Let us remember 2010

Now that 2010 is over, let us remember some of the major events that have happened in the course of the year. Hoping to learn from our successes and mistakes and make of 2011 an amazing year.

We have compiled the below event in 6 different categories: Natural disasters, air crashes, economy, achievements, miscellaneous and left us in 2010.

To read the full blog go to wwww.ideasgroupblog.com

Overcoming stage fright

Does your heart pounds, your hands shake, your forehead sweats, your mouth goes dry and your stomach feels like a blender on high speed every time you are about to speak or present to a group?

Well the good news is that you are in the majority, and that almost everybody shows the same symptoms when they are asked to speak or present to a large group. Even the most experienced speakers still feel stage fright at times.

The other good news is that with simple techniques you can use stage fright to your advantage.

Below are 5 tips extracted from our stage fright section of our “Public Speaking and Presentation Skills” workshop:

To read the full blog go to www.ideasgroupblog.com

“When you lose something, you are just making space for something bigger”

I have received a call last week from one of my clients, who for internal reasons had to cancel one of the  biggest contracts we have signed this year. To tell you that I wasn’t deceived would be lying; The news could have ruined my whole day, week or even month because of the magnitude of such contract. However as I am committed to have a high EIQ (emotional intelligence quotient), I had to analyze the choices I had, so I quickly drew the below mindmap (click to enlarge).

As you can see, by just changing my paradigm from deception to choices, a multitude of options started flowing  and I was suddenly enveloped with a warm feeling of happiness. It is strange and weird but in the nicest possible way.

So I continued my analysis and tried to come up with computer and IT analogies; when we delete files in our computers we are just making space for another file, the same goes in our lives; when we lose something we are just making space for something bigger.

A lost opportunity = more focus on a bigger one
A lost job = a chance for doing what you love
A lost family member = more love for other family members, or more focus on continuing what the lost one has started
A lost friendship = opportunities for a better one

And the list goes on...

A women in Lebanon has lost her son in a water sports accident, and after grieving him for a while she felt that her life had stopped; You just can imagine how hard it is to loose a child. But one day she woke up and asked herself the following question: What is the reason that my son was taken away from me at a young age? What is the message behind it? How can I use this incident to serve others?

A week later she has started a foundation with a purpose of making parents aware of the dangers of inattention when it comes to their children. So going back to her choices, she had two choices; either grieve her child for the rest of her life, or help thousands of other households save their children. With the latter choice she now feels that her son’s decease was a rebirth for a thousand more child.

“When you lose something, you are just making space for something bigger”

So if you just think about a loss as a free space, you will not get stuck in the past and will start generating opportunities for the future. It is all about using your energy- any kind of energy; negative or positive - and turning it into choices that will get you closer to your goals.

To know more about increasing your efficiency and how to generate healthier choices, visit our website: www.ideasgrp.com

You can complain or you can....

 

The world that we live in presents enough challenges for de-motivating the most positive people on earth. On the other hand, people seek comfort when they start sharing their problems with others; and some take that comfort to the next level and will find a need for complaining. As one of my friends puts it: “As human beings, we love to be victimized. Being victimized is perhaps the best way to run away from our responsibilities.”

This implication of being victimized spreads across all aspects of life: Relationships, education, health and most importantly careers.

Looking at the career and professional aspect, it is really annoying to be around people that whine and moan every day at work; sometimes this excessive negativity will drag others into it and will have a slumping effect on performance.

So how do we stop those people from complaining and how do we lift our moods if we think that we are in an awful situation.

First of all, Start by auditing your life: List the good things that are happening in your life and the bad things that you are exposed to and ask yourself those two simple questions: 1) How can I increase the good things? 2) What can I do specifically to change each of the bad things on my list?

Second, Don’t be positive: Yes you are reading correctly. Being positive and wishing for good things to happen is like staying at home without contacting anyone and waiting for Microsoft to ask you to become one of their Vice Presidents. Instead of being merely positive, have a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA) and draw plans, while acknowledging that you will face some negative challenges. So have a PMA and identify what might go wrong so you will be able to pro-act and not re-act.

That brings us to the third point which is Be Proactive. As Dr. Stephen Covey puts it in his habit 1: “Take responsibility for your life”. If you cannot see a change make the change, if things are not going the way you plan, you have two options: sit down and watch things go terribly wrong or take control of the situation and ask yourself how can you change the situation. The how questions open a lot of doors and will get you closer to your desired situation.

The choice is yours; take the driver’s seat and lead your life to your own victory or complain while watching other people climb the peaks of success.

To learn more about how to increase your Leadership Quotient and other workshops by ideas group visit our website on www.ideasgrp.com

Social Mania

At First Companies have rebuffed all social media, claiming that it was a waste of time for their employees and that it weights on corporate productivity. Then, as soon as some success stories rose about the use of social networks to make money – the likes of dell making $ 3 million in less than 2 years just out of twitter, and Perez Hilton becoming the friend of celebrities just by blogging about them, all corporates wanted to have facebook profiles, a presence on linked-in and a need to tweet. However this was done the wrong way.

Before jumping on the Social Networks extravaganza, companies, or even people who are looking for a personal branding e-campaign, should ask themselves the below five questions:

1- How is our SEO (Search engine Optimization) benefiting from our social network sites?: Social networks play an amazing role getting our website discovered by the search engines ( google yahoo, bing etc). Using key words on our social network will increase the rankings, if you don’t have a corporate social website its time to do so.

2- Are all of our social profiles and websites interlinked? What makes any website/webpage powerful is the amounts of links directed to that site, when connecting websites with links to each other, then you are creating your own web of sites and thus empowering your reach.

3- Are all of our profiles homogenous? Having different info on different social websites will confuse the visitors and weaken your reach. All the introduction texts in the “About us” section should say the exact same thing, and when updating one social site all the others should be updated in the same time.

4- Are we heard by the right audience? A lot of companies think of adding followers or members randomly. When choosing a “follow-ship” companies should be speaking at the right audience. A good way of building a great database of potential customers is to have a blog that can only be read by inserting contact details. Those blogs can be easily made of subjects that only interest your type of clients.

5- Are we offering to our public something of value? Some social profiles only portray publicity and ways of eliciting customers. The web 2.0 audience is always looking for something of value and for free….Wikipedia, Youtube, mashable, and …. Are perfect examples.

The social networks should be handled the same way we handle the traditional media, you should have a social media strategy, social media officers and an alignment between your overall strategy and online strategy.

Camil El Khoury

How can you win the $75 Million Lottery

I woke up this morning on unusual news: “The winning ticket holders of the UK's largest-ever lottery prize are a married couple from Newport, in south Wales, and a syndicate from Liverpool. The two tickets will take a £45,570,835.50 share approx $75Million.

And when the couple was asked about what will they do with the money: they have both answered, “That’s a lot of money, we don’t know”

And the entrepreneur in me started thinking: “what If I won that lottery, what would I do with it?” and since I know how to always get rid of that responsibility called money, I have quickly divided it into several functions the first being injecting cash in my company to hire more people and create new experiential learning programs, and the second was to take some time off, focusing on writing my next book about business strategy….and with all those waves of thoughts I woke up from my daydream and realized that I didn’t win the lottery, however I was covered with hope and motivation, a motivation to make things happen.

And then I started researching lotteries and their past winners, only to discover that all what lottery companies do is sell hope, a hope so dim that can be outperformed by our minds. Coming to think about it your chance of winning that lottery is one in 50 million that is 0.00000002 %

And right at that moment, a thought came to my mind, “How can I start doing those things with the means that I have” i.e. without the $75 Million, and a million ideas came to my head of which I have captured on a mindmap, and decided to start acting upon those.

My question for you is: “What would you do if you won the $75 Million Lottery?” ………………………………………………………………………………………. Once you come up with that list, start acting on what you can do now with your current means, and what would you need to influence to be able to achieve that full list and bang… here is your big lottery win.

The author Camil El Khoury is the Chief Vision Officer of ideas group an experiential learning consultancy that facilitates and sustains organizational performance. Ideas group serves its clients from its 2 offices Dubai – United Arab Emirates and Beirut –Lebanon and conducts workshops with organizations from the Middle East and Africa. www.ideasgrp.com