6 minute stressbuster meditation

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Apr 23, 2010 in Awakening, Jedi mind tricks, On ko chi shin | 3 comments

A few folks have lately needed to make use of this 6 minute guided meditation I made a few years ago. It’s not tied specifically to any one tradition or religious practice, just a way of getting yourself recentered by using your senses and some music. Give it a try, and let me know how it works for you.

6 minute meditation MP3

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Please DO SHARE IT with anyone you think might benefit from it.

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We live or die on our database

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Apr 20, 2010 in Marketing | 3 comments

Jeff Pulver, co-founder of the Vonage Internet phone company and creator of the VON and 140 conferences, has an expression that you absolutely must take to heart:

“We live or die on our database.”

In the age of social networking and social media, it’s easy to get lost in the clouds. It’s easy to believe that the cloud, the network, the ethereal presence is always there, has always been there, and will always be there…

… Except when it’s not. The cloud, the meta, fails. Sometimes it’s intermittent and momentary, when the network connecting you to the cloud becomes unavailable. Sometimes it’s considerably more permanent, when a cloud provider goes out of business, when a network shuts down, or when your account is terminated with or without your consent or even awareness.

The only guarantee, the only insurance policy you have against the fallibility of the cloud, is to own your database. Own it in whatever data format you’re most comfortable with, but own it. Download the database as often as you can, as often as is necessary, to ensure your continued access to it.

One recipe is the email newsletter. Create one of value and relevance and then persuade every person over whom you have influence to sign up for it. That database is yours (even if you switch email providers) and you can take it with you no matter where you go.

Another recipe is a network provider that lets you keep your data. As of this writing, the one major provider that lets you keep your data is LinkedIn. Encourage people to network with you on any provider that lets you download the entirety of your database and take it with you. Endorse, support, and promote providers who do not hold your data hostage.

We live or die on our database. Without a database, there is only death.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Attention to detail

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Apr 18, 2010 in Awakening, Productivity | 3 comments

I was traveling around Northrend the other day, looking for zombies to send to Amber Naslund for her Social Fresh St. Louis keynote – after all, there’s no place to find zombies like the Lich King’s backyard. On one of my stops at the Shadow Vault, I took the time to look at The Leaper, a (now) friendly geist hanging out along with Vile, the giant wandering abomination.

I noticed for the first time just how detailed The Leaper is. A large skeletal zombie of sorts with a single eye and a hangman’s noose around his neck, he’s the epitome of creepy – and even though I’d spent more than a few hours looking at him and his friends while finishing quests at the Shadow Vault, I’d never really noticed how detailed he was.

Attention to detail is one of those skills that we often are forced to develop in the workplace, and as a result, the skill is developed reactively, with only punitive feedback received for insufficient skill. We’re very rarely rewarded for its use and only punished for a lack of it. As a result, many of us – myself included – rarely make use of it outside of workplace routines to its fullest potential, and miss out on some of the enjoyment of our leisure time.

Take some time in your next burst of leisure time to see what you might be missing. Slow down, see what details there are in what you do for fun, and you might find your leisure to be much richer than you thought…

… and of course, the stealth move is that if you squeeze more juice out of your leisure time with attention to detail, chances are your skills in the workplace will magically accelerate, too.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

The significance of being unfollowed by me

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Apr 14, 2010 in Twitter | 11 comments

I got an interesting question from Ethan Griffin via Twitter yesterday:

@cspenn Quick question… Did you unfollow me on purpose? or is it one of those new fangled tools you have?

The short answer: ascribe absolutely no significance to being followed or unfollowed by me. As I joked in response, if Jason Falls is the Social Media Explorer, I’m the Social Media Mad Scientist with beakers and test tubes filled with APIs, data files, SQL statements, and PHP scripts. That’s what I do, experiment with stuff until it blows up – thus, the significance of being followed or unfollowed by me is roughly zero, since I’m not explicitly assigning any value to who I follow or unfollow beyond whatever I’m working on at the time.

The original question does raise a followup question though: how much weight do YOU assign to someone following you? Given that the level of commitment is near zero, does someone following you have any material significance? Why would you value that in any way, given that following isn’t required in order to have conversation or create a valuable relationship?

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Which is the real home?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Apr 13, 2010 in Awakening | 11 comments

Which is the real home?

Imagine yourself standing inside your home (be it an apartment, condo, house, or other place to live) and looking out the window. See the world as it passes by, see the seasons come and go.

Now, change places. Imagine yourself standing outside your home, looking in the window. See life as you live it, meals served and eaten, holidays celebrated in the way you do at home.

Here’s a question: Which view is the REAL home?

What a ludicrous question, huh? They’re both your home, from different perspectives. Outside looking in or inside looking out, it’s still your home, just from different points of view. They’re both real, both valid.

Seems logical, doesn’t it?

So why do so many of us work so terribly hard at managing others’ perceptions of ourselves as separate and distinct entities from how we see ourselves?

Imagine how strange a home it would be if you had separate, one-way windows for looking out and for looking in. Wouldn’t that be a little creepy? Wouldn’t that be horribly inefficient?

The closer you can get to looking out the same window that everyone else is looking in, the fewer windows you have to maintain and keep clean, and the easier it will be for you and the world to see eye to eye.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.