How to Find and Keep the Best People 2

At this point, I never knew if he agreed with me or not, because he always did this first. He didn’t reject anything out of hand – he tried it on, walked around in it, and looked it over completely before he decided.

If he agreed with what I said, he would say so, and smile. Then he would say what I had said again, with something of his own added -- a slightly different slant, a story to illustrate. We would both smile at each other and sit there for a minute, smiling. To be understood and appreciated is the best incentive, the best reward.

If he disagreed with what I said, he would say so and explain, touching on the parts that he thought were right and saying at what point he thought it was wrong and why. He would take me with him every step of the way from where I was to where he was. So we still understood each other, even if we didn’t agree. Sometimes this was even better, because we always took some action and found out who was closer to the truth. He was always just as pleased when I was right as he was when he was right.

Ted's Blogging for Business 4

Ted Demopoulos' posts on blogging for business over at CEO Read.

Your customers are talking about you and you're not listening?

How to Find and Keep the Best People 1

There's only one thing you need to find and keep the best people. It's the ability to listen well. No, I mean really well.

If you listen really well, people will tell you almost anything you want to know. They can’t help it.

I am still learning how to do this. I don’t do it as well as I’d like. But I knew a man who listened really well. This is how he did it.

Whenever I would go to talk to him, he would stop doing anything else. He would turn toward me. His face and body would relax. He would look me in the eye and smile, motioning for me to take a seat. Then he would look down and wait for me to speak, with the fingertips of his hands pressed together in front of him, absolutely still.

When I started talking, he would look up again and watch me intently. He would listen the whole time I was talking. When I stopped talking, he would repeat it back to me. He would say it the way I meant it, checking with me to see if he had it exactly, not changing it or turning it into something else. “Hmmm,” he would say, “I see what you mean.” He would think about it silently then.

Ted's Blogging for Business 3

Ted Demopoulos' posts on blogging for business over at CEO Read.

Your Blog Topic

Ted's Blogging for Business 2

Back to Ted Demopoulos' posts on blogging for business over at CEO Read.

The Worst Type of Business Blog

Sandia Lite Party Tonight

Tonight I will be at the annual April Fool's Day Party at Sandia Lite Roastmasters, the funniest Toastmasters club in all of New Mexico. The festivities are from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM, which is our regular meeting time, at the Albuquerque Press Club, our regular meeting place.

The Albuquerque Press Club is a 101-year-old log cabin on the National Register
of Historic Places and an awesome place to visit for its own sake. To get
there:

From I-25 take the Central Avenue exit.
Go west on Central Avenue one block.
Take a left on Elm.
Go one block straight,
then up the hill to Highland Park Circle.
Park anywhere.
The Albuquerque Press Club is on the right.

Hope to see you there!

Steve Pavlina, Blogger, Toastmaster

You bloggers will remember Steve Pavlina, whom I posted about here. He was the blogger who first put Google Adsense ads on his website in February 2005. That month, he made $56. In January 2006, he made $4,700.

Steve's newest post is about something he calls Progressive Training. He talks about his conscious decision to build his speaking and communication skills and his experiences doing that in Toastmasters.

I should have known that Steve was a Toastmaster, because he is such a good communicator. And because he talks about Darren LaCroix in several posts. Darren was the Toastmasters International 2001 World Champion of Public Speaking and he is coming to Albuquerque for our Spring Conference!

Better Than a Trophy

I didn't win a trophy. But I did well.

I got many hugs and handshakes and well dones and I felt very good about it myself. B.S. said:

"It's the best speech I've ever heard you give. It really resonated with me."

I like resonating. And G.L. wrote a review for those who weren't there:

"Marianne turned in an excellent effort with her International Speech, 'The Journey.' It is a worthy addition both to her Toastmasters resume and her developing repertoire as a professional writer-speaker-consultant. She incorporated humor, self-revelation, an effective take-home message, and showed a style and poise that reflects the hard work she's done."

I think I'll ask him to write all my reviews. Miz said I was awesome. I thought so, too!

It was Miz who gave me the line, "I did what any woman in my situation would do, I decided to become a truck driver." My fellow Toastmasters at Sandia Lite taught me to say "we" instead of "you" and gave me the three philosophers (Aristotle, Descartes, The Beatles). And Sandy taught me to actually say Descartes (day-CART). And while I was figuring that out, I also got to learn about other philosophers from Miz and Annie and Peg. Thanks, Everybody!

The Journey (continued)

I found a truck driving school and learned how to drive an 18-wheeler. I heard about a place where I could get a job and moved a thousand miles from the place where I had lived all my life to go to work as a truck driver. That was back when there were hardly any women driving trucks.

Sometimes it amazed me that I had done it. You might think that I was daring and brave. But that wasn’t it. I was just more afraid of my life as it was than of any danger out there.

I saw a way to get out of my rut into a different one, one that looked more interesting. And it certainly was! Anybody can see that driving a truck would be fun. Remember how competent you felt when you first drove a car alone? Well, imagine what it’s like when your vehicle weighs 40 tons. But there were other things I didn’t expect. That the whole country would become like my own neighborhood. That I would talk to so many people and see so many people I knew driving coast to coast, because we were traveling the same routes.

Maybe you, too, have done something exciting, exotic, and unexpected? Strange how it affects you, isn’t it? No matter how much you research, prepare, and think you’ve learned everything about it, there are things that you can’t know, that people can’t tell you, unless you’ve been there.

That’s what happens. All the planning makes you think that you, the person you are, can do this. But you can’t. Because in doing something so far from your norm, you end up discovering more of yourself.

And when you come out of your rut, even to go over into another one, you stand on an high open plain, at least for a moment, and you can truly see that the possibilities are endless. And you know that there can be so much more to the journey and to life.

The Journey (continued)

Although most of us can’t remember, we can imagine what it is like to be a baby growing up.

At first, we can barely make out that there is a world outside of ourselves, dim and distant and incomprehensible. We wait for things to happen to us and hoped they are good things.

As time moves on and our bodies develop, the outside world comes into clearer focus. But it’s still a mystery. We learn to do some things for ourselves, but we still rely on other people to teach us how the world works, how to get what we want, and even what to want.

We develop the belief that everything is known or else unknowable because, for everything we want, there is someone to teach us how to get it or else to tell us that we can’t have it. “Why?” we ask. “Because that’s the way it is”, they say.

We might notice that other people are doing other things, living other lives, but there's an answer for that, too. "That is them, this is you."

I think that’s the way it went for me growing up because I remember, just after my 25th birthday, I was sitting in front of the tv when it suddenly occurred to me that I was late in doing what I was supposed to do. I didn’t have a husband or children or a house.

Not that I necessarily wanted those things. I just realized in that moment that I had always believed that they would happen. And they hadn’t. Now that was okay, but, if that wasn’t my plan, then there was no plan for my life! And that was so scary that it really freaked me out, as we used to say.

So, I did what any woman in my situation would do.

I decided to become a truck driver.

The Journey, Live at Presbyterian's Savage Auditorium!

Thanks to Peg for asking if the speech contest where I will compete is open to the public. Yes! We love the public! The contest will be tomorrow, Saturday, March 25, at 1:00 PM at:

Savage Auditorium
Presbyterian Hospital Downtown
1100 Central SE, Albuquerque, New Mexico
on Central Avenue, just east of I-25

Go in the main entrance and take a left to the purple elevators. Go down one level. When you step off the elevator, you will be standing in front of Savage Auditorium. Tell them you're there for the Toastmasters International Speech Contest. I am competing for Sandia Lite Roastmasters in the Area 24 Contest.

I would love to see you there!

The Journey Intro

Besides blogging, I have been tending to business. I have started a new column to submit to the Albuquerque Tribune and practicing my speech for the Toastmasters International Speech Competition. Here is how the intro turned out:

Life is a journey. And we might make that journey in a straight line from beginning to end, never veering from the road that is right in front of us.

No! Getting to the end the easiest way is not the point. What is the point, you say? Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? I don't know! In my youth, maybe like you, I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. I read the philosophers: Aristotle, Descartes, The Beatles. Okay, so I didn’t read all of them, they were pretty boring. But I saw that there are no sure answers to those questions. And I came to this conclusion: Whatever human beings are here for, whatever our purpose, it must have something to do with being human. And if we only try to be the best human beings that we can be, then we're doing what we should be doing. Our purpose is in this life and the way we live it.

What's all that got to do with the journey? The point of the journey, of life, is what happens along the way. If we stay on whatever path we were set on to begin with, then we stay the undeveloped beings that we began as.

Ted's Blogging for Business 1

Here is Ted's introduction to his series of posts on blogging, including why to blog, over at CEO Read.

Why do I blog?

Happy Birthday!

Yes, today is my birthday! Have a piece of cake!

Ted's Why Blogs Matter

Here's a great article on why blogs are important to everybody, even if everybody doesn’t blog: Blogging Benefits for Non-Bloggers. It’s by Ted Demopoulos, guest blogging over at 800-CEO-Read Blog, which is where I go to get recommendations for good business books to read. Ted has his own blog, called The Ted Rap. He has written a book about blogging, just out!


Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and why You Should Care

House for Sale

Our real estate agent came by on Friday to set an asking price for the house and we were so far along that we decided to go ahead and let him list it. Which is why I have been away from my computer for two days. People started calling and coming by right away and I had to get out of here and leave it to the real estate professionals! I snuck back in tonight after dark. Thank goodness people don't look at houses at night!

SEO Elite Software

For the past several days, I have been recommending the information in this series of posts:

Fast Track SEO Guides: 7 Days to Complete Search Engine Optimization

The author, Brad Callen has given us many free tips on search engine optimization in Lessons 1 through 4. Now, with Lesson 5, he starts talking exclusively about what you can do with his software, which is called SEO Elite. It looks good, but it costs money, so I'll just give you the last three links in case you're interested. That seems to be the end of the free lessons, although he does have more information in different places around his website.

Lesson 5
Lesson 6
Lesson 7

You can check out his earnings figures at least for inspiration!

Two Emotions

I did a speech in November which I called Star Stuff. While researching material for it, I came across the idea that there are only a limited number of basic emotions, from which all other emotions are derived. Some people say nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, and some say only two. I found references to two basic emotions in A Course in Miracles. They said the two emotions were love and fear. That didn't feel right to me, probably because I love symmetry. But I knew that if there were only two emotions, they wouldn't be love and hate, because hate is so obviously a derivative of fear or even a corruption of love. Last night, it occurred to me that maybe the two basic emotions, beautifully symmetrical, are hope and fear. Could love be an expression of hope?

SEO Finding the Sites That Matter to You

Recommended reading!

Fast Track SEO Guides: 7 Days to Complete Search Engine Optimization

In Lessons 1 through 3, Brad Callen has been talking about onpage optimization. In Lesson 4, he begins the lessons on offpage optimization. He describes exactly how to find the websites that you want to request links from, which ones are most important to your site. Near the end of this lesson, he starts making a pitch for his SEO software to automate that task, but he's still giving away a lot of great information.

How To Skyrocket Your Website To The Top Of Google With Properly Planned Offpage Optimization!

Men in Black and HSS

A friend read my article in the Albuquerque Tribune and agreed with most of my points but reminded me of a quote from the movie, Men in Black:

I wrote:
HSS are intelligent, logical, hard-working, moral, and social.

From Men in Black:
Jay: Why the big secret? People are smart, they can handle it.
Kay: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.


I love that movie! So, I might say it this way:

A person is intelligent, logical, hard-working, moral, and social. And even if he is not at any time, it's still good to treat him as if he is, because that's what makes him want to be.

SEO Link Requests

Recommended reading!

Fast Track SEO Guides: 7 Days to Complete Search Engine Optimization

In Lesson 3, Brad Callen says that you should never register with a search engine(!). He does have another suggestion, which is a good one (find a page rank 6 or 7 website to link to you), but I don't think registering would interfere with that plan. He also suggests buying a link back to you from a high ranking page if you can't find one that will do it. But I bet you can find one for free.

The Secret To Getting Listed In Google In Under
24 Hours!

Serenity

I am still packing and cleaning, trying to get my house ready to go on the market. I fear I have been getting a little cranky. But I have a new role model. Our friend and business partner has been working on the new house and coming back to help with this house every few days. I don't think he has had a day off in many weeks. He was here the other day, sick with a cold or the flu, but installing a new kitchen sink as promised. He had been working by himself for a little while when I heard him say quietly, "Uh, Gator (that's my husband), could you give me a hand for a second?" My husband said, "Sure, I'll be there in a minute." Then he said, still very calmly, "Now would be better." I walked around the corner to see him struggling to hold up the sink from below because the last fastener had broken and the old sink, which we didn't realize was cast iron and weighed close to 200 pounds, had fallen on him. I wish I could be like that!

SEO Titles and Headers

Recommended reading!

Fast Track SEO Guides: 7 Days to Complete Search Engine Optimization

In Lesson 2, Brad Callen explains what you need to put inside titles and headers and other tags that tell search engines "these words are important".

How Changing One Single Onpage Optimization Factor Can Boost Your Rankings By Over 350 Positions!

Albuquerque Tribune Article is from The Book

The Albuquerque Tribune article I wrote is from the first chapter of my book:

Doing the Right Thing and Achieving All Your Goals at the Same Time.

It is called:

People Are What They Are and It's Irrelevant Anyway

Article in Albuquerque Tribune!

My article has been published in the March 13, 2006, Albuquerque Tribune, Section B-ABQ Biz, Page 2, above the fold. Byline photo by Steven Sehr. My editor changed the title from "Around the Office: There is No Them, There's Only Us" to "Forget Myers-Briggs; we are who we are". Catchy! (And thanks for fixing that incomplete sentence, Nancy!).

Here's the link: Forget Myers-Briggs; we are who we are

Need Help with Philosopher Name

This is the opening of a speech I will be doing at a Toastmasters Speech Contest. A wonderful evaluator suggested I put in philosopher's names. But I can't pronounce Descartes, at least not consistently. If you know the name of another philosopher that most people have heard of that could take the place of Descartes, please tell me! Thanks!

Life is a journey. And we might make that journey in a straight line from beginning to end, never veering from the road that is right in front of us. No! Getting to the end the easiest way is not the point. What is the point, you say? Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? I don't know! In my youth, maybe like you, I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. I read the philosophers:

Aristotle, Descartes, The Beatles

SEO Keyword Suggestions

A friend and fellow blogger invited me to this series of posts:

Fast Track SEO Guides: 7 Days to Complete Search Engine Optimization

In Lesson 1, Brad Callen tells you how to pick your keywords and place them where they will do the most good. Excellent material!

Optimize The Wrong Keywords And You'll Likely Never See Results

Thanks, Greg!

Toastmasters & Leaders

Sorry about the sporadic posts these days. I am packing and cleaning, getting ready to put my house on the market and move a little farther out of town.

I took a break from all that today to go talk to a few Toastmaster friends, Ron and Gregory, about leadership in our district. We talked about leaders we know and people who might be leaders and about ourselves as leaders.

Ron told me that leaders have gravitas. Which is something important that I need to think about in my own struggle to be a leader. He always seems to know what people need. He's like that.

Ron Chapman
Magnetic North

Gregory had the most beautiful thought of the evening:

"The unwounded person
does not have the depth
to be a leader."

Gregory Lay

Gregory doesn't have a website for me to link to, but he can be reached at MeetTheChallenge@aol.com and this is his bio at UNM Continuing Education, where he is an instructor: Gregory Lay.

Blogging 102 Breaks

Peg over at www.pegspot.blogspot.com wants to know how to put a blank line in HTML. She noticed that actually putting a blank line in the code doesn't do anything. I noticed that when I first started, too. I found the answer by using a little trick that Elliot over at www.lifeintheusa.com taught me. When you want to see how something is done on a web page, right click on the page and choose View Source. Then scroll down to some words you recognize and see how they coded it. That's how I found two ways to put a blank line in: < br > or < p >. Note: There are no spaces before and after the br and before and after the p, I just put those in so it wouldn't create blank lines. Thanks for the question, Peg!

Blogging 102 Search Engines

Another blogger, Sandy at www.SandySchairer.blogspot.com suggests that you register your blog, which is a website after all, with some of the search engines to speed up the process of getting crawled and cataloged by the bots. Here are some links:

www.google.com/addurl
submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
beta.search.msn.com/docs.submit.aspx

plus a very helpful website that has many more links:

Words in a Row Search Engine Registration

Thanks, Sandy!

Blogging 102 Become a Barnes & Noble Affiliate

To put a link to your book on Barnes & Noble (or any book or anything else they sell, because you get a commission on all of it), you must first go to www.barnesandnoble.com and sign up for the Barnes & Noble Affiliate program (it's free). To find the link, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the link that says, in little tiny print, Affiliate Network.

When you get your account, log in and click on Graphics & Links in the left hand column. Scroll down to Product Links. Then enter the ISBN number of your book (you can look it up ahead of time or use the keyword search here), and click on Make My Code. This will create HTML code to display an image of your book cover as well as a link to your book that includes your account identification (so they can pay you if someone clicks through and buys something). Click on Select All, then go to the Edit option of your browser and choose Copy.

Now you have to paste this code into your blog. From here, it is the same as pasting any other link. You can paste it into a post or your can paste it into the sidebar. To paste it in the sidebar, log in to Blogger and go to the Template tab. This will show you the HTML for your blog. Scroll past all the formatting junk on the top (more than half way down) and look for something like this:

< !-- Begin #sidebar -- >
< div id="sidebar" >< div id="sidebar2" >


< !-- Begin #profile-container -- >

< $BlogMemberProfile$ >

< !-- End #profile -- >

This tells you that you are in the sidebar and below your profile. If that's where you would like the link to be, click to put your cursor here, then go to the Edit option of your browser and choose Paste. Click on the button that says Preview. If it doesn't look good, close that window and click on the button that says Clear Edits. If it looks good, click on the button that says Save Template Changes.

You Never Know

I had a great time and learned a lot at Albuquerque Weekenders Toastmasters even though I wasn't in the speech contest we had. I got some great information at Southwest Writers even though the talk was on synopses and I don't write fiction. And someone told me that "people are saying good things about you." Cool! And at Page One, I met some wonderful people even though I didn't sell any books. And I might get involved in a project with one of them in the near future. Sometimes, you set out to do something, it turns out differently than you expected, and that's good, too!

Toastmasters-SouthwestWriters-PageOne

Tomorrow, Saturday, I will be at Albuquerque Weekenders Toastmasters at 8 AM, over to Southwest Writers with a few extra handouts from Blogging 101 at 10 AM, and then doing the local authors' book fair at Page One Bookstore from 3 to 5 PM.

Hope to see you!

Blogging 102 Become an Amazon Associate

To put a link to your book on Amazon (or any book or anything else they sell, because you get a commission on all of it), you must first go to www.amazon.com and sign up for the Amazon Associates program (it's free). To find the link, scroll down on their main web page and look for box in the left hand column that says Make Money in green letters. The link to the Associates program is in that box.

When you get your account, log in and click on Build Links in the left hand column. Under that, choose Product Links. Then either search for the ISBN number of your book (you can look it up ahead of time or use the keyword search here), and Amazon will pull it up. Click on the button that says Get HTML. This will create HTML code to display an image of your book cover as well as a link to your book that includes your account identification (so they can pay you if someone clicks through and buys something). Click on the button that says Highlight HTML, then go to the Edit option of your browser and choose Copy.

Now you have to paste this code into your blog. From here, it is the same as pasting any other link. You can paste it into a post or your can paste it into the sidebar. To paste it in the sidebar, log in to Blogger and go to the Template tab. This will show you the HTML for your blog. Scroll past all the formatting junk on the top (more than half way down) and look for something like this:

< !-- Begin #sidebar -- >
< div id="sidebar" >< div id="sidebar2" >


< !-- Begin #profile-container -- >

< $BlogMemberProfile$ >

< !-- End #profile -- >

This tells you that you are in the sidebar and below your profile. If that's where you would like the link to be, click to put your cursor here, then go to the Edit option of your browser and choose Paste. Click on the button that says Preview. If it doesn't look good, close that window and click on the button that says Clear Edits. If it looks good, click on the button that says Save Template Changes.

Blogging 102 Links!

You need to learn just a little, tiny bit of HTML in order to put links on your blog. Don't be afraid!

Log into Blogger and go to the Template tab. This will show you the HTML for your blog. Scroll down past all the formatting junk on the top (more than half way down) and look for something like this:

< !-- Begin #sidebar -- >
< div id="sidebar" >< div id="sidebar2" >


< !-- Begin #profile-container -- >

<$BlogMemberProfile$>

< !-- End #profile -- >

This tells you that you are in the sidebar and below your profile. If that's where you want the link to be, click to put your cursor there. Type in the link on a blank line. It needs to be like this link to my website except that you can substitute any URL (website address) and any title:

< a href="http://www.mariannepowers.com">Doing the Right Thing< /a >

where "http://www.mariannepowers.com" is the website address
and Doing the Right Thing is any text you want to display for your link.

NOTE: I had to put a space before the first a and a space before and after the /a in order to get it to show you the HTML instead of creating the link. If you copy it, take the spaces out.

Click on the button that says Preview. It should look like this: Doing the Right Thing

If it doesn't look like that, close that window and click on the button that says Clear Edits. If it does look okay, click on the button that says Save Template Changes. Then republish your blog to see the changes.

Always look at your blog from your web browser when you make changes, especially changes to the HTML. Always test your links by clicking on them to make sure they work.

Give it a try!