Clippings

Back to Basics: Dale Carnegie on Speaking

At All About Presentations, some good advice from Dale Carnegie:
You know about Dale Carnegie. He is famous for his book How to Win Friends and Influence People
. He wrote many books in his lifetime. One such book was The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking. I picked it up from my bookshelf one night. My main interest was to know how relevant is Dale Carnegie in today's PowerPoint age. He taught public speaking way back in 1940s but is he relevant today? What does his book have to offer to you and me?

Well I skimmed through the book and loved what I read. I am going to summarise some things which I liked and I feel will help you become better at presentations and public speaking. This is not a book review but captures some of the learnings from the book.

Read the whole post for the good stuff, http://ow.ly/x1yN#close=1

Book Review: Better Beginnings by Carmen Taran

“A good speaker with bad beginnings is like a fitness trainer who smokes.”

-- Carmen Taran
via sixminutes.dlugan.com

From the Six Minutes review of Better Beginnings: Most speech opening advice begins by telling you the types of openings you can try. For example, you might open with a personal story, a startling statistic, or a quotation. However, none of these types of openings are inherently focused on your audience. (A story or statistic can be focused on the audience, but it might not be.)

I really like the approach taken in Better Beginnings because it is organized not around types of openings, but according to the emotional or cognitive response you would like to trigger in your audience. Audience-focused!

120 Ways to Boost Your Brain Power

Boost your Brain Power

Here are 120 things you can do starting today to help you think faster, improve memory, comprehend information better and unleash your brain’s full potential.

  1. Solve puzzles and brainteasers.
  2. Cultivate ambidexterity. Use your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, comb your hair or use the mouse. Write with both hands simultaneously. Switch hands for knife and fork.
  3. Embrace ambiguity. Learn to enjoy things like paradoxes and optical illusions.
  4. Learn mind mapping.
  5. Block one or more senses. Eat blindfolded, wear earplugs, shower with your eyes closed.
  6. Develop comparative tasting. Learn to properly taste wine, chocolate, litemind.com

Follow the link to see even more reader responses.