7 Ways to Enhance Your Next Speech and Get Your Brain Moving
Posted on 14. May, 2010 by admin2.
Increase Your Brain's Brilliance
When you stretch your brain and your thinking, you actually create new pathways and build your brain power. This will increase your brilliance. Learn how to be brilliant with these 7 easy techniques.
First, I want you to remember that just as you learned to read, mastered math facts, and learned how to function as an adult – you can learn new skills, at any age. Your brain is a magnificent machine.
Here are 7 tips and techniques you can use to improve your brain. You can be more creative, solve problems more easily, be organized, feel confident, stay focused, stay committed to follow through, and be more relaxed.
- Double Doodle –begin by bringing your arms out in the middle of the air and start mirroring each other. Then take a pen in each hand and begin mirroring while writing on paper. Once you get the hang of it, start writing your name and drawing pictures.
Benefits: Stimulates both hemispheres of your brain at the same time. Your creative side and your logical analytical side. This is a great exercise to do while you’re preparing your speech. It helps you to have a fun, witty, creative speech that also has a clear message.
- Cross Crawl – bring your left hand to your nose and your right hand to your ear. Any movement that crosses your mid-line, left to right and right to left. You can bring your right elbow to your left knee, etc.
Benefits: This gets your left and right brain communicating by stimulating your corpus colostrum which connects your two brains. Once again this is a great exercise to do while preparing for your speech.
- Thinking Cap – Rub your ears.
Benefits: Improves focus and concentration by improving hearing and listening abilities and helps to cut out distracting sounds.This also stimulates over 400 acupressure points and improves circulation throughout your body. This is a great activity to do every day before any event.
- Calf Stretch – while seated bring your right ankle to your left knee. Focus on stretching and massaging the tendon in the back of your calf.
Benefits: This helps to move ones ideas and thoughts into spoken word. If one has a hard time getting their message across then this is a great exercise to do.This is great for everyone in leadership, as a great leader, one must be able to complete ones projects. In Toastmasters we are all working on our Leadership skills.
- Deep Breathe/ 3 Part Breath -Begin with your hands on your belly and as you breathe in, expand, as you breath out, release. Then move one hand onto your solar plexus (the space between the bottom of your ribs), breathe in from your belly up to your solar plexus. Then with one hand on your heart, breathe in from your belly, to your solar plexus and up to your heart. Exhale from the top, middle, down.
Benefits: Oxygen is needed to live. By breathing in more fully we have the ability to think clearly, focus and concentration. This will also slow down a racing heart so if you find that your heart is racing, pumping and your body is uncomfortable, this will physically slow it down and return it to a normal breath where you will feel more comfortable, calm and relaxed within. Great all day long and especially before a speech.
- Use your body for Confidence –here we did a great demonstration on how to use your body to appear and then feel more confident by sitting taller, with your shoulders rolled back and your chin forward.
Benefits: By taking on the posture of confidence your thoughts will soon follow. A way to enhance this is by noticing how your body feels when you are confident and when you are less confident. Notice and become aware of your thoughts during these times, too. By identifying your thoughts and feelings when you are confident, then you can bring them to your awareness when you need the confidence the most. Use this before, during and after your presentation. You want to project confidence throughout the meeting.
- Your thoughts –The Mind/Body Connection –Your thoughts affect your body. Imagine eating a lemon where ones mouth begins to water and one truly experiences this principle of learning how powerful ones thoughts are.
Benefits: You will have control over your thoughts. You can have the choice to worry, stress and think you’re going to do poorly during a presentation or you can utilize the power of your thoughts to improve your confidence to feel good and have fun.
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7 Elements To Permanent Change
Posted on 06. Apr, 2010 by Administrator.
How come making a change is so hard, difficult and challenging?
I believe it’s because we simply haven’t been given the process to make effective, permanent change. Without identifying these 7 elements, you’re likely to sabotage your success.
Here’s the 7 Elements to Change:
1. Identify and clearly state your goals. I love the SMART formula, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time Measurable
2. Desire: How motivated are you in attaining your goal on a scale of 1-10 (10 highly motivated). If it’s less than a 8, I recommend working on your motivation first.
3. Belief: Create a future vision of yourself already attaining your goal. What are you doing in this vision? What do you hear yourself saying to yourself? What are others saying to you? How do you feel? Include all of your senses in how you’re thinking, feeling, seeing, tasting and hearing.
4. Identification: Who do you currently identify with the same problem or challenge? Also, who do you identify who’s successful at your goal?
5. Self Sabotage: What are you self sabotaging behaviors? What new actions are you choosing to take instead?
6. Repetition: What habits are currently holding you back from reaching your goals? What new habits are you creating to reach your goal? Remember, it only takes 21 days to create a new habit.
7. Self Talk: What are you currently telling yourself about reaching your new goals? Is your self talk negative? Or positive and pumping you up?
I’ll be going into more detail of each element in the next blog. Until then, a great resource to jump start you into learning the elements of change is an blog talk radio show by Anastasia Netri who interviewed Andrea Spence on April 5th 2010.
How to End the Self Sabotaging Cycle
Here’s to YOUR Successes!
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How to Create WIN-WIN New Years Resolutions!
Posted on 11. Mar, 2010 by Administrator.
Are your New Years Resolutions realistic, or completely outrageous? What about setting up your New Years Resolutions in a win-win strategy?
For each goal, have 3 objectives.
1. A Minimum Goal. Something you can easily achieve by simply taking 1 step forward. This will help you create success and build momentum to keep moving forward.
2. A Target Goal. Your goal that stretches you a little further than you’re comfortable for and still realistically achievable. When you achieve this goal you’re extremely proud of yourself.
3. Outrageous Goal. This exceeds your current possibilities; it’s like shooting for the moon and expands your mind further.
I love this system by Raymond Aaron because it makes one feels successful from the very beginning. Sometimes the hardest step is the 1st one to take and once you’re in action it’s easy to keep moving forward.
Also, it reminds me of Brian Tracy’s saying on “How to eat an elephant?” …one bite at a time. It’s the continual work that pays off and creates the successful outcome we desire. Whether it’s putting money away every month towards one’s financial freedom or eating more vegetables to achieve one’s healthy weight, it’s our day to day actions that create the success.
Too many times I believe we limit ourselves, that’s why it’s important to think about what’s possible and bigger than our current goals. What would your goal be if you were guaranteed success? How big can you think?
For example my Toastmasters Goals:
- Minimum Goal: 12 speeches a year. I accomplished this in 2009 so I can easily meet this goal by keeping at my current pace of 1 speech a month.
- Target Goal: 36 speeches a year. I will have to step out of my comfort zone and find new places to give presentations
- Outrageous Goal: 72 speeches a year -6 speeches a month, I would have a completely different career, traveling a lot more and having a fabulous time!
What are you current goals? I would love to hear how this system works for you!
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Illusions of the Mind~
Posted on 11. Mar, 2010 by Administrator.
Is your reality an illusion? Or are illusions your reality?
How is it possible that you and I can look at the same picture and see two different things? Take a look at the picture below, what is the age of the woman? What is the age of the woman in the picture?
Can you see the young lady? Can you see the older woman? Can you see them both at the same time? Why or why not?
Perhaps we see exactly what we’re looking for.
Look around your room and notice everything that is red. Then close your eyes and name everything that is green. I bet you found half as many green items as red, since you were not originally looking for it.
It’s the same in life, if you’re looking for doom & gloom, I bet you can find lots of evidence to support that. If you’re looking for the good, you’ll more easily find that too.
Here’s a fun activity to do everyday before you go to bed, list 5 successes that you had today, whether it’s big or small. As you focus your mind on success, it will be easier for your mind to create more successes.
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The Power of the Subconscious Mind!
Posted on 10. Mar, 2010 by Administrator.
“In each of us, two natures are at war –the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of the must conquer. But in our hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.” Jekyll and Hyde Restaurant
The subconscious mind operates our body and mind, automatically. It is where all habits reside and where all of life’s programming and imprints take place.
The conscious mind is the seat of will power, which is a function of the decision making capability.
If we attempt to create any change, it has to be done on the level of the subconscious mind where memory, programming and habits reside.
The hypnotic state is the tool that we use as a vehicle to communicate with the subconscious mind.
Conscious Mind
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Subconscious Mind
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When we do things on the subconscious level we do them automatically, quicker, more efficiently and more accurately. It is a great advantage that we can relegate many tasks to the subconscious so as to free our conscious mind.
To demonstrate the functionality of the subconscious mind, try the following exercises.
Exercise #1: The A-B-C’s;
Say the entire alphabet as fast as you can, and notice how long it takes.
Next, say only every other letter. That should be easier and quicker right? Well try it by saying every other letter.
The first time around you were reciting something you already knew on the subconscious level, and thus it was easy, fast and accurate. The second time around you had to think consciously about what you were saying so, of course you found that to be a much slower process, fraught with mistakes.
Exercise #2: The hand clasp
Clasp your hands (interlacing the fingers) three times as fast as you can. Notice how comfortable, quick and easy this action is.
Now clasp your hands with the other thumb on top (interlace the opposite way).
Do it three times fast as you can and notice how uncomfortable and slow it is compared to the way you are used to doing it. Again, when you do it habitually and subconscious, it is easy and fast contrasting with the slow and cumbersome conscious way.
Exercise #3: Typing
If you know how to properly –i.e. with all fingers and without looking at the keyboard – you know how fast you can go when you ar in the flow (typing subconsciously). However, when you do stop to look at the keyboard and spell out the words (typing consciously), you find that it is much slower and you are prone to making mistakes.
Exercise #4 Driving
Remember learning to drive? Remember how difficult it was? You had to remember to place your foot on the brakes, insert the key ,start the car, use your blinkers, put it in gear, step on gas pedal etc. Then you had to deal with the traffic! Everything was done consciously thus slower and with effort. Now you can drive in rush hour without blinking an eye, with your radio on, coffee in one hand, cell phone in the other.
Learn to be more productive with less stress, solve problems quicker and easier and eliminate the blocks that are preventing you from reaching for your highest potential in your business and personal lives!
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How to Avoid Going Brain Dead…
Posted on 10. Mar, 2010 by Administrator.
In your spare or ‘boredom’ time you can stimulate your brain with fun, easy, creative exercises. With as little as a minute of time for each exercise, you can easily increase your reading, writing, comprehension, spatial coordination, arithmetic and much more.
1. Ear Rub
Technique: Massage your ears for 1-2 min. Rub in the inside, outside and all around your ears.
Benefits: Improves listening comprehension and enhances ones focus. This technique helps with public speaking, singing and playing music. This is also great to help restore one’s equilibrium, especially in moving cars.
2. Double Doodle
Technique: Begin with your arms out in front of you and begin mirroring your arm movements. Then take 2 pens to a piece of paper while you mirror your arm movements. Begin with simple doodles and work your way up to writing your name.
Benefits: Helps with math, spelling and writing by enhancing the blood flow to your left brain. Also, it stimulates the right brain to encourage creativity, play and innovation. This technique increases hand-eye coordination in both visual fields, great to improve ones sports abilities.
3. Cross Crawl
Technique: Alternatively move one arm to the opposite leg and the other arm and its opposite leg in slow motion.
Benefits: Improves spelling, writing, listening and reading. This is an ideal warm-up exercise before learning since it stimulates both the right and left hemisphere.
4. Crazy Eights
Technique: Extend your arms in front of you; clasp your hands together with interlocked fingers and your thumbs pointing up towards the ceiling. Move your arms first up to the top left and continue in a sideways figure “8” motion. Make sure to come upwards through the middle of the “8”. As your arms move through the figure “8”, your eyes should follow your thumbs through the motion. Be sure to move only your eyes and not your head as you do this.
Benefits: This exercise stimulates the right and left hemisphere simultaneously, increasing the communication to each hemisphere. Reading comprehension and long term memory are improved with this technique.
5. Balance Poses
Technique: Take a moment to get centered on your feet by shifting your weight to the front of your feet, then shift the weight to the back and then side to side. Feel your feet well grounded and planted on the floor. Then lock out your left leg and lift your right foot a couple inches off the floor. Repeat with opposite leg. Allow your gaze to be soft as you stare at something standing still.
Benefits: Be working on ones balance it helps one become more centered, focus and improves concentration. It also helps ones patience with oneself.
