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!