Newsletter Vol 3 #23           
January 2014   
S Lakshmi Narasimhan 

Welcome to this edition of the Voyages of Discovery Newsletter, the newsletter that is all about you and your voyages of discovery of your genius.  If you missed our previous newsletters, get them here from our archives.

WISHING OUR READERS A HAPPY & PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR 2014 and CHINESE NEW YEAR - YEAR OF THE HORSE! 

In This Issue
Your Year End Retrospectives
The Magic of Visual Presentations (Part 2 of 2)
Next Issue
Your Year end Retrospectives

 
Are you course correcting in life?

  

  

 

Your Retrospective               

It is that time of the year yet again. Days have rolled into months and now you are about to ring down the curtain on the current year and welcome the new year. This has far more implications than merely wishing friends and family for the new year and then forget about the one that has just ended. It is the perfect time for a look back at the year gone by or about to go by.

A retrospective is not merely a chronological review of days passed. It is an opportunity to list your achievements, examine your mistakes, take stock of lessons learned and course correct. Year end retrospectives are not passive postmortems of days gone by, they are a rich tapestry of what you did well and not so well, what events were life changing, who you will thank and be grateful to, how it will prepare you for the new year unfolding and so on.

Napoleon Hill, the author of the all time classic "Think and Grow rich" used to say: "If you keep doing what you have always been doing, you will keep getting what you have always gotten."

So, a retrospective is a scorecard, so to say, of life. A scorecard which has positives and negatives with the difference being that negatives are opportunities to turn into positives and not merely indications of your failure and something you can beat yourself up for. The human is a being on an incessant quest for meaning and purpose and failures are an integral part of that journey. The retrospective is a tool for an assessment of that quest.

 

 
Your Achievements
By reason of being a human you have a "why" element to life that makes you different from the animal world. You are able to reason. In the same vein, you are able to motivate yourself and aim higher and be more happy and successful. Nothing motivates you more than in realizing that there a lot of facets of your life where you have been successful. You have achievements that you are proud of. Or are you? One of the unerring truths of life is that despite all the positives that you can enumerate, a human is often susceptible to focusing on negatives. In photography (one of my passions), we have a quote that mirrors life: "A negative is something developed in a dark room."

Your achievements are the fulcrum of your future endeavors. They inspire you, galvanize you and help your remain upbeat. And most critically, acknowledging your own achievements is no self aggrandizement. Your main objective in celebrating your achievements is key to personal growth. Nothing succeeds like success. Success begets success.

What can you rate as your achievements? Well, anything where you have put in extraordinary effort. Note that I say "effort." It is not merely results that can be chronicled as a personal achievement, efforts are too. Thomas Edison the greatest inventor of all time is said to have made 10,000 attempts at inventing the imcandescent bulb (the one that literally shines in your daily life). If he had felt that his 10,000 attempts were not achievements, he would never have made that fateful next attempt where he indeed produced results and tasted success. Efforts are stepping stones to results and success and are therefore as much achievements on a personal level as anything else. Your lack of apparent achievement could be because of what you consider an achievement.

Go on, give it a shot. For this new year 2014, resolve to rate as achievement where you have invested sincere effort and time towards a goal or a life mission. It is therapeutic to say the least and life changing at its best.

 

Your Mistakes      
Mistakes always get bad press. They are reviled and even scorned. It is often said that if you are not making mistakes you are not trying hard enough. Mistakes are part and parcel of personal growth as much as achievements are. In fact, you can hardly make a worthwhile effort without a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes indicate that you are stretching and not remaining stationary.

Lessons learned
An umbilical cord connection to mistakes is lessons learned. Having said that mistakes are integral to personal growth, that process is not complete unless you picked up some lessons along the way relating to your mistakes. Nothing is more reflective of being in inertia than repeating your mistakes. Not learning lessons from your mistakes is more damaging than the mistakes themselves.

Napoleon Hill used to say: "There is a seed of equivalent if not more benefit from a failure or a mistake if only you look for it."

Mistakes indicate that you are stretching, going outside your comfort zone, treading new paths. This is a sure sign of being on the road to progress although you may be met with disappointments initially. It is getting past that zone of despair that is key. Continue striving, Rome was not built in a day and neither will accomplishments come easily. However, the lesson to be learned is to discover what went wrong and correct it. You will be stronger in spirit for that.

Your year ahead
However, in all these facets of a retrospective, the transformational one is the manner in which you look ahead to the new year. Do you approach it as: "one more year to endure," or "a year to take firm action and grow." The approach you adopt will decide your future. Destiny is a strange thing. When it encounters a committed mind able to harness past achievements, lessons learned from mistakes made and a resolve to forge ahead, it seems to conspire to create what you imagined or planned for. Go on, put it to practice, it is uncanny.


Let me leave you with this thought.
You cannot do anything about the 365 days that have rolled past. But you can certainly influence the 365 that are in front of you. How?
By resolving to grow personally, become a lifelong learner.
And if you do look back on retrospective, it is only to provide momentum to your future.

Go on! Design your own destiny!

  
Leave your comments about this article by clicking here.  
The Magic of Visual Presentations (Part 2 of 2)

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The Beginning and the End !

Do you know their significance? 




In Part 1 of the Magic of Visual Presentations, you came across the concept of picture superiority - the ability to juxtapose images with
words to sear knowledge into your audience's brains.

In this concluding part we will look at a few other phenomenon that can transform your staid, soporific presentation into an edge of seat, nail biting, anticipation filled one.


Repetition
One of the most powerful aids to memory (apart from images) is repetition. Repeating keywords in your presentation in different forms helps memory and retention. Audiences come to your presentation hoping to take away something with them when they return to their mundane worlds. This can only happen if your content is sprayed with "ideas" rather than mere words. Ideas can be acted upon while words are just that and nothing more. Ideas are dynamic, words are passive.

You will have noticed that the most captivating presenters will present ideas in multiple perspectives. So much so that the idea or concept gets lodged in your brain. When you get back to your daily rigmarole and pause to think back on the presentation these repeated ideas or keywords are what you will remember.

What are ways in which you can repeat content?

By introduction, summaries, illustrations, exercises, do it yourselfs. A presentation which you cannot remember after you have left the event is as good as not having been to.


The Recency and Primacy Effects
Closely related to the repetition factor is a phenomenon known as the Recency Effect. Given a list of items to remember, you will tend to remember the last few things more than those things in the middle. You also tend to assume that items at the end of the list are of greater importance or significance.

This has powerful implications for those making presentations or involved in any form of public speaking, teaching or training. What you communicate at the end of your presentation or teaching or training event is what is going to remain in memory for your audience. This is also the reason why summaries are so ubiquitous in any form of group communication. The summary harnesses the effectiveness of the Recency Effect by providing a snapshot of the communication at the end. It is what your audience will take away with them. So, the more catchy the method of your summarizing is, the more it will hit home.

The other side of the Recency Effect is the Primacy Effect. This refers to how the you will tend to remember the first few things more than those things in the middle. So, what you communicate at the beginning is what will stick. This is the function of an introduction.

So, between the Recency and Primary effects the summary and introduction to a group communication have tremendous value. In short, whatever you may have communicated during the middle of your communication may well have no significance. It does emphasize the importance of categorizing the different stages of your presentation or group communication. Pace your communications in a structured manner with distinct beginnings and endings. It is probably the best thing you could do for your message to go across and stay.

  
Humor
Emotion also plays a great part in recall. In particular, humor brings a powerful facet to memory and recall. A concept or idea that is put across with humor (a cartoon, funny image or a catchy one-liner) is most likely to stay in memory of your audience long after the event. This is because emotion is one of the key associative triggers (the other one is repetition which we saw earlier) critical to memory and recall. Humor brings in a element of surprise to the context in which a particular idea or thought is presented and is a great glue to retention.

The magic in visual presentations comes from how you leverage the workings of your audience's brain. Visual stimulus is fodder for the brain enhancing recall and retention.

 

 

Let me leave you with this thought.
The next time you go before your audience, make your presentation starkly visual. Make your introduction and summary vivid and distinct. Use humor to make the message stick.
Your audience will be talking about your presentation long after the event. Would you not want that?

    

Leave your comments about this article by clicking here.  
Next Issue (see you in February 2014)
Discover your Genius
The road to your passion
 

Design is ubiquitous. It touches all facets of your life and every waking moment. Read why and how.

 

Are you a risk taker? Or do you like to play safe? Find out why it is important to know this.

and many more......

 
Feedback on the newsletter is welcome including any suggestions for improvement and may be sent to [email protected]

Believe in yourself and discover the genius in you.

Talk to you soon.
S Lakshmi Narasimhan
e-Learning Portal: http://www.elearningcloudacademy.com
Author of the Book: Discover the Genius in the Mirror





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