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This is the fourth in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.

Before I begin this one, here are all four:

1. Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
2. Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
3. Jon Gordon: the energy addict
4. Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Jon Gordon is an author, presenter, and self-described “energy addict.” I attended his session at NAESP, liked almost all of it, and took these notes:

About energy and negativity
Positive people live longer, healthier, happier lives.

On walking the talk
Quote from St. Francis of Assisi: “No use walking anywhere to preach unless you walk what you preach.”

About busy people
You feel like energy vending machines. People who come up to you have lots of quarters, and they use them. Do you feel out of stock?

About health and energy
It’s mostly a matter of choices: drink water, get lots of sleep. Eat stuff made from plants, not inplants. Walk every day. Breathe deeply. Sit up straight.

He mentions the Heart Math organization, where he gets a lot of his research and ideas from.

Practice breathing and silence every day.

On choosing positive energy over negative energy
Story: a man with went to the village wise man and told him that he had two dogs inside, a positive one and a negative one. “They’re always fighting, and I don’t know which one will win,” he said. The wise man said: “Feed the positive dog.”

How?

1. Thoughts are magnetic …. stop thinking about what you don’t want, have, or do.
2. Project the energy you want to receive (who do you like to hang around with: energetic, happy people, or negative, downer people?)
3. Visualize 10 minutes every day: what you want to accomplish

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” (Ghandi)

Jon tells the story of a cab driver, George, who was irrespressibly cheerful. He happened to be in a bad mood that day, and didn’t appreciate it, but the driver kept smiling and making happy comments. Finally, Jon asked him why.

The man replied: “I love you.” Jon was wondering kind of nutcase he was, but then he continued. “God loves you and He made you and He made the world, and since He loves you, I love you. My job is not to drive a cab, my job is to make people’s days.”

On leadership

1. Your energy must be greater than other’s doubt and negativity.
2. Ask people to get onside: get “on your bus.”
3. Don’t waste time or energy on the people who don’t get on the bus.
4. Avoid “energy vampires.” Don’t let them get you down.
   As Ghandi said: “I will not let anyone walk through my mind with dirty feet.”

5. Remember that where there is a void, negativity will fill it.

10 things to do to have more energy

1. Smile
   Increases endorphins in both you and others who see you.

2. Laugh
   Laughter is a major antidepressant – Jon talks about a study of depressed people who were basically forced to laugh several times a day. Most of them were able to go off their antidepressant medication.

3. Be grateful
   It’s impossible to be miserable and grateful at the same time.

4. Charge up your emotions
   Recharge from time to time. Take a day off.

5. Go to be a success every night
   Keep a positive journal … make a note before going to bed of a few good things that happened that day. Focus on what is successful and good in your life, not on what is negative and failing.

6. Remember your greatest moment
   What is your greatest moment? The birth of a child? A doctor’s announcement that your cancer is in remission? Remember it, savor it, bring it back to mind.

7. Drive with enthusiasm
   George, the cab driver, said “I love life.” Do you?

8. Love your passengers
   Appreciate those on the bus of life with you.

9. Enjoy the ride
   You have to be having fun. If not, change something

Other tidbits
What he tells his kids when they complain: remember, kids, we’re winners, not whiners.

Eye contact when talking: women like 10-12 seconds, men only 2-3 seconds. More than that and men will think you’re challenging them.

Negativity has one good use: finding out what we don’t want.

What old people wish they had done more of
Researchers did a study of 95-year-olds and asked them what they would do differently if they could go back and do it all again.

Here’s what they said:

1. Reflect more – take more time for thought and contemplation
2. Take more chances
3. Do something to leave a legacy beyond their lives

Now you have a chance to change something – before you’re 95 years old. What sould you change?

As I’ve mentioned before, I work for Premier, an educational services company. We provide lifeskills training and tools for over 60,000 schools. This week I travelled to Texas and went with two of our local sales consultants to experience what their life is like.

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This is the third in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.

Before I begin this one, here are all four:

1. Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
2. Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
3. Jon Gordon: the energy addict
4. Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Glenda Hatchett was the highest ranking woman at Delta Airlines, successful and well-paid, when she was asked to become a judge. Not wanting to, but feeling led by God to take it, she did, and has since become one of the most famous judges in the US (it helps that she’s on TV!)

She’s a fiery speaker: reminds me of a souther black Baptist minster preaching. Her speech was built around 2 main stories that she told: one of a 8-year old kid in her courtroom the first week of her new job, and one of herself and her relationship with her father.

My notes from her talk:

A promise to keep
Her first week, an 8-year old boy came in to her courtroom, looked around, and just starting shaking with fear. He had been left by his mother, a crack addict, at a homeless shelter. She said she’d come back for him, but she never did. He was there so the state could find him a place to live.

Glenda zipped off her judge’s robe, went down to him over the protests of her bailiff (this wasn’t the way judges were supposed to act) and gave that boy a long hug. Her promise was to help that boy, and over the next year, she did … getting his mother in rehab (several times) and finally, getting him back in home with a drug-free mother.

“Yo-yo prayers”
She didn’t want to be a judge, but she wanted to pray about her decisions. So she said a 10-second prayer about how she didn’t want to do it and tried to leave it at that. Of course, she couldn’t and the rest is history …

On failure
“There is no such thing as failure if you’re trying to get it right. You’re only warming up for success.”

One of her favorite quotes
Walt Disney had a quote for people who really impressed him: “you’re able to dream beyond your lifetime.” Think about that for a minute – that IS impressive. Do you dream beyond your lifetime? Do I? Real visionaries do. People who truly care about others do.

Write your own story
When she was little, her school in the south was segregated. And the black kids got the hand-me-down books from the white schools. Lousy, broken, ripped, mildewed – you name it.

She cried to her father: can I have a new book? Her father replied: write your own story.

She didn’t like it at the time – cried and went to her room – but that’s what she’s done with her life, and that’s what she’s motivating others to do as well: write their own stories.

This is the second in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.

Before I begin this one, here are all four:

1. Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
2. Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
3. Jon Gordon: the energy addict
4. Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Christine Whitman is a former governor of New Jersey and EPA administrator. She also worked as an ESL teacher early in her career.

A couple of notes I made during her speech:

On leadership
“The best leaders are leaders because they want to do something, not because they want to be something.”

On knowing what’s going on
“Get out of the office!”

This is the first in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.

Before I begin this one, here are all four:

1. Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
2. Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
3. Jon Gordon: the energy addict
4. Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Eric’s seminar was one of the best ones at NAESP – maybe the best. He’s a product of divorce, abuse, and neglect … and the love of just one teacher who loved him, gave him opportunities, and made him believe there might be something he could do with his life.

Some of my notes from his session:

What he tells kids he works with in schools
“Why do you do the right thing? Because that’s who you are!”

On communication
You cannot not communicate.

On helping kids who need it the most
Kids who get attention are the top few and the bottom few … the top few because they’re successful and smart and popular, the bottom few because they’re always in trouble for something.

Kids who get missed are the tweeners … the kids in between. And yet, if you look at successful people in the world, most of them are in this tweener area: success in school does not reliably predict success in life.

So: how do you help the tweeners?

1. Meaningful touch
   Unloved and unpopular kids don’t get touched. Researchers studied what happened to people who didn’t get touched – looked at Vietnam war prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton. If you’re not touched for weeks and months, you start to feel you’re a dream. You doubt your reality. You doubt your validity. (My note: maybe this is why so many street people go a little crazy and start talking to themselves … who touches them?) So: appropriate and meaningful touch is important, even in this day of sickos and a resultant over-reaction.

2. Spoken message
   Eric was talking to a class that was being plagued by disruptive kids, and he wanted to get positive peer pressure to help fix it. So he held up a $20 bill and asked kids, if it was theirs, and someone stole it, what they would do to get it back. Responses escalated from getting friends to help them, to teachers, to principals, to their parents. But they wanted it back.

   So, he said: these people who are disrupting the class are stealing from you to. What do you think is the difference in lifetime income between people who graduate from high school and those who don’t? $250,000. They’re stealing a quarter of a million dollars from you. What are you going to do about it?

3. Honor
   Honor is wanting to know your world more than my own. It’s valuing you and what you think and what you like and what you’re interested in more that myself, and what I think and what I like and what I’m interested in. Honoring people – truly honoring people – is something you can’t pretend, but when you really do it, makes a huge difference in your relationships

4. Picturing a special future
   The one thing that gets people through tough situations is hope. Hope is a candle on the far side of a dark cave, that can get people through a day, a year, a decade which they know is going to be tough. Picturing a special future is saying: “Wow, you’re great at singing. I think people will pay to hear you sing someday.” Or, “you really paint well. I think you could get a job as a graphic artist.”

5. Active commitment
   Active commitment is sticking with people who need help. It’s actually doing something tangible. Eric told the story of a 16-year old girl who, only a few years ago, had never been to a mall. Never gotten any new clothes. Was dropped off by her mother at her grandmother’s home. Was hated by her grandmother. Was teased unmercifully at school.

   He took her to a store and they went clothes shopping – for the first time in her life. And she knew, maybe also for the first time in her life, that someone cared, that there was the possibility for a better future, that there was hope.

Great seminar. Eric speaks at schools all over the US and I highly recommend him.