Knowledge is available for catching how our thoughts can sabotage our success and applying corrections to lead us in a more productive direction. There are proven benefits to using social motivation (a friend or coach) to progress to implementation from the knowledge. The following are some examples of knowledge sources on negative self talk:

Taming Your Gremlin (Kindle Edition)

by Rick Carson.

“Your gremlin interprets your every experience. He has nothing good to say about you or anything you do, not to mention your dreams and aspirations. Just when you feel you’ve out-argued or overcome him, he changes his disguise and his strategy. Grapple with him and you become more enmeshed. What he hates is simply being noticed. That’s the first step to his taming. This and many other straightforward and powerful techniques await you in Taming Your Gremlin: A Guide to Enjoying Yourself.”

Review

“Rick Carson is a genius at exploring our inner conflicts in novel ways. …And there’s a bonus: it works.”

About the Author

Richard Carson lives near Dallas with his wife, Leti, and their son, Jonah. He writes out of his thirteen years as a psychotherapist and as a consultant to human service professionals. His professional background includes service as a full-time faculty member for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor for the University of Texas at Arlington Graduate School of Social Work. He is a Clinical Member and Approved Supervisor of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas, and a Certified Social Worker with an Order of Recognition as an Advanced Clinical Practitioner. Richard is a member of the Academy of Certified Social Workers. He consults and conducts seminars across the nation for a myriad of institutions, agencies, organizations and businesses,and may be reached at 7424 Greenville Avenue, Suite 113, Dallas, TX 75231 (214) 363–0788.

Triple Column Technique to defeat Negative Self Talk

by David D. Burns via J.D. Meier

“Your mind believes what you tell it.” — Paul J. Meyer

Negative self-talk is a common problem. The trick is to learn how to turn your inner dialogue from a critic to a coach. The Triple Column Technique is a proven practice for improving your internal self-critical dialogue.

Review

J.D. Meier’s blog post is a concise, to the point, step by step, explanation on how you can use a simple tool to challenge self critical dialogue.

About the Blogger

J.D. Meier is a Microsoft manager known for his work on agile project management. I highly recommend subscribing to the RSS feed of the Sources of Insight blog.

Learned Optimism

by Martin Seligman

Many of these techniques are based on the research of Martin Seligman who was the founder of the positive psychology movement and was elected President of the American Psychological Association for 1998. Martin’s Learned Optimism book includes the principles, experiments, proven results, and benefits of learning optimistic thinking.

I have written previously about Learned Optimism in my Glen’s Life blog.

If you liked these references you might also like:

* The Dirty Dozen: The Twelve Words You Should Eliminate from Your Daily Vocabulary by Rajesh Setty

* Excuses Begone!: How to Change Lifelong, Self-Defeating Thinking Habits by Wayne Dyer

* Why Your Life Sucks: and what you can do about it. by Alan Cohen

I found the speech by (the character) Peter Weyland, an inventor of humanistic robots, interesting because I recently gave a speech myself about how future borg will look more like humans than robots. The technology will be advanced enough to provide its capabilities and be almost invisible because the interface will adapt itself to humans instead of the other way around.

This vision of the future although not explicitly shown in the 2023 TEDtalk will be disturbing/frightening to a lot of people because it suggest that humans will lose control and the robots will take over. The related Prometheus movie trailer (Movie to be released June 8 2012) is even more of a horror story of what could be our end.

Of course it doesn’t have to be this way.

Just recently a new book called Abundance has been released that also presents a picture of the outstanding changes that are accelerating us towards our future and should provide some reasons to be optimistic about solving some of humankind’s most difficult problems. Another Peter, Peter Diamandis has given a TEDtalk in 2012 called Abundance is Our Future. In this scenario technology slays scarcity of resources and the population explosion is seen as a boon rather than a disaster.

It is beyond dispute that massive change will be experienced as time goes on and there will be winners and losers.

The question is – are you seeing the upcoming changes as a source of opportunity or of doom?

Are you going to be driven by fear due to the amygdala (lizard) portion of the brain?

The even bigger question is what are we going to do to create the type of future we want to live in so that time machine can be given a tuneup?

“It’s extremely difficult to read a speech and sound as if you mean it.
For most of us, when reading, posture changes, the throat tightens and people can tell.

Reading is different from speaking, and a different sort of attention is paid.

Before you give a speech, then, you must do one of two things if your goal is to persuade:

1. Learn to read the same way you speak (unlikely)

or,

2. learn to speak without reading. Learn your message well enough that you can communicate it without reading it. We want your humanity.

If you can’t do that, don’t bother giving a speech. Just send everyone a memo and save time and stress for all concerned.”

I am trying to ensure that as part of speech preparation I rehearse multiple times to both help memorize the speech and also see where it needs to be edited for flow and time.

You have seen the result when a speaker didn’t do this rehearsal.

We all suffer from not having enough time to prepare but try to balance whatever time that can be allocated between time spent creating content and time devoted to rehearsal to improve the quality of speech delivery. If you can’t be excited and present in the moment[1] to deliver a speech just mail it in.

[1] Not being present in the moment reminds me of the Hindenberg disaster video as applied to speeches crashing and burning. If you don’t prepare to be persuasive and bring the humanity of your presence (that Seth mentions) to the speech you might set off the speech equivalent of the disaster to humanity stated in the Hindenberg video.

Day One is a beautiful application for Mac ($10) and iPad/iPhone ($2) which syncs via Dropbox. It has many well implemented features with lots of plans for enhancements:

Of course everyone from Oprah to Jim Rohn has spoken about the merits of keeping a journal to become more mindful and with that there are myriad other benefits.
For example see this video from Jim Rohn.

Story telling is a big part of effective speaking and writing so that is another good reason to keep a journal. It really helps speech writing to have a collection of stories that are personally meaningful to you.

Problems and solution tracking can be helpful so you can refer back and relate to them if someone else needs help with something similar.

Emotions and what are affecting them can be good things to track too. Since self talk can really impact your life you might want to try recording these “conversations” so you are more aware of them and can analyze how they are affecting you.

Jim Rohn recorded an inspiring hour long audio-book on How to Use a Journal that can be purchased from Audible.com or other sources for only a couple dollars.

Many people like to use a moleskine book as a journal which is quite attractive because it looks and feels good. Packaging can emphasize the importance and enjoyment you are attaching to capturing your ideas.

Personally being a tech guy trying to reduce clutter in my life, I currently use MacJournal on my Macs ($40), iPad ($2.99), and iPhone ($2.99). That way I have a journal capture tool with me all the time. I like the way I can keep information entered from each device (iMac, MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone) in its own journal as well as a merged master journal. As a possible point of interest my stats for journal entries show that I have the same amount of journal entries on my iPhone and iPad, twice as many on my MacBook Pro laptop, and twice that number on my desktop iMac. To put it another way here is a pie chart view.

Syncing really is (as in so many other areas) one of the key features that makes journaling powerful and simple enough to use every day without a lot of extra overhead. It is high time that I produce a review on MacJournal tips and techniques but for now here is a quick list of features you might be interested in:

• Media browser to adding multimedia to your journal entries
• Send to journal entry to blog such as Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, Tumblr and more
• Backup journal
• Export in multiple formats
• Icon labelling
• Mood indicators
• Advanced sorting
• Timer as reminder to do journal entries
• Writing Statistics
• Calendar mode
• Full screen mode
• Security protection

MacJournal pretty much has all the present and future planned features of Day One with the possible exception of the current menu bar and future iCloud sync (and markdown?) features. Of course not all features are necessarily created equally so a full review would need to compare the implementation quality of each feature and overall design of the application on each device.

MacJournal (on the Mac)

If you like the timeline view in MacJournal this is something that you can get on steroids by using the Beedocs Timeline 3D ($65) or Easy Timeline ($20) software that can also export your timeline as a pdf or video. Timelines are so popular that Facebook is on the bandwagon too but in my opinion that is only good for information that you want to make completely public.

Although MacJournal is a highly functional specialized journaling tool with extra bells and whistles (especially in the just released [December 2011] version 6 for the Mac) you might want to use something simpler like Simplenote (see Simplenote Love) that can also keep your text notes in sync across all your devices wherever you are. Another alternative is Evernote (free for entry version) which also can be used multi-platform and allows for rich text and media formatting. Springpad (free) or a plethora of other online or device notebook apps are also a possibility which may be attractive if you like to classify your journaling into different notebook topics (though MacJournal can do this too).

Another feature you might find attractive on your Mac or iPhone is social network communication with selected parts of your journal. MacJournal supports publishing journal entries to blogs but not social networks which you have to do manually either through export or cut and paste. It also doesn’t have a feature to import social network posts into your journal entries to organize your personal history. Day One has neither of these social network integration features.

A beautifully designed iPhone app called Momento ($2.99) has quite extensive social media import capability. Its claim to fame is it can automatically import information from the following social networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Instagram
• Last.fm
• Foursquare
• Gowalla
• Digg
• YourTube
• Vimeo
• RSS feed

It seems a bit preposterous to be aggregating your videos for the long term on a mobile phone but this is the only journal that appears to include this feature right now. Unfortunately there isn’t a Mac counterpart to the program and the export capabilities are limited to emailing text information. It seems ill advised to aggregate much of your social network records in this app at the moment. You can backup the multimedia database via iTunes but it can only be restored to Momento. For now, Tweets seem the best match for including in Momento iPhone journal data. Perhaps in the future Momento will develop better export capabilities and partner with a Mac application.

What might be a good candidate is a Mac application called Chronories ($14.99). Chronories puts an emphasis on automating the collection of data that could be added to journals. It can import from MacJournal and also automatically capture information from the following sources:

• Computer activity
• Favorite applications used
• Weather information
• Music played
• News headlines
• Screenshots, images and isight photos
• Emails and chats
• Visited web sites
• iCal appointments

Chronories

Oh yeah, you can also type and format text into the journal and use other features like:

• Menu bar service for entering moods or other quick information like screenshots
• Analyze and visualize your data with charts and tag clouds

Back in distant past there emerged a vision of not just journaling but capturing digital life data in total. It was done by a pioneer named Gordon Bell as part of Microsoft research in a MyLifeBits project. An audio recording of the MyLife Bits and Memex vision can be heard at ITConversations. We are gradually moving in the direction where more and more data is being collected. Hopefully there will be tools that will allow individuals to manage the increasing volumes of their own data. We are making progress but we are not there yet. In the mean time we can choose from the alternatives that exist today and with an eye to the future plan to evolve into the brave new world.

The developers of MacJournal, Day One and particularly Momento and Chronories could potentially evolve products that through interoperable interfaces or even collaborative development rise out of the ooze of lowly text journaling into life information tools. Where there is Siri and isight can multimedia dictation be far behind?

based on a Socialcast Infographic

Technology is improving and becoming more human centred. Increasingly technology can be interacted with on human terms not forcing users to compensate for technology interface limitations. Despite the enhanced user friendliness of technology, human training will still be a productive ground for optimizing the overall effectiveness of the system. The onus still needs to be on people being clear on what they want to accomplish and what their tool’s capabilities are, with the machine’s role being easy to command.

We are definitely in the age of mass personalization but while people enjoy the benefits of this process being automated there are privacy concerns that require even smarter technology so people can control the distribution and monetization of their personal information. Similar to the increased awareness that economic business models need to take into consideration the impact on the overall environment, the same is true of the need for current information economy business models to evolve for the overall benefit to society. Much of today’s business is based on the ad model where users private information is captured often without their awareness and bartered or sold as part of the selling process.

Human centred design is a huge advancement in simplifying people’s lives for the better. Interfaces can be optimized for specific functions and computers in many different form factors can serve as multi-purpose devices with software driven interfaces that can ease the interaction learning curve for us humans.

Smartphones have come a long way particularly with the introduction of the iPhone platform. Instant messengers and social networks have proliferated but are entering a stage where consolidation and federation (open interworking) are needed to promote universal interworking and standardization so users can have it all without undue complexity and limitations.

Apple is definitely on a roll with innovative more natural user interface technologies like touch interfaces, gestures, and most recently, voice activated Siri. These interfaces make new capabilities possible for more people but still require people to become trained to take advantage of the full benefits. Extending these advanced technologies into high stakes domains like robotic surgery will require advances in engineering and reliability before ease of use will supersede concerns about the risks.

GPS has become ubiquitous with its inclusion in the feature set of modern smartphones. It can settle spousal arguments on the best route and avoid people getting lost, but maps for new areas under development may not be up to date. Amazon recommendations and reviews are good examples of information adding to the value chain which leads to it being ever more easy to make a sale that is more likely to be valued by the customer.

Pandora is a good example of sophisticated information processing and organizing capabilities almost creating a magical experience for people to find more music they like. Driverless cars, like robotic surgery, are likely to stay in a niche category for some time until there is an overwhelming risk-benefit tipping point that is reached. Isn’t it enough that your car will be able to parallel park itself?

There is no doubt that the widespread availability of mobile devices with powerful interactivity (Thankyou Steve Jobs) will serve as powerful platforms for interacting with our world in many yet to be seen creative ways (look at Jambone Up and Fitbit as recent examples). The full benefits will require enhanced communication techniques and ongoing training for people to leverage the technology. Finding the need? Asking users what they want is alright for incremental enhancements but it hasn’t worked for breakthrough innovations which usually are the result of inspired leadership.

vCard is a file format standard for digital business cards so you can import contact information into your address book application without having to type it in. Wikipedia provides an overview of vCard that summarizes the enhancements introduced in each version. Currently work is underway on version 4. Sharp Innovation Solutions uses version 2.1 because it is the latest version that is widely supported.

Using vCard with Windows

People using the Windows operating system most commonly use one of the following address book managers:

How to use vCard with Outlook

In the Address Book, on the File menu, point to Import, and then click Business Card (vCard).
Locate the business card file on your computer or a network drive, select the file, and then click Open.
When the business card is in your Address Book, a dialog box opens in which you can modify or add to the contact information.

Importing vCard into Vista or Windows 7 contact manager

Using vCard with Mac OSX

All version of the Mac OSX operating system use the Address Book application which can import vCards. If you downloaded a vCard, choose Import vCards (Command-O) from the File Menu in Address Book. If you received it in Mac OS X’s Mail application, simply drag it from the email message across to Address Book.

Using vCard with Linux

If you are using Linux you probably know how to import vCards. Linux and vCard links.

Scenarios for Using vCard

The Internet mail Consortium, who is responsible for the vCard standard, provides a summary of scenarios for using vCard.

Converting vCard to Other Formats

If the application you use for contact and address information doesn’t support the vCard format you may want to convert the information to LDIF (LDAP server Data Interchange Format) or CSV (Comma Separated Values) which are formats for directories or spreadsheets that are supported by many applications (e.g. Thunderbird, Gmail, Hotmail). Web site for converting vCard to LDIF or CSV.

Sasha Dichter: The Generosity Experiment | Video on TED.com

The best investment mix for each person will be different but the key message is that impact investment in people can make a difference to chip away at problems that many have thought were impossible to solve.

Interesting survey data from Scott Berkun on how speakers prepare for ignite presentations.

Conclusion is that excellent speeches take a lot of preparation, even for pros, and that generally speakers don’t rehearse enough.

Why are professional speakers so good? One explanation is that they do a speech many times to improve it. They also prepare and rehearse more than regular speakers.

“Turning 3 minute Conversations into long term relationships and lasting results”

I was impressed by Michael’s content and presentation. As a toastmaster I couldn’t help but evaluate Michael’s speaking style and passion. I thought he did a wonderful job as a speaker and reinforced his points by getting the audience engaged in some short exercises. With his wealth of experience he had lots to share and he did it most effectively by breaking the information into manageable chunks.

I particularly liked Michael’s networking model that has 6 phases. He explained not only what needs to happen in each phase – he also identified the most common myths and hangups people have with each phase and what can be done to overcome them. Michael provides a free document summarizing his networking model on his web site – www.networkingforresults.com.

Mixed in with all the practical advice and wisdom was the really effective use of stories to reinforce his points. I especially liked his story of sitting down with the chairman of the board (his wife) to do a startup company review. I think all the small business entrepreneurs in the audience could relate to the struggles and desire to do better faster.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Michael to anyone who is interested in improving their networking skills. I really believe in Michael’s key point:

Put relationships first with a sincere desire to help and business will follow.