Does your workplace feel or appear less professional these days? 
Here are six steps to help your team ”polish up” their presence:
1. Join Toastmasters.
Very affordable (about $75 per year) Toastmasters is a great place to practice your speaking and presentation skills in a safe and encouraging environment. It helps with your grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary, you name it. Almost every community [...]

The most powerful learning experience in my past was intensive outpatient recovery for my alcoholism.  At the age of 43, I was in the late, chronic stages of alcoholism, slipping quickly into a time when my only option would have been institutionalization.  There are many excuses I can make for why I ended up on [...]

Recently, one of my mentors ended up in the hospital.  After a traumatic injury and surgery, he began to display strange, out-of-character behavior.  Normally an extremely friendly and congenial person, he acted very mean and angry, calling his caregivers derogatory names.  He was convinced that he was not in the hospital, but somewhere else. He was convinced [...]

The new academic year is upon us. When school starts I always think of my friend Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, who devoted his life to getting adults to keep reading. Being a perpetual student of life myself, I promised to carry his torch after he was gone from this earth.  Soon after Charlie went to Heaven, my mentor Jim Rohn died, the [...]

Voice: “Knock Knock”.
Leader: “Who’s there?”
Voice: “Anxiety.”
Leader: “Oh, hi again.  Who sent you?”
Anxiety: “You called me”
Leader: “I did?”
Anxiety: “Yes”
Leader: “Oh, sorry.  I didn’t mean to.  I must have dialed the wrong number.  You are welcome to come in but only for a second.  You can’t stay.  I have priorities that are important to me”.
Anxiety: “You mean [...]

The most powerful learning experience in my past was during intensive outpatient recovery for my alcoholism.  At the age of 43, I was in the late, chronic stages of alcoholism, slipping quickly into a time when my only option would have been institutionalization.  There are many excuses I can make for why I ended up [...]

  This morning at our weekly MAC Toastmasters Meeting I was asked to give a short recap of my Saturday breakout session “Pumping Mental Iron”. One of the things I didn’t get to do on Saturday, since my time was shortened (read my last blog post) from 50 minutes to about 35-40 minutes, was to do [...]

You are a passenger on an airplane.  You look out the window of the place and the wing is on fire.  The oxygen masks drop down.  The flight attendants make an announcement that the pilot is going to have to make a crash landing on water.  You hear yelling: “Brace…Brace”.  People around you are starting [...]

All of us need to improve our decision making abilities in this business environment. 
IQ (Intelligence Quotient) measures your overall general intelligence. EQ (Emotional Quotient) measures your emotional intelligence: your ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power and acumen of emotions to facilitate high levels of collaboration and productivity.  This is how effective leaders [...]

SECRET……The dictionary tells us that a secret (noun) is something that is kept hidden or concealed.
 
Most of us have been exposed to the tremendously successful movie and/or the book called “The Secret”, which contains knowledge that has been around for thousands of years, and it was packaged in an intriguing and ingenious way to attract [...]