PRWeb makes it easy. We’ve just written the Obama Victory Speech Vision Statement Movie Press Release and got it out on the wire. PRWeb has all the tutorial help you’ll need.

A new venture by NSA Northern California past-president Scott Q. Marcus looks interesting. Scott lives up in the redwoods in Eureka and is turning his geographical isolation to an advantage with a blog on Long Distance Marketing.

Scott writes of the challenge of finding and developing a customer base that is not located near your base of operations:

The question is “How?” That is one foundation on which this site is built. How do you reach potential clients and customers who live far away from you? What works? What doesn’t? In this “new” age of marketing, what are the most effective tools to find your clients? Of even more import is how do they find you?

His blog will document creative approaches to that challenge. One approach is to publish a quarterly magazine called ‘Two Words’.

For a ringside seat at the birth of a new business venture, bookmark Scott’s blog and join in the conversation as he launches himself into cyberspace – WOOOOSH!

I spent four days in the desert in mid-November at the National Speakers Association (NSA) Fall Conference. This is a much smaller affair than the big Summer Convention, with only around 250 registered. We stayed at the sprawling Doubletree Scottsdale, right by Camelback Mountain. Stetson-wearing Mama’s drove their SUV’s past the Saguaro outside the compound.

On Thursday Bob Pike did a pre-conference workshop Who Else Wants to Be One of the Highest Paid Professional Speakers in Their Niche? This was wonderfully well-facilitated learning experience by one of the champion trainers in the country. I’ve already implemented many suggestions from his workshop in a proposal I submitted last week and, hey, I got the business!

Marketing Intensives

On the Friday and Saturday I attended the marketing intensive tracks. Phenomenal value. These two all-day sessions were different strokes for different folks. Bob Smith – Surefire Proven Ways to Out-Think, Out-Maneuver and Out-Market Your Competition filled 20 pages of my notebook with action items and to-do’s. On Saturday Steve Miller stayed true-to-form as a maverick and did not record his material; there were too many ‘trade secrets’ being shared. One tip that I immediately followed-up on was to buy a Flip Mino video camera so I can add more You Tube videos to my blogging and podcasting mix.

Top Eight Sessions

What of the rest of the Conference? Here’s a list of the the eight most popular sessions (as shown in the post-conference wrap session where people listed take-away’s from each session – these eight had the most post-it notes on the wall-charts – apart from Bob & Steve’s Marketing intensives that is.) I’ve placed my order for a copy of each of them for my continuing education.

Note: each session link is to the recording that ANYONE – NSA member or not – can purchase on CD or as an MP3 download.

1. Ford Saeks – Mega Session: Social Media Marketing Secrets of Growing Your Speaking Business
2. Aldonna Ambler, CMC, CSP – Mega Session: The Strategic Working Session YOU Need Right Now–Evaluate How You and Your Business Are Really Doing
3. Francis Bologna, CPA and Vern Hoven, CSP, MT, CPAE – New Roads to Wealth and Opportunity for the Professional Speaker
4. Becky Pike Pluth – Teaching From Tinseltown: How to Use Movie Clips to Teach and Train
5. Heather Lutze – Become the Easiest Speaker to Find – Online! Learn how to achieve 1st-Page Search Engine Presense Using the FindAbility Formula!™
6. Robert Bradford, MBA, CSP – Mega Session: Sell Your Speaking When You Stink at Sales: How to Stand Out in the Speaking Marketplace
7. David Greenberg, CSP – Secrets to Creating a Killer Speech and Earning a Ton of Money Now!
8. Dianna Booher, MA, CSP, CPAE – Writing in Layers: Developing a Creative, Quality Book Quickly

Adi Da Samraj Passes from the Body

Naitauba, Fiji – November 29, 2008

Adi Da Samraj, a spiritual master, writer, and artist of international renown, passed away in his hermitage in Fiji, on November 27, of natural causes. He was 69 years old. He founded an entirely new way of spiritual practice, to which he gave the name “Adidam”.

Adi Da was a prolific writer and artist with over sixty published books and hundreds of thousands of works of art. The book that Adi Da designated as his most important work is The Aletheon, which he worked on intensively for the last two years, bringing all of his most essential spiritual and philosophical communications into a final form. He completed his work on The Aletheon on the morning of his passing. The Aletheon is scheduled for publication in 2009.

Spiritual Teacher

In the early 1970s, Alan Watts, writer of numerous books on religion and philosophy, acknowledged Adi Da as “a rare being,” adding, “It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT’s all about.”

In the 1980s, Wittgenstein scholar Henry Leroy Finch wrote: “If there is a man today who is God-illumined, that man is Avatar Adi Da Samraj. There exists nowhere in the world, among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or any other groups, anyone who has so much to teach. Avatar Adi Da is a force to be reckoned with, a Pole around which the world can get its bearings.”

From his birth (on Long Island, New York, in 1939), Adi Da manifested unique signs of spiritual illumination. He described his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities. His first focus was to discover the process by which any human being can realize the Truth of “Reality Itself”. His second focus was to develop his own ability to communicate the Truth of “Reality Itself”–through verbal means and also through artistic means.

Adi Da graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature.

In 1964, Adi Da began a period of intensive practice under a succession of spiritual masters in the United States and India. Eventually, in 1970, after a final period of intense spiritual endeavor, Adi Da spontaneously became re-established in the continuous state of illumination that was his unique condition at birth.

Author

Adi Da’s literary, philosophical, and practical writings consist of over sixty published books. These include many masterpieces of spiritual illumination, including The Knee of Listening, his spiritual autobiography, and The Dawn Horse Testament, his magisterial revelation of the entire Spiritual process from beginning to end.

Over a period of many decades, Adi Da undertook a massive examination of the world’s religious traditions, culminating in an annotated bibliography of approximately 10,000 items, entitled The Basket of Tolerance. A briefer “epitome” version of The Basket of Tolerance is scheduled for publication in 2009.

Adi Da also created original translations of traditional spiritual texts, translations which bring out the deepest meaning of the original texts. The recent publication Reality Is All the God There Is presents his translations of texts from the traditions of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.

Adi Da’s writings on fundamental practical areas of human life, examined from the spiritual perspective, include Green Gorilla (relative to raw diet) and The Complete Yoga of Emotional-Sexual Life.

Adi Da’s principal literary work is his trilogy entitled The Orpheum. In the late 1990s, poet Robert Lax said of The Mummery Book (the opening volume of the Orpheum trilogy), “Living and working as a writer for many decades, I have not encountered a book like this, that mysteriously and unselfconsciously conveys so much of the Unspeakable Reality.” The Orpheum is also presented in theatrical form—as shown online at www.mummerybook.org.

Artist

Adi Da was an extraordinarily prolific artist, producing over 100,000 works, primarily in the years since 2000. He was invited to show his work in a solo exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and also as part of the 2008 Winter in Florence Festival. Noted art critic Donald Kuspit has written, “It is Adi Da Samraj’s imaginative triumph to have conveyed the illusions created by discrepant points of view and the emotionally liberating effect when they aesthetically unite . . .” Among the publications of Adi Da’s art are The World As Light, Transcendental Realism, and The Spectra Suites. His artistic work can be viewed online at www.adidabiennale.org and www.daplastique.com.

Call for World Peace

Another dimension to his far-reaching legacy is his contemporary social wisdom embodied in the book Not-Two Is Peace. In it he calls for the establishment of a Global Cooperative Forum that mobilizes “everybody-all-at-once” on the basis of recognizing the inherent unity of the entire human family. He proposes that such a forum is the necessary and effective means for addressing the world’s most pressing issues. Information about this initiative is available online at www.globalcooperationproject.org.

Spiritual Way

Adidam, the spiritual way founded by Adi Da, is practiced by thousands of individuals worldwide, with centers in many parts of the world. Information about Adi Da and Adidam is available online at www.adidam.org.
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Just discovered iTunesU – a vast collection of FREE, down-loadable lectures from great academic institutions around the world. I’ve got 18 episodes on creative writing from Britain’s Open University lined up, with lectures on politics from the LSE to follow.

Spruce up your blog, website, podcast, PowerPoint or next speech with images and music licensed under the Creative Commons.

Here’s where to find stuff.

Peggy at the SCORE Women’s Success Blog has very useful step-by-step guide on transitioning to the WordPress.org self-hosted blogging platform. I use this and attribute ‘Executive Communications’ being #2 in the Google rankings to having my WordPress blog sitting on my own webserver. Not be confused with WordPress.com

A group of us created a Vision Statement Movie to celebrate President-Elect Barack Obama’s victory speech in Chicago on November 4th. The opening words of his speech deserve a place in the annals of great American political oratory. The words he spoke that night started with:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
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It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

We are pleased to present this video to honor those words.

During my recent visit to the Toastmasters Conference in Oakland I was pleased to run into the 2000 World Champion of Public Speaking – Ed Tate. Ed won Toastmasters highest award – a world-wide contest open to all 175,000 members of Toastmasters International. He’s now an internationally known keynote speaker and fellow member of the National Speakers Association. He’s earned a reputation as the “speaker who energizes, educates, and entertains.” He has spoken professionally in 46 states and 10 countries, and on 4 continents. Ed is also a successful trainer and author.

I took the opportunity to ask Ed what are the three most important pieces of advice he has for business leaders who speak. I also asked him if he could remember the first time he delivered a speech. To hear what he told me, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:02 — 2.8MB)

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The 2008 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference taking place November 16-19 in Sacramento, is focused on understanding the nature of individual and organizational behavior and decision making and using that knowledge to accelerate our transition to an energy-efficient and low carbon economy.

The Conference brings together a diverse group of policymakers, social scientists, program implementers, media, and energy experts to explore the practical application of social and behavioral insights to address our climate challenges. The goal is to achieve viable solutions for meeting long-term energy and greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets by improving the design, adoption, and continued effectiveness of policies, programs, technologies, and individual/organizational actions.

I met with an attendee, Mike Olson, who gave me an update on the importance of the behavioral aspects of climate change and energy consumption today. He highlighted why it’s important to make energy efficiency fun and the role communications plays in making people aware of the issues. To hear what Mike had to say, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:18 — 1.9MB)

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