Here’s a special one-off article on the benefits of meditation and in particular mini-meditations – especially useful for those busy busy days!

“The more tranquil a [person] becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom.”
– James Allen, 1864-1912, Author of As A Man Thinketh

What Is Meditation?

The goal of meditation is to focus your attention and calm your mind. In general, meditation is best practiced in a quiet place with few distractions.

There are many different types of meditation, each of which involves different techniques. Transcendental meditation, for instance, entails repeating a word or phrase (known as a “mantra”), while tai chi is considered a form of moving meditation.

Although meditation is often practiced for spiritual purposes, the benefits of meditation also include greater physical and mental relaxation which can have a calming knock-on effect in all areas of your life, including business and speaking!

Why Meditate?

The benefits of meditation may include the following:

• relief of stress and/or anxiety – great for those pre-gig nerves.
• pain management
• improvement in mood and/or symptoms of depression
• improvement in sleep

Mini-Meditations

If you’re anything like me, trying to find a chunk of time to meditate each day becomes an effort.  Which is why I love mini-meditations. Many people (even in the work-place) use very brief meditations at strategic points during the day. I know speakers who have a visualization ritual before stepping on stage.  These meditative experiences may not be more than a minute or two in length – and I call them ‘mini-meditations’.

I like mini-meditations and think they can be a great tool for business and speaking.  You can use a mini-meditation at any point during the working day.  Useful if you’re in overwhelm, in stress, feeling frazzled or pulled into a squillion different directions.   They’re a great way to instantly tap into your inner calm.  A mini-meditation or mantra is also a particularly powerful tool before getting on stage.  Imagine inducing the feeling of utter calm and reassurance before you face your audience!

How To Mini-Meditate

You could close your eyes and take deep breaths, counting them.  Following one’s breath is a great way of focusing on the self.  You could repeat your mantra.  You could do some tai-chi moves!  You could have a visualization technique of calm and success. Anything that connects you back with your inner centre and gives you a feeling of calm.  A mini-meditation could simply be a breath of fresh air – literally and metaphorically.

Down With The Stress!

Mini-meditations, scattered throughout your workday and used pre-speaking gigs, can take the edge off tension buildups and made a marked difference in your ability to handle the stress of work or handle pre-stage nerves. Imagine handling work with a relaxed attitude! Imagine facing your audience whilst radiating inner peace! There’s also another great benefit – meditation is known to lower blood pressure.

So this week, why don’t you build some mini-meditations into your work day and observe the effect this has on your stress levels.  I think, like me, that you might find that taking time out to reconnect to yourself will reward you with a renewed sense of purpose and most certainly take away the overwhelm, leaving you with a feeling of peace.

• Stand Still
• There is nothing worse than a speaker who dithers and wanders aimlessly about the stage
• Standing still makes you feel more grounded…

…which gives you more confidence…

…which helps you to earn more money

• Be Strong, and Calm, and Centered. It makes you audience feel more comfortable with you.

If you are looking for more time in your day, then look no further than today’s article. One of the most important gifts you can give to yourself is the gift of learning how to manage your inbox.  It’s a time-saver….

In-box Stress

You know what “in-box stress” is, don’t you?  It’s that horrid feeling you have when you turn on your computer in the morning and groan at your overloaded in-box. 

Email Overwhelm

Back in the ‘old days’ all we had to manage was the telephones and the post.  These days we have email as well.  If you’re one of those people struggling to cope with the deluge you get sent each day, you’re not alone.   We all get way more e-mail than we can fully act on. The in-box gets bigger and bigger and rapidly spins out of control leading to email overwhelm and stress.

Letting The Inbox Rule Us

The real problem is not with reading email but rather with doing the tasks that come from the email.  Having to take action on each email eats a massive chunk of our day.   If you’re anything like most people, then you don’t have a natural way to prioritize your reactions to your email.  Instead you just try and do it all there and then – acting on each email as it comes in.  Not only can we not keep up that way, but all our important work does not even get done – we end up prioritizing the email over everything else – simply because we are letting our inbox rule us.

Taking Charge of The Inbox

Simple! Don’t read the messages as they come in.  Read them periodically, no more than every hour or so. Or perhaps even just once or twice a day.  Research shows that it takes several minutes to recover from each work interruption, and that’s what scattered email reading leads to.  Now for a big tip, turn off the email notifications!  That way you stop jumping each time a new email pings in.

The next step is this: don’t take significant actions on emails when you first read them – unless they are truly urgent. Instead, put those actions on your to-do list.

As you read through your batch of emails, task each one that needs action onto your to-do list.  Prioritize them as you would any other task.  This way you treat your email no more or no less importantly than the other tasks in your day.  I suggest writing your task list first, then checking your in-box, adding your email tasks to the list and then prioritising the entire list. That way your e-mail doesn’t rule you – you rule your email.

The End of In-box Stress

Converting emails to tasks is a powerful practice.  It gifts you time  – as you are not bogged down doing e-mail actions prematurely, you’ll get through your email much faster.  Conversion to tasks also stops email from completely hijacking your workday!

Before you were answering emails and taking action just because it was at the top of your in-box.  Now you’re putting the email action onto your single task-list and working from your priorities. As a result, the most important tasks get completed first, rather than the other way round….

Converting emails to tasks takes away the stress from managing your inbox. As the email tasks are now on one list, this means you can empty your in-box easily.  Your task-list holds all your actions so you can empty and file the inbox daily.

The freedom of an empty inbox is such a relief.  It takes away stress and gives you more time to get on with your important tasks.  Why don’t you make a start right now into tasking your email actions onto your to-do list and enjoy the extra time it gives you…..

• When you are doing a presentation you must stick to time
• At a multi speaker event if you over run, the promoter will not be happy.
• The speakers after you won’t like it either
• You can perfect your presentation timing by practice, practice, practice
• If you haven’t started to close by about 60-70minutes your close rate will start to fall off rapidly.

As a speaker, the first key area that you need to really always be focusing on building is your credibility. 

What is Credibility?
Credibility is the way that your market perceives you and it’s vital to be credible to them.

Why Is It Important To Have Good Credibilty?

Because your audience needs to trust you and promoters need to trust you.  Event planners need to trust you.  If you want to be in demand for speaking engagements then you need to be a sought-after person.

First and foremost, that means you need to be trustworthy.  You need to have a story to tell, have a reputation behind you and be credible.  Now, there are lots of ways of establishing and working on building your credibility.

What Should You Focus On To Build Your Credibilty?

1. Story
   Look at your background – what’s in your background becomes a really good reason why people should listen to you.
   What is it in your background that gives you some credibility?
2. Results
   Another part to your credibility is your results – things that you’ve personally achieved in your life.
   My credibility is based around how I made over $1.25 million in my first 12 months as a professional speaker.  That has credibility!
   We refer to this kind of credibility statement as a “hook”—it’s a hook that instantly captures people’s attention.  It captures their imagination and they get excited!
3. Profitability
   Another very important factor, especially if you’re doing multi-speaker events, where you’re doing affiliates, and you’re sharing profit etc with the host, is you need to also be a profitable speaker.  Promoters want to know that you can actually make sales.  That’s yet another thing that will add to your credibility.

Make sure that you constantly track and record your results!

4. Integrity and Authenticity
   Always focus on maintaining good relationships with promoters, event planners, and people that you’ve worked with in the past.  That’s a really vital part of it….  So that people can trust you.  Credibility is all about establishing and maintaining trust.
5. Testimonials
   Another really quick and easy way to get credibility is through the use of testimonials. 
6. Media Endorsement
   Another way of building credibility is 3rd party endorsement from the media.  So if you’ve been in the newspapers, magazines, and so forth, you can use that resource as part of your armour of credibility.
7. Success of Students
   If you’re an educator and you’re teaching people, then it’s really good to use the  success of your students, because that’s probably the best thing that you can use to reflect your own credibility.

Always look at building up credibility in order to become attractive to promoters and other presenters.

So, I’ve given you lots of useful tips here.  What one thing can you do this week to start building your credibility?  Could it be trying to get some media endorsement?  What about getting those testimonials together?  Or even working on your bio to strengthen your hook?  The sooner you start building your credibility, the more promoters and audiences will want to work with you!

• A really effective way to establish credibility with your audience is to use testimonials
• If you can get a testimonial from a known name in the industry then it will go a long way to establishing you as an expert in the mind of your audience.
• Written testimonials are OK – but video testimonials are better

In Part one of this 2 part series I looked at why to use success stories in your presentation and in this, the second part I’m expanding on how to use success stories in your presentation.  Remember, there’s nothing more influential than hearing how someone else has become successful to inspire people to action.

The “HOOK” to grab your audience from the get-go!

The best way to start a great success story is with an audience-grabbing opening question. It’s a fantastic way to engage your audience.  An obvious opening question would be,  “Does anyone here know Joe Bloggs?” 

Painting the Picture

The next step is the details of the story. When I met the person, here’s what their life was like before they joined my program.  Let the audience know the biggest challenge for that person that they needed to overcome.

Prove Success

Here is where you will explain how the tools were applied to create proven success. We are going to want to know those skills and lessons.  And then you show the results:

• Increased his closing ratio from his presentations three times
• Has more clients that he knows what to do with
• Is enjoying the financial rewards of that with his partner..

Good OR Good?!

Before Picture: My biggest challenge was!

After Picture: Ultimate benefit!

It’s key that you get into the details of the story by following these steps:

• Does anyone know …?
• Acknowledge that – “I wish you did…” or “Brilliant, you’ll love…”
• When I first met them – their biggest challenge was…
• What happened was…
• What that meant was…

Multi-Sensory Language

To take your success stories to another level, you can use multi-sensory language. This is what I call VAK:

• Visual
• Auditory
• Kinesthetic 

Provide a visual picture of what he/she looks like.  Include something he/she told you ‘She was telling me the other day..” which is the auditory part of the story. And kinesthetically, a real sense of power (you would act this one out a bit). So we get to know him/her even more.

You’ll love this TIP!

If you don’t have any success stories, go to your clients.

• Ask them what successes have they had.
• Find out what people have been up to or get on the phone to your clients.
• You can run “The World’s Greatest Testimonial Competition!”

Summary

By now, you know why and how to use success stories in your presentations!  So, if you still haven’t got any success stories, why don’t you make it your focus this week to gather as many as possible so that next time you give a presentation you can inspire  your audience to take the next step with you.

I have a real gem of a tip for you today. It’s about reconnecting with your passion. I get so many people asking me how they can find their passion I thought I’d give you this little nugget.

• Passion is that driving force – that oomph that enables you to just keep doing what it is that you do
• It enables you to connect with your audience because if you speak from your passion your audience will feel an emotional connection with you
• If you don’t have passion – you won’t inspire passion in your audience

Reconnecting with your passion

• Every week – for the next 12 weeks
• Take 2 hours per week and do something you loved as a child
• Just you – no family, no friends, no spouse, no children
• Just you and your inner child
• Connecting with your passion is not something you will figure out in your head – it is something you will feel with your heart

There’s nothing more powerful than using a success story in your presentation to prove what you say is true.  And there’s nothing more influential than hearing how someone else has become successful to inspire people to action.

Why You Need To Use A Success Story In Your Presentation

This is a bit of a no-brainer but I thought I would spell it out anyway.  Why do you need to use success stories in your presentation?  The key benefits of using success stories are:

• They hammer home your credibility.
• They convince your audience that you do what you say you do – that you can deliver; the bigger the results the better.
• They prove you have market trust in you – this makes your audience more receptive to putting their trust in you.
• It uses social proof perfectly – other people have risked their time and money investing in you.  It worked for them so it could work for you.
• By using someone else’s words to promote you, and not just you saying how good you are, it’s a compelling call to action.

What Makes A Good Success Story?

A good success story in a presentation should be brief and to the point. It should be a balance of enough detail and enough emotional impact and yet still be nice and clear.

The lesson in the telling of success stories of other people is take them back to the place where they were emotionally.  Paint out that journey from struggle to success. Share these stories with your audience as faithfully as you know them.  This is a really key point – be honest in your success stories because if you aren’t, this lack of honesty will come back and bite you.

The 5 Keys of How To Make A Good Success Story In A Presentation

• The “hook” to grab your audiences’ attention
• Painting the Picture
• Prove Success
• Using Multi Sensory Language
• A Success Story for when you don’t have a Success Story

A success story in a presentation is not about proving how good you are at what you do, although it certainly does that. It’s about opening up the emotional place and allowing people access to it. And then of course, you give them the tool that allowed you to make the shift. It’s this change that makes all the difference in the world.

In my next article, we’ll break this down and examine the 5 key components in more detail.  So in the meantime, if you don’t have any success stories why don’t you ask your clients and ask them what they’ve been up to.  Get on the phone to them and see what successes they’ve had.  You could even run the world’s greatest testimonial competition!

Good luck!

• You need a Niche an inch wide and a mile deep
• You must start with a small and specific group of people
• Once you become the King or Queen of that niche – Then you can expand
• If you try to go too wide at the start you won’t get anybody
• The smaller and more specific it is – the better you can be
• “The riches are in the niches“
• Your Niche will help you find your target audience and decide where to speak