Lightning

Where there’s lightning, there’s thunder.

Be the misfit, the rebel, the rule breaker, and the round peg.

Be there first.

When you strike, they’ll listen.

Modern Equity

Equity transcends gender, nationality, and skin color.

Make your work resonate by recognizing their kindness, attitudes, skills, honesty, willingness to take risks, and self-awareness.

This information can’t be gathered through surveys but is well worth discovering.

There

If you want to go there, you can’t stay here for too long.

Embrace change and reinvent yourself every day.

Obsessed About the Customers

Now more than ever there are hordes of anonymous people who can watch what you do. They can decide whether you’re succeeding.

If you let them.

Let them analyze and speculate from the nosebleeds.

The only people who matter to you are the customers who need you.

Care to show up for them, not the bystanders.

Best Yet

Are you wasting your time and budget to paper over the flaws in your work?

Or are you investing your time and budget to do what you have every right to do, without shame from those who are keeping you from it?

The former is a trap that yields mediocracy. At best.

The latter is generosity that usually leads to our best work.

Step 2

Step 1: learn how to do it.

Step 2: turn it into a habit.

The good trainings accomplish Step 1, but rarely Step 2. Simply because it’s overlooked.

Enable your audience to commit the learning to practice. Guide them on how they can show up and do it again and again until it’s a part of who they are and what they do.

Say What They’ve Come to Hear

Table of contents, executive summary, and unbranded section are terrible things to waste.

Use them to cause a forward motion.

Your customers are already looking at you, they’ve given you the microphone, and they’re ready to hear the best part first.

Risk

“Feels risky” is not the same as “is risky.”

What’s the worst that can happen?

From Here to There

You can change the culture, but not by picking a fight.

Recast your outcome in terms of their worldview.

This is far more effective than insisting they change what they want or what think they know.

Who Are They, Really?

It’s easy, and therefore common, to sort them by gender, nationality, and skin color.

It’s far harder, but way more useful, to sort them based on kindness, expertise, attitude, skill, emotional intelligence, honesty, generous persistence, willingness to take risks, loyalty, perceptivity, attention span, and self-awareness.