You’d think creating a blank mind would be easy, but for people who overthink, meditation can be a challenge. As we try to clear our minds, we start thinking about how to not think (more thinking) and it’s like looking in a mirror at a reflection of a mirror.

This is a good example of a belief system that’s taken over to where they now actually believe it.

You’re talking to someone and their mind is elsewhere; they’re only partly here in the moment with you.

People are confident because they know they are. It is not something someone makes them or gives them.

You certainly wouldn’t start a presentation with: “I’m sorry to take up your time, sorry you have to listen to me, and sorry that I’m not very good.”

We assume we’d spend attention like we’d spend currency. Thoughtfully. But we don’t.

If you recorded yourself, changed all the words to gibberish, and just listened to your sound, what would it sound like?

Most of what we learned about how to communicate, we learned by accident.

I think it’s safe to say that we don’t look forward to many of the meetings we have to attend. Why?

We’ve grown to think of motivation as something done TO us by a coach, a carrot or a stick.

Do you think additively—focusing on what’s good or do you think subtractively—noticing what’s missing?

We had thoughts way before we were aware we had them. It was as though they were just there and we didn’t have a say in it. But where did they come from?

Use expectations as the software of your mind. Load them with excitement and goodness. Make them so want-able that every fiber of your being wants to aim themselves at them.

How much control do you have over the content and impact of your thoughts? More than you think.‍Start by listening to what you think. What words do you use? How critical are you? How nurturing? What emotions result? Those feelings impact your results.

A great strong machine. That’s what expectation is; it projects outcomes. Project positive ones. You can easily predict the results of expectational statements like this: ‘It won’t work out,’ ‘I’ll get nervous,’ ‘I won’t know what to say.’

We get what we believe we deserve. What expectations do you have of your life? That is probably what your life is like. I believe that expectations precede—daresay—cause reality.

Our interaction with people all day long either fuels or drains our battery. To start, we should put more people in our lives who add to our batteries than drain them. You might, however, have to wean yourself gently away from toxic people.

Worry, by nature, is usually negative: “What if something goes wrong?” “What if they don’t like me?” “What if, what if, what if...”

People who like to dump their woes on you, are battery drainers. They are problem-oriented and often bring them to you and then YOU have to use YOUR battery to fix them.

What if the time we spend at work added to our battery instead of depleted it? Our belief systems suggest that work consumes about eight hours of battery, right?

Stop thinking and run silently like a submarine for a little while. You’ll better see your battery level. How full or empty? What if we could have more full more often?

One of the best things you can do for your battery level is manage your interactions with others. Don’t let some people drain you. Don’t let them need your energy too much. You can help steer but they shouldn’t need you to supply their energy. If they do, teach them self-reliance.

If your battery is about fullness, can it self-perpetuate like an alternator on a car? Yes. What if work generated at least as much energy as it consumed?

Good interaction with people—that’s what fuels our battery. ‍We interact with people all day long and that impacts our battery—plus or minus. To start, we can work at having more people in our lives who add to our batteries than drain them. You may have to wean some toxic people out of your life.

Talk about their value. Pay attention when they talk; listening by itself is a gift these days. Notice what someone’s life is like; celebrate and empathize.

Do you attract people who suck the life out of your battery? They’re problem-oriented and needy and they need you to spend your energy to fix them.

Your battery doesn’t have to be at full power all the time but, if you stay at 51% or more, confidence becomes your default.

Think of people you like to be around at work. Why do you like being around them? What impact do they have on you?

There are lots of ways to spread worth. Listen to people’s thoughts, consider their ideas, and empathize with their feelings. Open your eyes and just pay attention to them. See what and how they see. Paint goodness on them for others to notice. Shine a light on them by recognizing their accomplishments.

Making the transition into new thinking habits is both easy and hard. ‘Easy’ because you don’t need any resources. ‘Hard’ because you may have habits of negative expectation and, when you try to change them, you encounter resistance.

You put out energy and the other person puts out energy. The way the energies connect impacts everything about the relationship.

When you’re thankful for something, it sends a message to the subconscious that you’re happy to have that thing in your life. Somehow, gratitude invites more of it to visit you. Thankfulness is an energy-producing machine that never runs out. If you have the perspective of the glass-half-full, there is always more to be grateful for.

Draw yourself to what you want by repeatedly putting thoughts of deep desire in your head. Attract yourself to it.

How does practicing positivity in the workplace benefit you and your employees?

Without realizing it, we develop a perception of our self and, unless we work at modifying it, we turn into that exact picture.

Without realizing it, we develop a perception of our self and, unless we work at modifying it, we turn into that exact picture.

It certainly impairs us so we need to manage it. We manage it by deciding not to think it into existence; we don’t give it any power.

We’re going along and suddenly we think something negative about ourselves. We stop being aware of everything else and focus on the negativity. And then we become aware that we’re aware; the more we think that we don’t want to be self-conscious, the more we’re self-conscious.

When it comes to perception, what filters do you wear? They are directly linked to your values. Examine your perception settings—maybe even become aware that you have perception settings—and decide if they are doing you right.

We tend to value people who behave similarly to us—look at your friends. Does that mean we devalue people who act differently? Sometimes.

We blame diminishing attention on technology and how much it distracts us. But we permit it to interrupt us. We can’t eliminate all distractions but we can stop giving most of them the steering wheel. The phone beeps and what do we do?

Judging is deciding if something is good or bad, right or wrong. But sometimes, we forget the first part of the sentence: “In my opinion, this is good or bad.” Sometimes we judge as though my opinion is THE opinion. That my judgment is THE judgment.

Humans communicate on multiple levels or frequencies, in addition to words. If we notice what they say on those frequencies, we perceive unobvious messages about what they think.

What are we doing when we judge? We’re labeling things, putting them in their place, and creating meaning. Deciding the value of something makes us think we have power over it.

How does the process of judging work? ‍The first thing we do is to decide what the rubric of judgment is. The rubric is based on my values. If someone’s work or behavior aligns with my values, my judgment is positive; if it doesn’t it’s negative.

Judging others is a powerful way human beings get power. Throughout history we find countless examples of individual’s unbridled lust for power. But why?

In personal, social and professional relationships, each person can give energy or take energy. Some people favor taking energy from you for themselves; that leads to very one-sided relationships because they are focusing on themselves by feeding off of you. Quite simply, reduce your interaction with these people because you will give more than you receive.

It’s not enough to surround yourself with givers of energy; the energy they give should be positive. Resist people who give negative energy.

It’s OK to tune out unimportant things. So, what makes something unimportant enough to tune out?

With so much on our minds, we have become bad at paying attention to one thing and may not even hear what we think we’re listening to.

Where else is our mind when we think we’re listening? We’re simply not good at paying attention. We try to keep so many balls of attention in the air

Whom do you let influence you? Often, it is people we trust. Maybe they are wise and have given us good advice; maybe they were there for us when we needed them or helped us through difficult times. These are sound reasons. 

On the other side of the power of influence, what do you do to influence others? What do you do with your power? Is it for reasons of empowerment or subservience? Are your means forthright or deceptive? 

Is there absolute meaning or is it all relative? Some meaning is denotative, in that it comes from the dictionary. For example, the meaning of “tree” as a large vegetative object is easily agreed upon. But a lot of meaning is connotative, or fluid, and suggestion plays a big part in it. For example, the meaning of words like important, ethical, and different vary based on who is saying or hearing it.

It’s one thing to get nervous; it’s another to decide what nervous means. We all have a comfort zone and nervousness typically happens near the edges of that space. Sometimes it’s an underlying and growing feeling and sometimes it’s triggered by something specific. The emotions feel like they happen on their own, usually against our will.

We can change the meaning we give something. We have that power. On my first day of teaching at Lakeland University, many years ago, I was a nervous wreck. I shouldn’t have been because I’d taught a lot elsewhere but, on that day, I was definitely wound too tight.

In order to deconstruct nervousness, we have to ask what we’re nervous about. We’re worried that we’re being judged and judged poorly at that. If someone is judging that I’m not good, why am I validating that crap by worrying about it? They don’t know me. If they were a good person they would be wishing me well for putting myself out there and taking a risk.

What is confidence? It is an empowering feeling that puts fuel in our tank and gives us the power to succeed. It helps us believe in ourselves and stand up straighter. It underscores our worth and allows us to walk into the spotlight. It’s not a gift from the gods, however, bestowed on people by chance.

One of the ways to harness our thinking is to know that it isn’t accidental and it doesn’t have a mind of its own. Whether you realize it or not, you decide every thought you think; they are all born in your head.

Confidence is the state of feeling certain of yourself and sure of your abilities. It’s a quiet inner knowledge that you're capable. Confidence comes from the Latin word ”fidere” which means “to trust:” trust your skill, your knowledge, your preparation.

The ones who have it decide to think thoughts that breed confidence not thoughts that breed doubt. That’s easy. Many of us see confidence as something we don’t have and we struggle to gain it. Truth is, we were born with confidence and we just learned to be unconfident. We learned to doubt ourselves and sometimes we do it automatically.

We normally associate worry with negative things “What if this or that goes wrong?” When we worry about what we don’t want to happen, it often does. But what if we turn things around and do positive worry? “What if I succeed?” or “What if this goes well?”

Being around confident people improves my confidence because it rubs off on me. When I’m around confident people I hear positivity and I start thinking and talking like that. Being around them makes me more confident because they may also say things to encourage me. They may throw gasoline on my ideas which make them burn brighter. 

Confident people wield a magnetic power. That’s what draws us in. When people are drawn in, they follow. So confidence makes it easier to influence, negotiate and lead.

Self-Talk is like a Brain Coach that says things to you all day like a prescription. Have that coach say: ‘I prescribe confidence’ and ‘I prescribe abundance.’ Use ‘I enjoy’ instead of ‘I am’ also. ‘I enjoy being confident,’ not that you always are but when you are, you enjoy it right?

Confident people pay attention to their thoughts. They notice what they’re actually thinking. They listen and write them down. They look for ineffective or damaging ones that are actually producing what they don’t want. And they write new ones to produce what they want.

I would work to create new thought habits but, as my day would go on, I found myself reverting to my negative thoughts. I thought the negative ones for so long that I didn’t even notice that I’d reverted to old thinking. This part of the process take vigilance and tenacity.

Decision wields tremendous power because we become who we are, based on the decisions we make. Therefore, our very power is self-determined; it technically doesn’t need permission. Sometimes, though, we erroneously believe everything has to line up before we can make a decision. Or, that we need someone to give us their permission.

Our thinking is as in-depleteable a source of confidence as we decide it to be. People who have confidence give it to themselves. ‍We don’t have to accomplish x, y or z in order to be confident. It works quite the opposite. 

We all perform—all the time. I don’t mean in a theatrical sense. I mean that we perform tasks all day to accomplish things and achieve our goals (What do we do to get what we want?)

We can manage our thinking in many ways with great success. Part of it involves what we want. Do we just say it or do we desire it? If there is more energy and emotion involved, the desire will seek its own resolution.

Replace unmanaged thinking with managed thinking to achieve superior personal and professional growth.

How many people do you hear say that they’re not creative? Too many. This is a good example of a belief system that’s taken over to where they now actually believe it. They’ve put on the lenses of ‘I’m not creative’ through which they see the world. Then they find an overabundance of examples to support why they’re not creative. This happens with anything we start to believe of ourselves.

The best way to be creative is to not try. If you want a good idea, listen to the subconscious and you’ll hear the million ideas that are already there. Those people we label as “creative” aren’t necessarily so; they simply know how to put their ear to the ground, listen to what the universe is saying, and get out of the way.

We live on a planet that’s rotating a star that’s hurtling through a universe of inexplicability. That’s pretty vulnerable. And it’s OK to be vulnerable; it connects us to other human beings. We tend to think of vulnerabilities as weaknesses. What if they weren’t; what if their humanity made them strengths?

We have millions of thoughts every month. There isn’t someone in our minds having them for us. We have them, no one else.

Are some of the people speaking for your business anemic speakers? Is their message unfocused? Are they uncomfortable in front of people? Do they dislike speaking? Are they focused on themselves? Do they barely make eye contact? Are they monotone and do they enunciate poorly? And worse, does the audience long for their presentation to be over?

The worst thing a vast majority of presenters do is focus on their presenting. “What if I forget something?” “What if they don’t understand?” “Do I have enough slides?” “Am I making sense?”

What is it you want your audience to understand and remember above all else? You should be able to articulate this in once cohesive sentence, like a thesis. It’s a lot of work to narrow down an entire speech to one sentence and that’s why most people don’t do it. But it’s worth every second of effort.

Good acting isn’t about the acting; it’s about the character. A good book isn’t about the author; it’s about the story. When you hear a great song, you don’t go home humming the band. You go home humming the tune that stuck with you.

The only time in which you can impact anyone is the present. People who have presence don’t worry about the past where they can’t do anything about anything. They don’t worry about the future (where they can’t do anything either). They think about and live in the tiny sliver of the here and now called the present where the rest of us live.

When something becomes predictable, we stop paying attention. When a speaker’s tone of voice or vocal rhythms aren’t unexpected, they sound like they know what’s coming next. When that happens, we don’t expect any surprises to look forward to and we stop paying attention.

What other people think of you can’t hurt you. Let’s put this theory to the test. Go ahead and think something terrible about the person next to you; it doesn’t affect them. Unless… If they saw you smirk when you thought the bad thing and then thought “Oh no, you know what that smirk means. It means they think I’m bad. And if they think I’m bad, it means they don’t trust me, and if they don’t trust me etc., etc,, etc.” With all this meaning they just assigned to the smirk, they gave you power.

Some people spend their lives building a wall around their comfort zone and, while that may protect them, it keeps their experiences and relationships finite. Some comfort zones are OK because they protect. For example, my comfort zone does not include sky diving and I’m fine with that fear.

A little self-consciousness is good. “Am I fitting into the world?” “Am I treating people well?” “Am I making healthy choices?” But too much self-consciousness destroys confidence and even the belief that you have worth. When you start second-guessing every decision you make, you become paralyzed. You even question your ability to make decisions you’ve made a hundred times. It would be like walking around carrying a mirror judging yourself constantly.

Informative speeches are inert. They are passive. They tell us information. Persuasive speeches are passionate. They are active. They engage and teach.

After a group listens to you, what do you want them to think? What do you want them to believe? What do you want them to do? 

To be honest, your audience doesn’t really care about you.

If in the middle of your presentation—poof—you were naked, your audience might be surprised THAT you were naked, but would they see anything that surprised them? We come in two flavors.

Nervousness is a state of anxiety that arises in response to a perceived threat. An alarm system goes off: a worry that something will go wrong?

When we get self-conscious, we turn a mirror on ourselves and judge everything we do very critically. When this happens, we start living in our heads, second-guessing every thought. And it becomes an endless loop.

Once you break up the old systems of creating nervousness, newly engineer better systems that create abundance. The old systems taught us that there was always an image toward which our subconscious brain steered us. We can deliberately and successfully replace that image.

Becoming aware of your own thoughts and feelings can lead to self-reflection, which can enlighten. The judgment that accompanies this awareness, can help you grow and elevate your consciousness. But when you overindulge in self-examination, you can create self-doubt and inadequacy.

Use this exact phrasing for a purpose statement when formulating why you are giving the speech. “My purpose is to persuade my audience how or why something does something.”

Your purpose statement said “to persuade my audience how or why something does something.” Your main points should be 3 hows or 3 whys something does something. EG: Tornadoes create havoc. How, how and how? 1. Tornadoes create havoc by devastating families with loss of life. 2. Tornadoes create havoc by destroying the homes where lives grew. 3. Tornadoes create havoc by obliterating the keepsakes of our ancestors. At the beginning of each section, dedicated to a main points, say sentences 1, 2, or 3 and then explain.

Never, ever, ever write out your speech fully. I know this may be hard for some of you but it impairs you when giving the speech. Putting every word down on paper seems like the diligent thing to do. You can organize your thoughts better and wordsmith what you say to perfection. It certainly makes you feel more confident when you get it all down on paper.

Instead of fully writing out your speech, use bullet points to capture the gist of what you want to say. Each short phrase should remind you of your points and then you can actually craft what you say WHILE you’re giving the speech. ‍By doing this, you’re delivering the presentation from your knowledge, not your notes. You’re having to figure out how to say it right here, right now, in front of everyone. ‍

You’ve spent a lot of time on your speech but your audience only gets to hear it once, so everything you say has to be geared toward making it easier for them to absorb. ‍Take them on a journey by having a beginning, a middle and an end. And use signposts: “First let’s get into this, next we’ll look at that, and finally we’ll tie it all together.”

The very first and the very last sentences you say can serve as bookends to tie it all together. The opening bookend can draw us in and excite us about the journey you’re about to take us on. It can be a startling quote, the beginning of a story, an evocating question, or something that takes us out of where we are and plants us into the world of your speech. The closing bookend should refer back to the opening so it feels like we’ve closed the loop. You can repeat the quote, end the story, or answer the question.

You wrote the speech so you know where it is going but the audience doesn’t. Make sure you let them know when you are moving from one idea to the next so they can keep up. Maybe pause before you start the new part. Maybe step forward. Maybe use a new energy. All these techniques will let the audience to shift gears with you. You will have all kinds of ideas you may think are brilliant. But their abstraction may get lost on the audience and they won’t know what you mean.