Clippings

Bring Your Personality When You Speak!

Next time you prepare your presentation,make it more personal, include a story involving you.

"It used to be that women thought they had to check their personalities at the door. But the more you need to hide, the less fulfilled you'll be. We need to bring more of ourselves into that door, into our workspace, so we feel more at home. " Charlene Li (Co-author of Groundswell, thought leader on emerging technologies)

Why Personality matters?

When people start talking about what happens to them, they become real. You can identify and you feel connected, closer. I am not speaking about disclosing your private life and secret garden, but moving from strictly professional to "more of YOU" into your professional life.

via geronimocoaching.com

A great post from Marion Chapsal's blog. She's directed it to women speakers, but I think there's something here for all of us. Go to the whole post for some great presentations that take the argument further and show that you really can make a difference.

Uh-oh.

The professors digitized 14 Christie novels (and included two more available in the Gutenberg online text archive), and then, with the aid of textual-analysis software, analyzed them for "vocabulary size and richness," an increase in repeated phrases (like "all sorts of") and an uptick in indefinite words ("anything," "something") — linguistic indicators of the cognitive deficits typical of Alzheimer's disease.
via nytimes.com

From The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas - Magazine - NYTimes.com, an indication of why verbal precision can be important. I've always been a fan of "indefinite words." My computer is full of files with "stuff" and "junk" in their names and my conversation is full of this kind of imprecision, too. Guess I better watch out.

Researchers say video games are good for the brain

The Irish Times reports that video games are stimulating to the brain

A multidisciplinary team of neuroscientists at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, has discovered that video games increase brain activity.

The team, consisting of neuroscientist and engineer Dr Philip Zeman, behavioural neurologist Dr Ron Skelton and PhD student Sharon Lee, is set to publish findings indicating that playing video games utilises the area of the brain associated with spatial reasoning and navigation...

The results grew out of a project to increase understanding of the potential for recovery in patients with brain injuries.

“Originally we were seeking to provide a new measure for tracking recovery,” said Dr Skelton. “It turns out that skill doesn’t really return after brain injury. It’s a matter of finding what areas of the brain are damaged, which are still functioning, and how to compensate.”

The development has potential applications in diagnostics for pharmaceutical prescriptions and for brain injury patients.

Once I would have welcomed this news to justify playing games, but I give watching Jeopardy and other TV game shows a lot of the credit for my recovery of cognitive skills after a stroke. Reported on Twitter by @BrainDamageNet,

 

The Moth gives storytellers center stage

Missy Hargraves looks nervous as she focuses on the dusty stage of the dimly lit El Cid in Los Feliz. She's hoping to tell a story on stage for the first time, in front of a packed house of strangers.

Every third Tuesday and last Monday of the month, budding storytellers like Hargraves put their name into a hat hoping to be one of the 10 selected to participate in an event called the Moth.
via latimes.com

I like to see stories about The Moth because I like the stories they bring me--the quality is almost always high. What can Toastmasters learn from these guys, though? Every storyI read has references to "packed house"; every photo does show crowded audiences. If you're a Toastmaster, can you say your club generates this kind of excitement and has this kind of following?