The art of: Story Telling

So for all you public speakers out there, my my... have I found some sweet goodies for you!
for normal people who aspire to be great..one day too will you have to face the challenge to speak in public

And when that time comes, this article that I found proves to be of great help! 

The secret martial art of communications: Story Telling 

But then again, it doenst mean that story telling is just meant for the people going on stage..it can be used in anything, when delivering an important speech at the family dinner table, convincing your friends to go to a party, discussions with your boss for a pay raise and so on...

If you can truly master the form of story telling, you audience will literary "be in the palm of your hands" as you take control of the direction of mind, imagination and will. 

yup ok, that's enough promoting! Now enjoy your meat below..sink it in and do share your stories of how you have improved after reading this :)


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Story telling is the art of positioning yourself and your business in such a way that your name or your company's name is the first that is thought of when your field is mentioned. Telling your own story allows you connect with other human beings in a way that only you can! The most influential leaders are story tellers. Listen to Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs; all of them are masters at sharing their vision and compelling you to action.

Stories liberate you and others to see that your struggles are not unique to you and also that because you survived and thrived, they can survive and thrive too. Or if you are still in the struggle, that there are others from which you can draw strength and vice versa. Stories reveal, "who am I?" 'What am I here for?" "What does all my pain (or past) position me for?" and "what can I contribute to the world?' Stories lead people to trust you and when you have that trust, you sell your business and personal brand.

It is also important to structure your talk so that like a story, it has a beginning, middle and an end or even a call to action. These would be the bare minimum for proper communication but for those who would like to get paid to speak, you have to take that up several hundred notches.

Your content comes from your story. What are you selling? You? Your company? Your ideas? A cause? Master it! Know your content thoroughly! Having mastered your story, what will then be important is how you tell the story so that it brings about the change that you desire – more customers, world peace, whatever. To begin to master the art of storytelling, you need to know the SYSTEM:

S- State: Manage your own state and the state of the audience. Speaking involves breathing and you use your breathing to regulate the tempo of your speech, a pause causes your audience to also stop and in that space, they relate with you.

Y- Yourself: What sells today is authenticity. Don't put yourself on a pedestal; you can put your product or idea on a pedestal but when it comes to you, show humility. We are painfully aware that we are all human and prone to falling anyway, so don't set the height for your fall too high – ask Lance Armstrong.

S-Stance: Adopt a stance that demonstrates and embodies leadership. Right in front of the stage is the power position. Don't move to the middle of the stage or stand in a 10 to 2 position! Please please, especially if you are male, do not stand with your hands in your pocket to make a presentation.

T- Tonality: 3 tones that will come to play depending on what you are saying.

The Sage is resonant, melodious, rhythmic.

The Warrior is a quicker fast paced tone used when signifying triumph or when you want your audience to make a decision. Used to deliver impact lines!
The Lover speaks from the heart-softly, quietly, slowly and with a lot more pauses (remember the pauses draw the audience in, causes them to relate with you).

E- Eye contact: Have individual conversations with your audience! Give attention to each person as though you were speaking specifically to them.

M- Movement: Learn how to own the stage! Move with purpose (don't just pace). Use movement to accentuate your impact line BUT your impact line is delivered when you have stopped moving.
source

RE: Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators

So well, I was almost immediately impressed when I saw the title of this article
and suddenly, almost like a revelation from God...I understood why I sometimes act the way I do and why certain things matter and yet don't matter much to me
Actually...this are the charastics of a writer 

Are you a writer? an artist? someone involved in arts? 

Can you sometimes not think of "ideas" or get brain blocked?

And also indicates that most people of this century are all "trophy" children...the "trophy" generation ,.
we were thought to believe everyone will get a trophy, all of us are "special" 

Are you special? Are you born with talent?
But my parents kept telling me how good I am! My friends keep telling me how good I am! I am a star!! 
Well..are you really?

Why do I keep procrastination? How to stop procrastination? How to advance and be better? 
Well...do know that, you need to know the physiology of it   

keep reading...
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Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators
The psychological origins of waiting (... and waiting, and waiting) to work

Megan McArdle Feb 12 2014, 11:48 AM ET

Like most writers, I am an inveterate procrastinator. In the course of writing this one article, I have checked my e-mail approximately 3,000 times, made and discarded multiple grocery lists, conducted a lengthy Twitter battle over whether the gold standard is actually the worst economic policy ever proposed, written Facebook messages to schoolmates I haven’t seen in at least a decade, invented a delicious new recipe for chocolate berry protein smoothies, and googled my own name several times to make sure that I have at least once written something that someone would actually want to read.
Lots of people procrastinate, of course, but for writers it is a peculiarly common occupational hazard. One book editor I talked to fondly reminisced about the first book she was assigned to work on, back in the late 1990s. It had gone under contract in 1972.

I once asked a talented and fairly famous colleague how he managed to regularly produce such highly regarded 8,000 word features. “Well,” he said, “first, I put it off for two or three weeks. Then I sit down to write. That’s when I get up and go clean the garage. After that, I go upstairs, and then I come back downstairs and complain to my wife for a couple of hours. Finally, but only after a couple more days have passed and I’m really freaking out about missing my deadline, I ultimately sit down and write.”
Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Most writers were the kids who easily, almost automatically, got A's in English class. (There are exceptions, but they often also seem to be exceptions to the general writerly habit of putting off writing as long as possible.) At an early age, when grammar school teachers were struggling to inculcate the lesson that effort was the main key to success in school, these future scribblers gave the obvious lie to this assertion. Where others read haltingly, they were plowing two grades ahead in the reading workbooks. These are the kids who turned in a completed YA novel for their fifth-grade project. It isn’t that they never failed, but at a very early age, they didn’t have to fail much; their natural talent kept them at the head of the class.

Forced into a challenge we're not prepared for, we often engage 'self-handicapping': deliberately doing things that set us up for failure.

 

This teaches a very bad, very false lesson: that success in work mostly depends on natural talent. Unfortunately, when you are a professional writer, you are competing with all the other kids who were at the top of their English class. Your stuff may not—indeed, probably won’t—be the best anymore.
If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package. By the time you’re finished, you’re more like one of those 1940’s pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end.

The Fear of Turning In Nothing

Most writers manage to get by because, as the deadline creeps closer, their fear of turning in nothing eventually surpasses their fear of turning in something terrible. But I’ve watched a surprising number of young journalists wreck, or nearly wreck, their careers by simply failing to hand in articles. These are all college graduates who can write in complete sentences, so it is not that they are lazy incompetents. Rather, they seem to be paralyzed by the prospect of writing something that isn’t very good.

“Exactly!” said Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, when I floated this theory by her. One of the best-known experts in the psychology of motivation, Dweck has spent her career studying failure, and how people react to it. As you might expect, failure isn’t all that popular an activity. And yet, as she discovered through her research, not everyone reacts to it by breaking out in hives. While many of the people she studied hated tasks that they didn’t do well, some people thrived under the challenge. They positively relished things they weren’t very good at—for precisely the reason that they should have: when they were failing, they were learning.

Dweck puzzled over what it was that made these people so different from their peers. It hit her one day as she was sitting in her office (then at Columbia), chewing over the results of the latest experiment with one of her graduate students: the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you’re either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it’s something you can nourish by doing stuff you’re not good at.

“There was this eureka moment,” says Dweck. She now identifies the former group as people with a “fixed mind-set,” while the latter group has a “growth mind-set.” Whether you are more fixed or more of a grower helps determine how you react to anything that tests your intellectual abilities. For growth people, challenges are an opportunity to deepen their talents, but for “fixed” people, they are just a dipstick that measures how high your ability level is. Finding out that you’re not as good as you thought is not an opportunity to improve; it’s a signal that you should maybe look into a less demanding career, like mopping floors.

The fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you 'really' are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome.

 

This fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you “really” are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome. A shocking number of successful people (particularly women), believe that they haven’t really earned their spots, and are at risk of being unmasked as frauds at any moment. Many people deliberately seek out easy tests where they can shine, rather than tackling harder material that isn’t as comfortable.

If they’re forced into a challenge they don’t feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call “self-handicapping”: deliberately doing things that will hamper their performance in order to give themselves an excuse for not doing well. Self-handicapping can be fairly spectacular: in one study, men deliberately chose performance-inhibiting drugs when facing a task they didn’t expect to do well on. “Instead of studying,” writes the psychologist Edward Hirt, “a student goes to a movie the night before an exam. If he performs poorly, he can attribute his failure to a lack of studying rather than to a lack of ability or intelligence. On the other hand, if he does well on the exam, he may conclude that he has exceptional ability, because he was able to perform well without studying.”

Writers who don’t produce copy—or leave it so long that they couldn’t possibly produce something good—are giving themselves the perfect excuse for not succeeding.

“Work finally begins,” says Alain de Botton, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.” For people with an extremely fixed mind-set, that tipping point quite often never happens. They fear nothing so much as finding out that they never had what it takes.

 “The kids who race ahead in the readers without much supervision get praised for being smart,” says Dweck. “What are they learning? They’re learning that being smart is not about overcoming tough challenges. It’s about finding work easy. When they get to college or graduate school and it starts being hard, they don’t necessarily know how to deal with that."

Embracing Hard Work

Our educational system is almost designed to foster a fixed mind-set. Think about how a typical English class works: You read a “great work” by a famous author, discussing what the messages are, and how the author uses language, structure, and imagery to convey them. You memorize particularly pithy quotes to be regurgitated on the exam, and perhaps later on second dates. Students are rarely encouraged to peek at early drafts of those works. All they see is the final product, lovingly polished by both writer and editor to a very high shine. When the teacher asks “What is the author saying here?” no one ever suggests that the answer might be “He didn’t quite know” or “That sentence was part of a key scene in an earlier draft, and he forgot to take it out in revision.”

Or consider a science survey class. It consists almost entirely of the theories that turned out to be right—not the folks who believed in the mythical “N-rays,” declared that human beings had forty-eight chromosomes, or saw imaginary canals on Mars. When we do read about falsified scientific theories of the past—Lamarckian evolution, phrenology, reproduction by “spontaneous generation”—the people who believed in them frequently come across as ludicrous yokels, even though many of them were distinguished scientists who made real contributions to their fields.

“You never see the mistakes, or the struggle,” says Dweck. No wonder students get the idea that being a good writer is defined by not writing bad stuff.

Unfortunately, in your own work, you are confronted with every clunky paragraph, every labored metaphor and unending story that refuses to come to a point. “The reason we struggle with"insecurity,” says Pastor Steven Furtick, “is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”

Young people are uncomfortable with the unstructured world of work. No wonder so many elite students go into industries with clear boundaries, like finance and consulting.

 

About six years ago, commentators started noticing a strange pattern of behavior among the young millennials who were pouring out of college. Eventually, the writer Ron Alsop would dub them the Trophy Kids. Despite the sound of it, this has nothing to do with “trophy wives.” Rather, it has to do with the way these kids were raised. This new generation was brought up to believe that there should be no winners and no losers, no scrubs or MVPs. Everyone, no matter how ineptly they perform, gets a trophy.
As these kids have moved into the workforce, managers complain that new graduates expect the workplace to replicate the cosy, well-structured environment of school. They demand concrete, well-described tasks and constant feedback, as if they were still trying to figure out what was going to be on the exam. “It’s very hard to give them negative feedback without crushing their egos,” one employer told Bruce Tulgan, the author of Not Everyone Gets a Trophy. “They walk in thinking they know more than they know.”

When I started asking around about this phenomenon, I was a bit skeptical. After all, us old geezers have been grousing about those young whippersnappers for centuries. But whenever I brought the subject up, I got a torrent of complaints, including from people who  have been managing new hires for decades. They were able to compare them with previous classes, not just with some mental image of how great we all were at their age. And they insisted that something really has changed—something that’s not limited to the super-coddled children of the elite.

“I’ll hire someone who’s twenty-seven, and he’s fine,” says Todd, who manages a car rental operation in the Midwest. “But if I hire someone who’s twenty-three or twenty-four, they need everything spelled out for them, they want me to hover over their shoulder. It’s like somewhere in those three or four years, someone flipped a switch.” They are probably harder working and more conscientious than my generation.  But many seem intensely uncomfortable with the comparatively unstructured world of work.  No wonder so many elite students go into finance and consulting—jobs that surround them with other elite grads, with well-structured reviews and advancement.

Today’s new graduates may be better credentialed than previous generations, and are often very hardworking, but only when given very explicit direction. And they seem to demand constant praise. Is it any wonder, with so many adults hovering so closely over every aspect of their lives? Frantic parents of a certain socioeconomic level now give their kids the kind of intensive early grooming that used to be reserved for princelings or little Dalai Lamas.
All this “help” can be actively harmful. These days, I’m told, private schools in New York are (quietly, tactfully) trying to combat a minor epidemic of expensive tutors who do the kids’ work for them, something that would have been nearly unthinkable when I went through the system 20 years ago.  Our parents were in league with the teachers, not us. But these days, fewer seem willing to risk letting young Silas or Gertrude fail out of the Ivy League.

Thanks to decades of expansion, there are still enough spaces for basically every student who wants to go to college. But there’s a catch: Most of those new spaces were created at less selective schools. Two-thirds of Americans now attend a college that, for all intents and purposes, admits anyone who applies. Spots at the elite schools—the top 10 percent—have barely kept up with population growth. Meanwhile demand for those slots has grown much faster, because as the economy has gotten more competitive, parents are looking for a guarantee that their children will be successful. A degree from an elite school is the closest thing they can think of.

So we get Whiffle Parenting: constant supervision to ensure that a kid can’t knock themselves off the ladder that is thought to lead, almost automatically, through a selective college and into the good life.  It’s an entirely rational reaction to an educational system in which the stakes are always rising, and any small misstep can knock you out of the race. But is this really good parenting? A golden credential is no guarantee of success, and in the process of trying to secure one for their kids, parents are depriving them of what they really need: the ability to learn from their mistakes, to be knocked down and to pick themselves up—the ability, in other words, to fail gracefully. That is probably the most important lesson our kids will learn at school, and instead many are being taught the opposite.

source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/

Austin 3:16 & John 3:16

Dear Readers,

Here is another poster that i have made. Yeah, it brings back old memories of the "good o' WWF (World Wrestling Federation) in the "attitude" era! This is one of the quotes of my all time top favorite list of superstars Stone Cold Steve Austin! Wow...he really did made my days interesting! 

As a young boy ,I have very fond memories sitting down on the sofa with my mother and brother watching WWE and all I could think of was, what was Stone Cold Steve Austin, the rattlesnake gonna do next?

And then, just when trouble seems far away, the bad guys would come out and run their mouths. I especially remember the Vince McMahon's season where he would come out to the arena and try to run things his way. Before the time of D-Generation-X (Triple H [Hunter Hearst Helmsley and HBK - The Heart Break Kid "Shawn Michaels") v.s Vince & the McMahon's era (or was it after that?), Stone Cold Steve Austin was the guy to look out for! And then suddenly, out of the blue...the sound of a shattering glass would resound throughout the arena. The sound that stops the heartbeat of the people....the sound of Stone Cold Steve Austin! Then Austin 3:16's entrance video would hit and there appears Austin...either doing his "Austin walk", driving a beer truck, riding a motorbike, or simply appearing through the wild crowd, heading towards his victim that always seemed to be dumbfounded by the presence of Stone Cold.

Thats when you know that "Austin 3:16 says "I just whipped your ass!" is coming to pass, like a promise that Stone Cold could only deliver. 

Well, while i was thinking back about all this..i decided to make a poster of my two favorite quotes. From the WWF (World Wrestling Federation) /WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) and from the Book of Life, The Bible. While Austin 3:16 says "I just whipped your ass" which basically means "You are so dead", John 3:16 says "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" which also basically means "I have come (to die) so you can live" and i have found that to be so profound and powerful!

One (Stone Cold Steve Austin) talks about brining death and destruction to his foes and enemies, which is very common for a conquering and dominating king or person but In the bible, the book of John talks about it, in such a loving manner that no human can comprehend. Both quotes, touched millions of hearts...both also categorized as great and mighty conquerer, both so different methods.

Thus, here is some fan art, of both my heroes! hope you guys enjoy it! (You can use it as a wallpaper too if you wish). All Glory unto God!

Poster: Lamentations 3:19-25

Dear Readers,

Here is another poster which i have made.

This poster comes from the Bible, in the book of Lamentations Chapter 3:19-25. It says
" ¹⁹ The thought of my pain, my homelessness, is bitter poison.
    ²⁰ I think of it constantly, and my spirit is depressed.
    ²¹ Yet hope returns when I remember this one thing:

 ²² The Lord's unfailing love and mercy still continue,
    ²³ Fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise.
    ²⁴ The Lord is all I have, and so in him I put my hope.

 ²⁵ The Lord is good to everyone who trusts in him,
    ²⁶ So it is best for us to wait in patience—to wait for him to save us—"

I had actually asked the Holy Spirit to move me to the word that He wants to tell me, and i had opened to the page of Lamentation, which a page that  i have dread to open. I guess anyone would dread because it tells of the Lord's fury upon his people where the Lord is crushing them.
The people are very crushed, and have lost all hope...they have tried everything with their own strength...they see their young men dead on the streets and the women and children are slaves.
The Lord was determined that the walls of Zion should fall, where he measured them off to make sure of a total destruction. The Law is no longer taught and the prophets have no visions from the Lord.
The people cry out, Lord, why are you punishing us? Woman are eating the bodies of the children they loved. Priest and prophets are killed in the temple itself!
The Lord in his fury has slaughter them without mercy on the day of anger.
He had bound me in chains; i am a prisoner with no hope of escape. I cry aloud for help, but God refuses to listen; I stagger as i walk; stone walls block me whenever i turn. (Lamentations 3:7-9).

Therefore i was brought to the word Lamentations 3:19-25 where by its wisdom and words have been true until this very day.
In all despair, trust in the Lord. Hope in Him! (Psalms 27). This is all we can do. Wait upon the Lord, have patience and wait upon the Lord. Surely his anger will cool down as we the people repent and come back to him with humble and contrite hearts. He will surely save you!
Surely i will see the Lords goodness in this present life! (Psalms 27)

Hope everyone enjoys it!