The Ultimate Leadership Activity Resource

The largest, searchable database out there!

http://www.thesource4ym.com/games

Or if you prefer your fresh, new activities in book form, The Activator is for you!

Building Presentations with F.O.R.C.E.

Next time you are developing a presentation, build it with F.O.R.C.E...

Focused - Keep your presentation's deliverable simple and focused.  Do not try to cover too much ground on one topic or a few things about many topics.  A famous trial lawyer once said, "If I give the jury ten great reasons to vote for my client, I might as well have given them none.  One or two compelling reasons is the best approach."

Organized - I recently spoke at a high-powered leadership event in San Diego and the biggest gripe by the conference organizers of one of the other presenters was that they were all over the place.  There was no clear structure or order to their message or flow.  Having a clear and concise organized plan for your presentation helps the audience remember what just happened, understand what is happening and look forward to what is getting ready to happen.

Rememorable - If you don't want your words acted upon, then a presentation is not the best delivery method for your message.  Send an email, letter or fax instead.  If you do require or desire action to be taken after your presentation, then you must make it rememorable.  Use props, stories, acronyms, interaction, emotional anchors, discussion, note taking, etc.  Unless your message is overtly or inherently compelling, these tools and skills are a must in today's busy, noisy world.

Connected - So many components of effective "speaker to audience" moments are driven by this concept of connecting.  The audience must trust, respect, admire, believe, listen to, want to learn more, ask questions of and like the speaker for the exchange of ideas to happen.  All of these things come down to the speaker making a connection with the audience - emotionally, intellectually, socially and even physically.  They all make a difference.

Engaging - You can spend hours preparing what you are going to say based on learning objectives, program metrics, audience expectations, your expertise, meeting goals, etc., but if you aren't able to deliver this excellent material in an engaging way, you are missing the point.  And so will they.  Your body and verbal language needs to be passionate and energetic.  It is amazing how many presenters forget this and therefore all their hours of thinking about what to say are wasted because they didn't spend any time thinking about how to say.

(Download an awesome poster version)

Resources

Following is a list of ways to connect, learn and grow from us:

http://delicious.com/pliblog - Huge database of leadership content I have gathered for you (and us) from the 150+ blogs I read daily. It contains over 1,000 articles, blog posts, videos, etc. They are all indexed by our curriculum's 10 leadership essentials (http://www.PersonalLeadershipInsight.org).

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pli-blog/id349608878?mt=8 - iPhone app that aggregates the RSS feed from this blog, my other blog, our PLI_Leadership twitter account (We also have other Twitter accounts you can follow - TeamTRI, RhettLaubach and yns1).

http://plileadership.blogspot.com/ - The PLI leadership blog.

http://www.authenticityrules.com/ - The speaking skills blog.

http://www.leadersingear.com/ - My new leadership and presentation skills book.

http://www.slideshare.net/rhettdean - A collection of my PowerPoints.

http://tinyurl.com/theleapshow - The slide show I use at the end of many of my keynotes to inspire.

http://www.personalleadershipinsight.org/- Our rich, beautiful, meaningful and interactive leadership curriculum.

We are also on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Twitter. Just search for our names (Rhett Laubach and Ryan Underwood).

I hope you enjoy these resources and find them enriching and valuable.

Training "Filler" Ideas

Today I walked a handful of Minnesota FCCLA advisors through tips and strategies on how to host an awesome regional leadership conference. One question that come up from the group was...

"What do you do if you are ahead of schedule or a speaker is running late and you need to fill some space in your agenda?"

Basically, they were looking for some new crowd involvement ideas their officers could lead. Something different than singing "camp songs" or doing the Cupid Shuffle. The reason for having something is to keep the crowd busy and possibly enhance the conference experience. An idle high school crowd is a rowdy high school crowd. Here are a few ideas I use in these moments:

1. Name That Tune. (5 minutes)
Get everyone standing in teams of 4-6 people. Tell them they are competing against the other teams in the room to see which team can get the most right. Then play either ten TV/movie theme songs or just ten CPP (Clean, Powerful, Positive) popular songs. Only play 10-15 seconds of each. After you are done find out how many the teams got right.

2. Switch Seats. (5 minutes)
Have everyone select a partner from their school that they will go on a mission with. Tell them when the music starts, they go with their partner to find a new seat in the room. The catch is when they sit down the people sitting to their left and right get to be from a different school. Once they are seated they learn three pieces of information from their new "friends" to their left and right. You can pick whatever you want these three things to be: name, school, favorite hobby, favorite band, favorite fast food restaurant, etc.

3. Meet New People. (5-10 minutes)
Ask everyone to stand. When the music starts your job is to meet as many new people (I.e. - not from your school) in the room a possible. Bonus points for meeting an advisor. Keep track of your points (1 per new person. 2 per advisor.) Give a prize to a few people that have the most points.

4. Dance Off. (5-10 minutes)
Have each school pick (or they can self-volunteer) 3-5 dancers that will come on stage and represent their school in a Dance Off. Pick a few advisors to be the judges. Then play 60-second snippets of Cupid Shuffle, Cha Cha Slide, YMCA, the Chicken Dance, the Macarena, Apache (Jump On It), etc. You can allow more dancers per school if you would like. The judges vote on both the dancing as well as the amount of support (claps, yelling, cheers, etc.) each school gives their dancers.

5. True of False. (5-10 minutes)
Get everyone standing in teams of 4-6 people. Tell them they are competing against all the other teams in the room. Then read off 10-15 true or false trivia questions. Make them interesting and "not-widely-known." Here are a few we use:

1. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our ears and nose never stop growing. T

2. In every episode of Seinfeld, Spiderman is always seen? F. It's Superman.

3. The words orange, month, silver and purple have something in common. T. They don't rhyme with anything.

4. Babies are born with kneecaps. F. They don’t appear until 2-6 years of age.

5. The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan. T

6. Elephants are the only animal that can’t jump. T

7. A polar bear’s hair is white. F. It's clear. It's skin is white.

8. On average, right-handed people live 9 years longer than left-handed people. T

9. The Earth is the only planet that rotates clockwise? F. It's Venus.

10. Walt Disney was afraid of mice. T


- Posted from my iPhone on tour in Minnesota.

Unload and Throw

Speaking to a group is not a diplomatic process. It is largely a one-way pipeline of information and emotion. The most popular and impact-filled presenters follow the advice of my good friend (and phenomenal pastor/communicator) Justin Beadles' dad to his son regarding speaking...

"Justin, when you present in front of a group, unload both guns on 'em and then throw the gun!"

Be bold. Be grace-filled, but be bold. Leave it all on the table.

"Make an impact, not just an impression." Rick Rigsby



- Posted using my iPhone on tour in Minnesota.

How to Maximize a Conference Experience

John Maxwell, the famous leadership author and teacher, tells us there are three things we must do to grow as leaders:

1. Surround yourself with the right people.
2. Consume the right media.
3. Attend the right conferences.

When you attend conferences, to make the most of them, follow these five guidelines.

1. Be child-like. This doesn't mean throw a tantrum if the room is too cold. It means ask questions. Lots of them. Don't let your pride or reputation or position keep you from raising that hand and getting clarity, more information or better information.

2. Take organized notes. If you aren't writing, you aren't learning. But don't just write to recall. Write with organization. Make notes of what needs to be delegated, acted upon immediately, filed for later, etc. This will help your post-conference actions take flight quicker and more efficiently.

3. Offer solutions, advice and suggestions in a CVS format. Concrete. Visual. Simple. It is important to not only add value where you can, but to be clear with your thoughts.

4. Maximize gap time. The official sessions and breakouts will be valuable learning environments, but the real magical sharing times happen early in the morning, at meals and during breaks. Make the most of them.

5. Seek out answers. If possible, go to conference with specific questions and challenges you are looking to resolve. Then hunt to find experts, speakers, exhibitors and attendees who might just have the answers you are looking for.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Small Moves

One of my favorite movies is Contact. It is a movie about a message sent from outer space containing instructions for building a vehicle to visit the message sender's planet. In the opening scene, a young girl is searching for a response from extra-terrestrials by scanning radio frequencies and sending out messages of her own. She is getting frustrated from not hearing anything and her dad instructs her to stay after it. He says to her, "Small moves, Ellie." Later in the movie, the grown-up version of the girl is the discoverer of the actual ET message.

This phrase, small moves, Ellie, came to my mind again at a recent coaching session with 30 young leaders in Wyoming. I was charged with teaching them skills to lead, guide and direct peer students at a camp. As they were praticing many of the skills I had taught earlier in the day, they were doing a great job. They just needed to make a few tiny adjustments, just a few small moves to really be hitting the sweet spot.

Following are a few of those small moves:

- Be nice. Many young or rookie presenters fall into the trap of being bossy when they are called to present to their peers. This strategy might work in an emergency, but is counterproductive to creating a team environment with your audience. Ask them to move, don't tell them. Say please and thank you. Help them to like you, respect you and trust you - not fear you.

- Use inclusive language. It is too easy to see your role as a presenter as that of a dictator. This mindset leads you to using phrases like, "I want you to be quiet." This sets up a wall between you and them. A better strategy is to use inclusive language - we, us, together, you and I, etc.

- Positive wording. Small changes to how you phrase things can make all the difference. Example - say, "we get to have curfew at 11 pm tonight", instead of "you have to have lights out at 11." Especially in an environment where the audience is being told to do things all day long, these small moves add up over time and puts a positive spin on the experience.

- Get everyone ready to listen. If your learning environment is physically, emotionally, socially or intellectually active (hopefully it is at least two of those), your group will be distracted from time to time. When it is time to move on to the next thing, you need to (gracefully) get their full attention. You can do this by using triggers (I say Batman you say Robin, clap twice on the count of three, etc.) or you can get then physically re-organized. Put them in a square, a circle or have them all turn their chairs toward you (we call this High Receive). The point here is they need to have either an attention getting moment or they need to be physically moved to regain their attention.

- Give instructions for passive involvement. The students were proficient at telling the group what to do when they were active, but they forgot to give expectations to the "watchers." Therefore, they had to keep roping the passive students in because they were being distracting. It wasn't totally their fault though because no one instructed them on what to do. Make sure you always think through what each audience member will be experiencing during your sessions and give everyone behavior expectations.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

W5: A Great Presentation Building Strategy

There are a million different techniques to follow to build a presentation. There are a few strategies to build a great one - one that sticks in the mind, changes behavior and makes an impact on the audience. I would like to add to this short list with a strategy called W5.

W5 consists of five "W" questions your audience will be asking throughout your presentation. Great presenters know this and build their content and engagement strategies accordingly.

WHY is this information being presented to me?
Your audience is constantly searching for purpose, outcomes and personal benefits between their life and your content. Make this search easy for them. Present clear connections and use their words, stories and situations whenever possible.

WHEN will I need to use this information?
This question is about future application. Are you presenting material they will need today, tomorrow or at some future point? Clearly answering this question will help your audience place the proper level of urgency (and thus attention) on the connection between your material and their life.

WHAT do you want me to do now to engage in your presenation?
It is critical for you to get clear in your mind how and when you are going to get them emotionally, socially, physically and/or intellectually engaged in the experience of your program. Moving your audience is vital to ensuring content retention, learning and enjoyment, but if you don't provide clear directions, instructions and language, these movement strategies will hinder you more than help you.

WHERE have I experienced this?
This question is about connecting your content with their past. The moment they bridge what you are saying with their life is the moment they relate with, believe in and trust you more.

WHO is an example of what you are telling/teaching me?
Every great communicator leverages the power of stories, people and real life examples. Put a face to your message to make it more relatable, memorable and personal.

W5 is a complex, but simple presentation building strategy. As you can tell, it demands that you intimately know your audience - where they've been, where they're going and what they need today. And that is what makes it great.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Music Tip

When using music with your speech, training or workshop, a useful tip is to set pre-determined start times for each song. You want to set these based on when the lyrics start so the songs "hit the ground running." I use iTunes to manage all my music and this is easy to do by right-clicking on a song, choosing Get Info, clicking the Options tab and setting a specific Start Time there. This feature help you maintain the energy between when you stop speaking and when the music starts. Good luck!

(You can also find the song lists we use in our programs by searching for iTunes in the search box of this blog.)


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The Secrets to Masterfully Answering Questions

I work with student leaders every year who are preparing for competitive events where they must answer questions from judges - pageant contestants, competitive speakers, etc.  The following strategies are the bedrock of everything we work on together to help them shine answering questions.

1.  Talk in a conversational tone.  The Q&A portion is essentially a formal conversation.  Without being too casual (using slang, filler words, etc.), be conversational with your answers.  Change the pace of your voice.  Look the judges directly in the eye.  Don't worry about saying the exact right thing.  If you say something that needs adjusted, do so.  Back up and say it again the right way.  If you need to, talk about the process.  IE - "that is a great question", "I have studied for many hours, but the answer to that question is escaping me at the moment."

2.  Answer in list form.  This strategy is especially important if the judges listen to multiple people in a row.  IE - they are in information overload mode.  This is also a valuable tactic if you tend to ramble during your answers, which can happen to even a seasoned pro.  List form is exactly what the name implies.  As the judges are asking their question, you quickly think of two or three answers.  When you begin your answer, you say something similar to, "There are three great ways to answer your question."  And then you take them through the three answers.  This is effective because it gives your answer structure (to keep you from rambling) and it helps the judges have a clear and concise method for following your answer.

3.  Use an anchor word.  If the answer doesn't demand length, try the anchor word strategy.  This is where you begin with one word that most accurately sums up your answer.  Then you give one or two support points about why you chose that word.  Most times simple and brief will be scored better than detailed and extravagant.

4.  Tell stories.  I have served as a judge at many competitive events and the most impressive tool I have seen students employ is telling stories in answers.  This is impressive because it demonstrates a depth of knowledge, an attention to detail and it gives your answers faces and places.  Remember to give your story meaning by briefly connecting the story to their question.

Good luck!