationships with women started to improve.

"You know what else happened after I changed? I became a very sexy man."

The audience burst into laughter.

He went on, "If you're jacked up on caffeine, you can't listen." He said that drinking tea instead of coffee made him more mellow, better able to listen to the women he was dating. Suddenly, women started pursuing him, instead of the other way around.

He finished this segment of the talk with this suggestion: "Any single guys in the room? Pick up some tea, baby."

Great use of subtle humor in this presentation. More on Dr. Tea and other speakers later. . .

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