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Issue Number 52
If you have built castles in the air, your
work need not be lost; that is where they
should be.
Now put foundations under them.
--
Henry David Thoreau
Greetings from Pivotal Points
Supporting you with resources for the times
when you pivot – change direction – towards
your personal best …
http://www.consultpivotal.com Your
personal best – it’s Pivotal!
Let’s begin with some random good news
stories ..
Hero stops runaway car on Golden Gate Bridge
After seeing a woman slumped over and
unconscious in her moving Jeep on the Golden
Gate Bridge heading toward oncoming traffic,
a Mill Valley good Samaritan sprang into
action, using his utility truck to guide the
Jeep off the road as traffic zoomed by.
Give one, Get one. Now extended through
December 31st
One learning child. One connected child. One
laptop at a time.
The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC)
is to empower the children of developing
countries to learn by providing one
connected laptop to every school-age child.
In order to accomplish our goal, we need
people who believe in what we’re doing and
want to help make education for the world’s
children a priority, not a privilege.
Since November 12th, OLPC has been offering
a limited-time Give One Get One program in
the United States and Canada. During Give
One Get One, you can donate the
revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a
developing nation, and also receive one for
the child in your life in recognition of
your contribution. Thanks to a growing
interest in the program, we are extending
Give One Get One until the end of the year.
Miss Landmine Angola -- beauty contest
for landmine survivors
The Miss Landmine Angola 2008 competition
was created by a Norwegian artist called
Morten Traavik -- it's been controversial,
but has some laudable objectives
And now .. Building your Organisation
Unbalanced Influence: How Myths and
Paradoxes Shape Leaders
What do executives consider when making a
decision? What motivates an executive to get
involved in one activity or initiative at
the expense of another? Who does the
executive look to for advice - and who does
he or she ignore? CCL's Pete Hammett sought
to better understand who and what influences
executives. The result is
Unbalanced Influence, a new
book about the myths and paradoxes that
influence today's senior leaders.
What Hammett found is that multiple
"influencers" come into play to shape an
executive's behavior and perceptions in
their efforts to be an effective leader.
More notably, said Hammett, is that "these
influencers often seem unbalanced."
Why Is Succession So Badly Managed?
Should CEO succession processes be
certified? Respondents to this month’s
column agree that CEO succession is badly
managed, perhaps accounting in large part
for the fact that few “inside outsiders”
ever make it into the job, despite their
often useful qualifications, observes Jim
Heskett. There were many theories about why
this is the case as well as suggestions for
how to fix the process.
Resource: knowledge sharing for fundraisers
This is a website for prospect researchers
but the focal point of the site is the
Resource database. The database lists
products, tools, resources and websites
spanning a wide variety of fundraising and
research areas, from trusts, major donors
and companies, right through to general
reference, volunteering and events.
More on Growing your organisation
For your personal Health and Wellbeing
 The
greatest minds of our day have contributed
their best work to help you succeed with
this eBook.
Ordinary People Can Achieve Their Lofty
Goals, an e-book by David DeFord
Experts from the top of the personal
development field have contributed their
tips and encouragement to help you live the
life you want.
David has gathered together 18 downloadable
bonuses to go with this book.
http://www.consultpivotal.com/Alofty_goals.htm
Stretching ...Why Should I?
This short article looks at some of the
tips, tricks and helpful hints you can use
to help prevent sports injury. It's been put
together to answer some of the more common
questions we get regarding stretching and
sports injury, and details a number of
useful sports injury prevention techniques.
I hope it proves useful to you.
Overcoming & Preventing Sports Injury
If you're involved in the health & fitness
industry, whether it be participating in
your favourite sport, coaching, training or
just keeping fit, you'll know how annoying
and debilitating a sports injury can be. In
reality, when you have a sports injury
you're actually losing on two fronts.
Firstly, you're losing simply because your
body has been hurt and now needs time and
care to repair itself. And on top of this,
you're also losing the time you could have
been putting into training and improving
your sporting ability.
A sports injury is a bit like losing money.
Not only do you lose whatever you were going
to buy with that money, but you also have to
work hard to make up the money you've lost.
Take it from me, a sports injury is one of
the most frustrating and debilitating
occurrences that can happen to anyone who's
serious about their health, fitness, sport
or exercise.
The Cold, Hard Facts
I recently read an article titled "Managing
Sports Injuries" where the author estimated
that over 27,000 American's sprain their
ankle every day. (and, no, that's not a
typo, EVERY DAY) On top of this, Sports
Medicine Australia estimates that 1 in every
17 participants of sport and exercise are
injured playing their favourite sport. This
figure is even higher for contact sports
like Football and Gridiron. However, the
truly disturbing fact is that up to 50
percent of these injuries may have been
prevented.
The Professionals Secret Weapon
While there are a number of basic
preventative measures that will assist in
the prevention of sports injury, there is
one technique that has slowly been gaining
in popularity. It's still not used as often
as it should be by the average sports
participant, but with the professionals
using it more and more, it's only a matter
of time before it starts to catch on. Before
we dive into this little used technique for
minimizing your likelihood of sports injury,
lets take a quick look at some other
techniques to help you prevent sports
injury.
So, Where Do You Start?
Most people are coming to understand both
the importance and the benefits of a good
warm-up. A correct warm-up will help to
raise body temperature, increase blood flow
and promote oxygen supply to the muscles. It
will also help to prepare the mind, body,
muscles and joints for the physical activity
to come. Click here for a detailed
explanation of
how, why and when to perform your warm up.
While warming-up is important, a good
cool-down also plays a vital role in helping
to prevent sports injury. How? A good
cool-down will prevent blood from pooling in
your limbs. It will also prevent waste
products, such as lactic acid, building up
in your muscles. Not only that, a good
cool-down will help your muscles and tendons
to relax and loosen, stopping them from
becoming stiff and tight.
While preventative measures such as
warming-up and cooling-down play a vital
role in minimizing the likelihood of sports
injury, other techniques such as obeying the
rules, using protective equipment and plain
common sense are all useful.
The One Technique to Cut Your Chance of
Injury by More Than Half
So what is this magic technique? Why is it
such a secret? And how come you haven't
heard of it before? Well chances are you
have, and also, it's not that secret and
it's definitely not magic. You've probably
used this technique yourself at some point
or at least seen others using it. But the
real question is, how dedicated have you
been to making this technique a consistent
part of your athletic preparation?
What is it? STRETCHING. Yes, stretching. The
simple technique of stretching can play an
imperative role in helping you to prevent
the occurrence of sports injury.
Unfortunately stretching is one area of
athletic preparation often neglected. Do not
underestimate its benefits. Don't make the
mistake of thinking that something as simple
as stretching won't be effective. Stretching
is a vital part of any exercise program and
should be looked upon as being as important
as any other part of your health and
fitness.
In recent time the professionals have been
getting more and more serious about
stretching and ultimately, their
flexibility. The coaches and trainers are
just starting to realize how important
flexible muscles are to helping prevent
sports injury. Flexibility has often been
neglected in the overall conditioning of
modern athletes. It's only now that its
benefits are proving invaluable to all those
serious about staying injury free.
How Does Stretching Prevent Injury?
One of the greatest benefits of stretching
is that you're able to increase the length
of both your muscles and tendons. This leads
to an increased range of movement, which
means your limbs and joints can move further
before an injury occurs. Lets take a look at
a few examples.
If the muscles in your neck are tight and
stiff this limits your ability to look
behind or turn your head around. If for some
reason your head is turned backwards, past
its' normal range of movement, in a football
scrum or tackle for example, this could
result in a muscle tear or strain. You can
help to prevent this from happening by
increasing the flexibility, and the range of
movement, of the muscles and tendons in your
neck.
And what about the muscles in the back of
your legs? The Hamstring muscles. These
muscles are put under a huge strain when
doing any sort of sport which involves
running and especially for sports which
require kicking. Short, tight hamstring
muscles can spell disaster for many sports
people. By ensuring these muscles are loose
and flexible, you'll
cut your chance of a hamstring injury
dramatically.
How else can stretching help? While injuries
can occur at any time, they are more likely
to occur if the muscles are fatigued, tight
and depleted of energy. Fatigued, tight
muscles are also less capable of performing
the skills required for your particular
sport or activity. Stretching can help to
prevent an injury by promoting recovery and
decreasing soreness. Stretching ensures that
your muscles and tendons are in good working
order. The more conditioned your muscles and
tendons are, the better they can handle the
rigors of sport and exercise, and the less
likely that they'll become injured.
So as you can see, there's more to
stretching than most people think.
Stretching is a simple and effective
activity that will help you to enhance your
athletic performance, decrease your
likelihood of sports injury and minimise
muscle soreness.
Stretching is one of the most under-utilized
techniques for improving athletic
performance, preventing sports injury and
properly rehabilitating sprain and strain
injury. Don't make the mistake of thinking
that something as simple as stretching won't
be effective.
For an easy-to-use, quick reference guide of
135 clear photographs of
every possible stretching exercise, for
every major muscle group in your body, get a
copy of The Stretching Handbook. You'll also
learn the benefits of flexibility; the rules
for safe stretching; and how to stretch
properly.
Click here to learn more about The
Stretching Handbook.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 1998-2007 The Stretching
Institute™Article by Brad Walker. Brad is a
leading stretching and sports injury
consultant with nearly 20 years experience
in the health and fitness industry. For more
free articles on stretching, flexibility and
sports injury, subscribe to The
Stretching & Sports Injury Newsletter by
visiting
The Stretching Institute.
……………………………………………………………………………..
Chain Restaurants Charged With Promoting
“X-treme Eating”
With Appetizers, Entrées, and Desserts
Weighing in at 2,000 Calories Apiece, the
Time is Ripe for Menu Labeling, Says CSPI
More on personal health and wellbeing
Communication
3 steps to better writing –
Do you hate to write?
Does it take you a long time to get the
words on the page?
Usually when people struggle to write, it's
because they are trying to edit as they go
along.
There is an easier way to write and be more
creative!
- So much for longstanding predictions that
the Internet would crush the book publishing
industry with digital readers and online
sales of used books …
Read on
More on Communication
And for those of us who want
to be better organised
Second Main Article:
How
to Think
Managing brain resources in an age of
complexity.
When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT
Media Lab, I had to write a teaching
statement. One of the things I proposed was
to teach a class called "How to Think,"
which would focus on how to be creative,
thoughtful, and powerful in a world where
problems are extremely complex, targets are
continuously moving, and our brains often
seem like nodes of enormous networks that
constantly reconfigure. In the process of
thinking about this, I composed 10 rules,
which I sometimes share with students. I've
listed them here, followed by some practical
advice on implementation.
1.
Synthesize new ideas constantly.
Never read passively. Annotate, model,
think, and synthesize while you read, even
when you're reading what you conceive to be
introductory stuff. That way, you will
always aim towards understanding things at a
resolution fine enough for you to be
creative.
2.
Learn how
to learn (rapidly). One of
the most important talents for the 21st
century is the ability to learn almost
anything instantly, so cultivate this
talent. Be able to rapidly prototype ideas.
Know how your brain works. (I often need a
20-minute power nap after loading a lot into
my brain, followed by half a cup of coffee.
Knowing how my brain operates enables me to
use it well.)
3.
Work
backward
from your
goal. Or else you may never
get there. If you work forward, you may
invent something profound--or you might not.
If you work backward, then you have at least
directed your efforts at something important
to you.
4.
Always
have a long-term plan. Even
if you change it every day. The act of
making the plan alone is worth it. And even
if you revise it often, you're guaranteed to
be learning something.
5.
Make
contingency maps. Draw all
the things you need to do on a big piece of
paper, and find out which things depend on
other things. Then, find the things that are
not dependent on anything but have the most
dependents, and finish them first.
6.
Collaborate.
7.
Make your
mistakes quickly. You may
mess things up on the first try, but do it
fast, and then move on. Document what led to
the error so that you learn what to
recognize, and then move on. Get the
mistakes out of the way. As Winston
Churchill put it, "Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt."
8. As you develop skills,
write up
best-practices protocols.
That way, when you return to something
you've done, you can make it routine.
Instinctualize conscious control.
9.
Document
everything obsessively. If
you don't record it, it may never have an
impact on the world. Much of creativity is
learning how to see things properly. Most
profound scientific discoveries are
surprises. But if you don't document and
digest every observation and learn to trust
your eyes, then you will not know when you
have seen a surprise.
10.
Keep it
simple. If it looks like
something hard to engineer, it probably is.
If you can spend two days thinking of ways
to make it 10 times simpler, do it. It will
work better, be more reliable, and have a
bigger impact on the world. And learn, if
only to know what has failed before.
Remember the old saying, "Six months in the
lab can save an afternoon in the library."
Two practical notes. The first is in the
arena of time management. I really like what
I call
logarithmic time planning,
in which events that are close at hand are
scheduled with finer resolution than events
that are far off. For example, things that
happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to
the minute, things that happen next week
should be scheduled down to the hour, and
things that happen next year should be
scheduled down to the day. Why do all
calendar programs force you to pick the
exact minute something happens when you are
trying to schedule it a year out? I just use
a word processor to schedule all my events,
tasks, and commitments, with resolution
fading away the farther I look into the
future. (It would be nice, though, to have a
software tool that would gently help you
make the schedule higher-resolution as time
passes...)
The second practical note: I find it really
useful to write and draw while talking with
someone, composing
conversation summaries on
pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I
often use plenty of color annotation to
highlight salient points. At the end of the
conversation, I digitally photograph the
piece of paper so that I capture the entire
flow of the conversation and the thoughts
that emerged. The person I've conversed with
usually gets to keep the original piece of
paper, and the digital photograph is
uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging
and archiving. This way I can call up all
the images, sketches, ideas, references, and
action items from a brief note that I took
during a five-minute meeting at a coffee
shop years ago--at a touch, on my laptop.
With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over
$100, you can easily capture a dozen full
pages in a single shot, in just a second.
Boyden, E. S. "How
to Think." Ed Boyden's Blog. Technology
Review. 11/13/07. (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/boyden/21925/).
More on Being Organised
Resources for Families
From the Blog:
The latest issues of
Whizz Kids Ezine, and
Resources for Families Ezine are now
online.
The
Pivotal Kids Books Blog has new
entries.
For your Marketing and Business Success
The
SuccessNet Resource Book.
It contains the top must-have tools,
products, services and resources for running
your business effectively.
Through a special arrangement with
SuccessNet, this $27 eBook is yours at no
cost. And most of the over 120 resources are
FREE to access and use.You could spend five
years finding, testing and sorting through
these resources, and you still wouldn't have
as valuable a list. These are the tools and
services SuccessNet uses to succeed online
every day--and they've been doing it for
over 11 years. Be prepared to access some
very cool stuff. They’re all designed to
save you money, time and frustration or to
make your life and your work easier, more
productive and more profitable. Go to
http://www.consultpivotal.com/Aresource.htm
Send cartoons
From Anne
Miller [Via
Speaker Net news]
Send a cartoon that is thematically tied to
your mailing message. For example, the
famous New Yorker cartoon showing a
secretary handing her boss a message as he
returns from lunch which has the caption:
“Sir, while you were out, the paradigm
shifted” can be used to begin all kinds of
sales/marketing letters, requests for
appointments, and or just informal contact
follow-up. It is different, it gets
attention, it makes people feel good — all
of which increases your chances for a
response. Go to
www.cartoonbank.com to see their catalog.
Your Telephone Speaking Voice
They say you can't judge a book by its cover
but how many of us make judgments about
people just based on their telephone
speaking voice? People form opinions and
make judgments about us in the first 60
seconds they see us. People also make
judgments about us based on the way we sound
on the telephone.
From the Blog:
The Next Dimension
Be organised, improve your productivity
More on Business success
Innovation and creativity
10 Lessons in Innovation from
Amazon’s Kindle
Are you left-brained or right-brained
Which one dominates you?
Navigating the imagination
Navigating The Imagination, a Joseph Cornell
interactive created by the Peabody Essex
Museum, allows a visitor to open up some of
this artist’s boxes, shake out the objects,
and play with them (at least virtually).
Short on text and long on pictures, the
interactive begins with a compartmentalized
box holding details from Cornell’s works.
Cornell’s magic and mystery is preserved as
viewers navigate through various sections of
the web site by clicking and selecting
images that seem to float by, coming closer
and then receding. For example, “Geographies
of the Heavens” begins with what looks like
a map of the constellations, and features an
engraving of a gentleman wearing a ruff and
gold chains, and a Cornell box with balls of
cork, cordial glasses, and blue marbles. It
takes some experimenting to discover that
repeatedly clicking the gentleman reveals
additional images of other Cornell works,
and it takes consulting the illustrated Web
checklist, helpfully provided in .pdf, to
find out that the gentleman is likely
astronomer Tycho Brahe, the box is Cornell’s
Soap Bubble Set, and several of the other
images are from a pleated book collage that
Cornell created in 1924, entitled Panorama.
Inspiration and Motivation
What matters most to you?
 The
Passion Test is a simple, yet powerful way
for anyone to discover what matters most to
them in their life. When you consistently
choose in favour of those things, your
passions, you will find yourself filled with
a sense of purpose.
The Passion Test
From the Blog:
Inner Securities
They’re Singing Your Song
More to inspire/Motivate
For Librarians and Information professionals
From the Blog
Public Speaking
How to Become a Professional Speaker
So you’ve decided you want to make a career
of public speaking and want to be the best
professional speaker you can be. You have
some experience, really enjoyed yourself and
feel you have something to contribute. The
financial rewards are terrific, you get to
travel with all expenses paid, meet new
people and see new territories and even new
countries.
Read on …
More on Public Speaking
Just for Fun
From Dr. Ann Weeks ezine #461.
Enjoy these humorous Classified Ads from
Newspapers:
FREE PUPPIES: 1/2 COCKER SPANIEL 1/2 SNEAKY
NEIGHBOR'S DOG
FREE PUPPIES... PART GERMAN SHEPHERD, PART
STUPID DOG
NORDIC TRACK $300 HARDLY USED, CALL CHUBBY
GEORGIA
PEACHES, CALIFORNIA GROWN - 89 cents lb.
NICE PARACHUTE: NEVER OPENED - USED ONCE
OPEN HOUSE: BODY SHAPERS TONING SALON. FREE
COFFEE & DONUTS
(AND THE BEST ONE) FOR SALE BY OWNER:
Complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica. 45
volumes. Excellent condition. $1,000.00 or
best offer. No longer needed. Got married
last month. Wife knows everything.
Closing
thought
Dreams come true; without that possibility,
nature would not incite us to have them.
John Updike
My very best wishes for the coming
fortnight,
Bronwyn
Please forward this ezine to someone who
might enjoy it
For more tips, articles and courses to
improve your Personal Best visit
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Bronwyn
Ritchie's
