Wyzga On Words

Laughter Is As Necessary As Food, Air & Water.

 

No matter  who we are or where we are; no matter our race or creed or gender; no matter our skin color or language - we all laugh the same.

We just don't do it often enough.  Maybe we forget.

The older I get I find there is plenty to laugh about.  As a former nurse I can tell you with certainty that laughter is the best medicine.

Art Linkletter thought so, too.  Time out of mind Linkletter worked in a TV station playroom asking children questions and listening for their responses.  As you'll see, what made it all work so  well was how Linkletter made the kids feel: as if someone was really listening to them.

Here are a few that might bring a smile to your face:

Kids Sat The Darnedest Things1

Kids Say The Darnedest Things2

Kids Say The Darnedest Things3

If kids are not your thing, perhaps The Laughing Buddha might be.

Or, if you prefer puppies, have I got the farm for you.  Juniper Moon Farm and Day #1 of their three-week old Maremma puppies on Day #1 eating solid food.  Kinda reminds me of growing up with 6 siblings.

TIP:     Laugh well and often.  It certainly makes folks wonder what you're up to.

Draw To Reveal The Story.

Who here doodles?

When we draw we are using a basic visual tool to help make sense of complex concepts, thoughts or ideas.  Drawing can help clarify and articulate our visions to ourselves as well as others in a conversation, presentation, meeting or trial.

I often use Post-It flip charts and Magic Markers when working with clients or audiences.  Drawing provides insight and problem-solving in a myriad of ways that mere conversation or brainstorming simply cannot accomplish as effectively.

Perhaps it's true that seeing is believing.

To see for yourself, visit Legal Sketchpad:

"BUSINESS SKETCHING FOR LEGAL CONFERENCES, STRATEGIC PLANNING MEETINGS AND TRAINING.

Legal Sketchpad promotes the use of basic visual tools in legal communication. As direct as possible, as low tech as possible."

I have no dog in this fight.  I am just pleased to help spread the word that PowerPoint is not the only game in town. 

TIP:    Fall back on what came naturally to you when a box of Crayola 64 helped unleash your imagination and creativity.

Dance And Be Smart.

Time out of mind I took every class offered by The Arthur Murray Dance Studios.  I competed in ballroom dance.  My favorites were the cha-cha, Samba and the waltz.  I had a pair of silvery regulation dance shoes with the kidskin soles that were carried in a bag and used only on the dance floor. 

As the story goes, my mother named me after her college roommate, Diane Blue, a woman who dreamed of becoming a professional dancer.  Instead, like many women of her time, she married; and gave up dancing.  I should have paid attention.  I married a fellow with no sense of rhythm and two left feet - and then my used-to-be-husband danced away. 

Still, I'm a dancer at heart.  I shake what my mama gave me at Zumba classes.  I love watching dance movies.  And Fred Astaire.

Imagine my delight to learn that 9 years ago The New England Journal of Medicine proclaimed dancing as the exercise associated with reducing your risk of dementia and making you smarter.

In a nutshell, here's how Dancing Makes You Smarter:

"We immediately ask two questions:

Why is dancing better than other activities for improving mental capabilities?

Does this mean all kinds of dancing, or is one kind of dancing better than another?

That's where this particular study falls short.  It doesn't answer these questions as a stand-alone study.  Fortunately, it isn't a stand-alone study.  It's one of many studies, over decades, which have shown that we increase our mental capacity by exercising our cognitive processes.  Intelligence: Use it or lose it.  And it's the other studies which fill in the gaps in this one.  Looking at all of these studies together lets us understand the bigger picture.

Some of this is discussed here (the page you may have just came from) which looks at intelligence in dancing.  The essence of intelligence is making decisions.  And the concluding advice, when it comes to improving your mental acuity, is to involve yourself in activities which require split-second rapid-fire decision making, as opposed to rote memory (retracing the same well-worn paths), or just working on your physical style.

One way to do that is to learn something new.  Not just dancing, but anything new.  Don't worry about the probability that you'll never use it in the future.  Take a class to challenge your mind.  It will stimulate the connectivity of your brain by generating the need for new pathways.  Difficult and even frustrating classes are better for you, as they will create a greater need for new neural pathways.

Then take a dance class, which can be even better.  Dancing integrates several brain functions at once, increasing your connectivity.  Dancing simultaneously involves kinesthetic, rational, musical and emotional processes."

 

TIP:     No matter how or when or with whom, your style or your size,  dance!

                        
                                                
                                                        

                                                                    

Q&A Tuesday: What Do You Do When?

Q:    What do you do when you think you've had enough?

A:    Dream radical.

Today is the day I am supposed to be writing about tips to use to become a better litigator.

I've been thinking about a movie I watched recently: We Bought a Zoo with Matt Damon and that rugged, raspy voiced heart throb, Thomas Haden Church of Sideways. 

The movie is based on the true story of Benjamin Mee who bought a zoo and still lives there.

TIP:    We're not here for a long time, but a good time.

TIP:    “This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.” Rumi

TIP:     Dream radical.

Maurice Sendak Is Where The Wild Things Are.

By now you've learned about the recent passing of Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator.

But maybe you haven't read this memoriam, "Thanks, Maurice," by Steven Heller.  Sendak spooked many of us; and, come to find out that wasn't so bad.  Excerpt.

"Maurice Sendak’s 1963 “Where the Wild Things Are” unlocked a scary, psychologically nuanced, inner world long taboo in mainstream children’s books. Mr. Sendak once told me that King Kong was a great character and had influenced him when he created “Wild Things.”

“You’re supposed to be frightened of these things. Kids need Kongs to help them conquer their anxiety,” he said."

Make sure you check out the slide show to see and read about Sendak's universal influence.

What Do I Mean When I Say "Power, Passion & Precision"?

 

Power.

            Passion.

                            Precision.

For decades now I have repeated my "3P Mantra" when speaking and teaching communication skills, story skills, and platform skills.  I use the "3P Mantra" on my office voice mail.

Power means coaching yourself to practice like you play.  The team plays to win.  The team practices to win.  You play to win - so practice like you play - with power.   A coach at my gym was training a member to get ready for her first tri-athlon.  It was the coach who kept reminding the trainee that she was getting ready for a race, a competition, to beat other people - not just taking a bike ride or a swim.  She took the advice and came in 4th in her class.

Passion means having life.  Does your case story come alive?  Or are you putting lipstick on a corpse?  Do you have a sense of affection for your work, for your client, for this case?  When my clients express exhaustion I always ask them, "For what do you have affection?  How do we marshall that for the task at hand?"

Precision means that state of being exact.  To be exact you must consider all the ways to get it right. To get it right you must develop the right story, right facts, right issues, right language, and right mindset. It can't be wrong when it's right.

Power.

            Passion.

                            Precision.

Q&A Tuesday: You Have To Think Of It.

Q:    How are some doctors and lawyers able to see the right diagnosis, the right legal story?

A:    They think of it before they call it.

I often read At First Glance by Lisa Sanders, MD, in the NYTimes Sunday magazine.  The process of sleuthing this week's befuddling health issue to an actual diagnosis often reads like a who-done-it.  You never know what you'll uncover.

Today I learned more than how to diagnose the unusual case of acromegaly in a middle-aged woman.  I learned that the process of inquiry is key.  Excerpt.

"How was Dr. Lesser able to see such subtle changes brought on by her tumor? Experience. He told me that he had diagnosed early acromegaly in two other patients before her. Of course he tested many other patients who ended up not having the disease. When you let subtle physical findings trigger your suspicions, you are going to be wrong more often than you will be right. Still, being right with a disease like this can make all the difference.

Dr. Lesser told me that in medical school, a teacher once asked him what the most important factor in making an unusual diagnosis was. Dr. Lesser was stumped. You have to think of it, the older doctor told him. The teacher went on to say that his father had died from a very unusual disease — botulism — because no one considered it a possible cause of his symptoms. “It’s the same with acromegaly — you have to think of it before you can diagnose it. And I do.”"

TIP:    Trust your instincts or hunches when something nags at you about your patient, case or client.

TIP:    Follow up on your instincts or hunches to discover where they will lead, what they will uncover in terms of facts - especially those no one else considered.

TIP:    Think of all possibilities; consider that the sound of hoofbeats outside the window just might be a giraffe (as a surgeon once told me) and not a horse.

 

 

 

Green Reduces Stress.

 

Environmental psychology researches the value of open space on humans.  Apparently, a stroll in the out-of-doors or just looking at green spaces helps reduce our stress level as well as supplying  much-needed time for exercise, solitude, contemplation, reflection, perspective, a break from the daily, noise-driven routine, and the like.

Check out GardenVisit.com to get away for a week or a moment.

And summer being the time of fresh produce plenty, visit pick-your-own places at Pick-Your-Own.org. As children and gardeners can attest, there's a special joy in getting our hands dirty.

What's Revealed In A Grandmother's Handwriting?

The envelope that arrived in the mail was slim.

My sister's note paper-clipped to the Xeroxed pages read, "Get your apron on!  Happy cooking...."

The faded handwriting setting out the recipes was unmistakable: Baci's.

Baci was our maternal grandmother.  She told stories and secrets abut her life that defied belief.  And yet she stuck to them until she was no longer around to repeat what her life had been about from the time she set sail away from war-torn Poland under the name of her dead infant brother to come to this country to work as a butcher, a hair dresser, and a light bulb packer for Westinghouse, among other jobs, that helped send her only child - our mother - to college.

This much I know is true: she could cook. There on the pages splayed out on my kitchen counter were the foods of my childhood: Christmas Nut Snow Balls; Cream Puffs; Poppeyseed Rolls; Meat Balls; batter for frying chicken in Crisco; Hamen Tashen; Golabki; Kluski; and more.  All I have to do is close my eyes and there she is standing in the Rahway, New Jersey train station clutching a cardboard box tied up with string, inside layers of waxed paper preserving something she baked in one of the many tiny walk-up apartments she lived in.  Baci was in her element behind a stove, sweaty hair pushed up over her brow, an apron double-tied around her waist.

Food feeds our body.  Stories feed our soul.  Both feed our imagination.  I've always said that the best way to world peace is to host a great big block party where everyone brings a dish to share and tells everyone gathered there something about it.  At times like that we find we have more in common with each other than not.

It's time for me to get my apron on.

How Is Live Opera Like Storytelling? Those On Stage & We In The Seats Hear 'BRAVO!'

The Theater!  The Theater!  How I love the Theater!

Story comes alive on the stage.  In its own way, story comes to life on the silver screen.  Both stage and screen are art forms.  But one relies on the audience participation and the other is impervious to it.  

Zachary Woolfe writing for the NYTimes, "The Screen Can't Hear You Yell 'Bravo'," laments a recent trend whereby folks attend a televised broadcast of a live opera while seated in a movie theater.  Excerpt.

"In last week’s Arts & Leisure section I wrote about how watching opera in cinematic close-up, with Dolby surround sound, changes the performance in ways large and small. But the most distorted and distorting part of the HD experience comes at the times when a live audience repays a brave performance with enthusiastic applause.

Without fail, some watching the broadcasts shout “bravo” with gusto. But most of the audience doesn’t quite know what to do, caught between the intensity opera elicits and the sobering realization that, well, they are in a movie theater, perhaps thousands of miles from what they want to cheer and even farther from the relationship live performance engenders.

For all the praise HD deserves, and it deserves a great deal, this disconnect is damning. What the audience in a movie theater experiences is not just the opposite of opera. It is the undoing of opera, an art form in which a present, active audience is fundamental.

“Operas in general,” the critic Marcel Prawy wrote, “can only be properly enjoyed when audience, orchestra and stage form a compact community.” Its history is a history of being there: of applause and booing and rapt silence, the symbiosis between performers and audience. An image, in high definition, 3-D or any other permutation, creates only the illusion of intimacy. It is a cooler, more detached art form."

So, too this "compact community" of teller, story, and story listener is what creates the storytelling experience.  Think of a story like a living organism - like wine, perhaps.  As I have taught for years, the teller brings the listener along in a virtual journey so the listener is actually participating in the life of the story.

The same is true when you are arguing your case, giving a presentation or lecture.  You are collaborating with the listener or decision-maker.  The outcome is determined by members of that "compact community." 

TIP:     To better assure your chances of getting the outcome, verdict or decision you desire, know your "compact community," address your story to their concerns, and invite them on the virtual journey to collaborate and resolve problems along with you.