The assistant- Agenda!

In recent days, I attended a few committee meeting, and I noticed the most important skill but not many people take it seriously is the skill to create "meeting Agenda". 

To be able to run a successful and efficient meeting, the most important factor is to be "Organise". The use of agenda for each meeting is to list the items in order that will be discuss in the meeting. However, they are many layout for agenda in different meeting, what I suggest is to make it as simple as possible so it's easily understand. 

Therefore I took the opportunity to be an agenda creator and responsible to create agenda for every meeting. The basic content for agenda included the "Time of the meeting", "Where to be hold", "Duration of the meeting" and of course the most important item to put is the "Name of the company". 

Furthermore, it then comes down to the specific section - each individual items that will be discuss for the meeting and of course, each meeting will have different item to discuss; therefore it's important for the agenda creator to keep up to date with the meeting and what need to be discuss. 

There are a few items that have to be included for every meeting in the agenda I create, such as the "Apology of Absence", "Review of previous minutes" and "Any of Business"for other to bring up their idea on thing that they wish to discuss. 

The agenda must be send to every participant 10 days before the actual meeting, so that participant can arrange their schedule to be available for the meeting. Agenda can be use in many areas, it doesn't need to be business meeting, it can be a society meeting or sport club meeting. 

Click here for the website I think is worth of reading in creating an efficient agenda. 

I will give an example of the importance of the agenda for the meeting. Since the first meeting I had with the community, we always have the meeting agenda and were all created by me, and every discussion in meeting were all went through the list of order in the agenda, I believe if we don't have the agenda for every meeting we might miss out items that need to be discuss and causes further problem, such as delay of work. 

I suggest if there's any opportunity to be an agenda creator, go for the position and take it. It simply not the hardest job in the business community or programme, but it's one of the most important job for the community and it only take about 10 or 15 minutes to complete the agenda. 

Due to the fact that I have developed the skill in creating the agenda, I then add another skill that show the knowledge I have about conference or community meeting. 

Billy, Later. 

Become a Good Speaker pt.2- Improve speaking

After pointing out the power of Rhetoric, with an understanding of the use of hand movement, eye contact and necessary pause in the speech, the next step is to find out what we can do in order to improve our communication. 

However, it's very difficult to split nonverbal, oral and written communication into individual action plan, saying do this will improve nonverbal communication and do that will improve oral communication, because each of the communications are link together. 

Therefore, beside looking around to see who is the most determine or dominant person in class, you could also watch a few TED talk speaker video. However, you must do this consistently and make it a daily activity in order to convert the skill into your long term memories. 

Some great examples beside the victory speech given by President Obama in the previous post, that I found it very useful in terms of improve my own communication and rhetoric skill. 

The TED talk speaker, Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? (2006). I found the topic was very interesting, and while it's interesting Sir Ken Robinson made it entertainment by including some humours during the talk, and he has definitely stolen audiences attention.  

Another good example will be Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do (2006). In the TED talk, there were a lot of point that make me rethink what I should do and why didn't I do that before. The way he gave the speech was very honest therefore it attracts me and obviously had attracted the audiences at the time. 

In both video suggested above, there was a very strong interaction with the audience whether by sharing a joke or asking question that seek a respond from the audience, it works! The hand movement was strong, make it clear of what he fully believe and convincing us to believe it too. 

In Tony Robbins TED talk, he interacted with the audience by saying "How many of you who knows what I'm talking about, give me an aight!" and the next second you could hear the room was full of "aight" in the video. 

So action 1, is to watch TED talk speaker handle their speech and the audience, and make it a daily activity, 

Another way that I think it would result an improvement in communication is be aggressive in any opportunity that offer yourself a chance to present a speech or project idea. However, this is depend on how much you want and how much heart you willing to put in. 

What I found by practicing this way is the fear of failure inside my mind. The first few attempts, I was speechless because I was afraid that I might say something wrong and people around me would make a joke out of it. However, what I did was speak to myself, convincing myself that this could be the last opportunity to either ask question or share my own idea. 

Once I raise up my courage to share my idea and ask question in few attempts, I then found an raise in my confident when speaking to others. 

"Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.” ― Coco Chanel, Believing in Ourselves: The Wisdom of Women

Click here for Previous post!

Billy, 

Become a Good Speaker

So in my last post, I mentioned the importance of Communication, and I gave a few examples to show both successful and failure way of using different communication. 

Now in this post, I will list down a few elements that is required in order to be a good speaker. Good speaker meaning the spotlight are all on one individual, audiences get motivate and cheering, clapping comes automatically. 

First of all, one of my teacher told me, the best way to discover who is the most dominant and influential person in the class is to be aware of their body language- nonverbal communication; to observe the way they sit in class, the position they chose to sit and the concentration they have in class.

Some little movement and small detail, such as the pause, the nod, the hand movement and the eye contact can be very effective in range from little conversation to speech in front of hundred or million of people. 

Let me (try my best to) show you an comparison example on what I meant the pause, nod, etc. 
A: Today, I'm happy to announce my engagement with Vivian. (say this sentence with no pause in between, just be as normal as possible)
B: Today (pause for 3 second and look around the audience), I'm happy (put both of your hands together in front of your chest) to announce my engagement (pause for 3 second and look around) with Vivian (point at Vivian with a big smile).

You can see (or imaging) the different it would makes just by adding a few pauses a hand movement in between. You will gather audience's attention when using pauses at the right moment, looking around the audience would give people a feeling of they are special and important. Let me show you an clip that present a good example:

The power of Rhetoric! 

President Barak Obama delivered victory speech in 2012. In this speech, President Obama used the words "You", " the American people", "We are American","One union" and "this country" to engage and motivate with the audience.   

Also to note that President Obama did not look at the camera during his speech, he focus on eye contact with the audience by looking his left and right consistently, to make sure that he is speaking to everyone, not any individual. 

President Obama had express the beauty of hand movement and pauses in this speech. Every motivate words and thing that he wanted to emphasis were combined with different hand movement, therefore the audience could identify what's importance by the hand movement. 

The next time you are up to give a speech in front of audiences or convince someone, try to add a few hand movement and pauses, the outcome could be different. 

In business, sports or anywhere, the successful people may have talent or gift within them, but people that knows how to inspire the audience is the one will get most respect and have most control. 

Click here for Part 2!

Billy

Communication- Adapt or die!

Over the past few years, I been traveling around the world experiencing the cultural differences, the language barrier and so on. And I will use one line from the movie "Moneyball", from Brad Pitt - "Adapt or die"!! 

It's true. Sometime when you move to a new environment, there's no way the environment will change for you, only adapting the environment can save you from struggling; therefore the first thing that I think it's important to point out and discuss based on my previous experience, is the importance of communication. 

Human communication can be divided into three major categories, which are shown below. The chart below is a self-created hierarchy chart on communication. 

Nonverbal communication are known as non-wording style of delivering the message, such as haptics, gesture, body language and facial expression. You can see this style of communication in baseball game where coach throws the sign to his players. 

Oral communication as known as verbal communication. As simple as what it says, it delivers the message throughout voice. When you watch the news on TV, the reporter is using Oral communication to report the news.

And the last is Written communication. It has changed largely due to the technology improvement over the years. It originally was pen and paper written down the message to be delivered, however, we can now use laptop or phone to type up the message on to computer system to deliver our message. An example of this is the daily newspaper. 

A good communication is that both people achieve delivering the message and receive the message, also with a level of understanding the message content. For example, the baseball coach throws the signal to his players and his players make the correct plays, this call a successful nonverbal communication. 

So how is communication important in our daily life? 

Let me give you a few examples that happened recently.

One of the example which happened in my volunteering hours was in a committee meeting, where I shared an idea that I would love to take charge of a sponsorship team, and asking if everyone in the committee agree on creating an extra team and also who would like to take part with me. During the speech for my idea, I saw most of the members were nodding their heads while eye focus on me, at that point, I knew that my message has been delivered to the members successfully. And with the feedback saying "yeah, I think that a good idea" and "Billy, I will help you in this project", I knew immediately that everyone had agreed with this idea. 

Another example that given here is a "Not so successful attempt" of using communication. 

I remember in one of the committee meeting. I wanted to remind our chairperson to discuss about one item, so I tried to tap the table lightly and tried to stretch my arm hoping that I will get his attention, but that didn't work so well. So I kept on trying with sending him a phone message with the message that I wanted to deliver, but he had his phone on silence, so that didn't work again. After that, I had my phone out on the table and tried to use my finger to tap the phone, hoping that he would turn to me and get the meaning of "look at the phone". 

However, that make it a third "Not so successful attempt"!!

In these two examples, you can clearly see the different style of communication being used and the end results of them. 

The first example was successful because my message was delivered with my personal voice, which is oral communication. On the other hand, the second examples didn't work so successful was because I couldn't get my receiver's attention by using nonverbal communication. 

However, I can be certain that you received my message on communication. And which style of communication am I using here?   

See you soon, Billy

Welcome to my blog

Hello all, this is where everything begin and lead to success- a start, a first!

This blog focus on discovering the weaknesses that occur in everyone of us, and I will be suggesting ways to overcome it with detail breakdown. 

And by doing this way, I can also figure out my own weaknesses in order to improve them, so it's like a two way process for me that I can share my experience with you while improving my own weaknesses.

Hope what I'm doing can have a positive impact for any of you that area facing difficult time in life.

2012 Active Kidz Shanghai Summer Cam

Sports has always been a big part of my life. The excitement of the game, the emotional from individual players, the way you look into your teammates' eyes, every moment that fires up the desire inside me to fight all the energy I got until each game finishes. 

Thank you for checking my blog, and feel free to check in every now and then to see what might interest you. 

Billy, Later.