Step Up to the Mic!

Recently I was driving in the left lane of city street. I noticed a van coming up on my rear bumper fast, far over the 35 mph speed limit. I also saw the driver waving his hands in frustration through the air.

Recognizing this as the international signal for, get out of my way, I changed lanes to the right. As I watched the van zoom by, I started laughing as I read the bumper sticker on the van. It read: Drive slowly! There's likely a school nearby.

Did the driver read his own bumper sticker? Evidently not! But it's a good reminder that often we make pledges that we don't keep.

I've got a tip for you that can be a real life saver on a trip. If you check luggage at the airport, always bring a small carry-on bag with you on the plane. Inside you should keep some basic toiletries as well as a spare pair of socks, underwear, and shirt. You never know when your luggage might get lost, so it's good to have something with you that can tide you over until you're reunited with your stuff. Sure, it's a pain to have to haul all this stuff around an airport but it's a bigger pain to have buy those essential items when you should be enjoying your vacation.

Half a lifetime (and a few pounds) ago, I ran Track and Field. Specifically I was a sprinter.

I loved the feeling of going fast. I had less affection for practice, which tended to be repetitive and tiring. But I must admit, they made me faster.

During our daily drills, I started to notice a pattern with our coach. He was always having us run lots of quick drills where you might sprint for 200 meters, then 300, followed by 400, and then back to 300. I'm sure the goal was to build up our endurance as well as our quick twitch muscles.

But that wasn't the unusual thing. In the midst of the workout, he would often gather all the sprinters around himself and he would tell a story. I can't say I remember any of them all that well because they tended to be rather dull and had nothing to do with sports. Often they involved long lost relatives and car repairs. Time after time, as we were trying to get our second wind, we were a captive audience for his stories.

One day, one of my fellow sprinters asked the question we'd all been thinking.

"Coach, why are you telling us these stories?" he asked.

The coach smiled and said, "If you don't like my stories, then you can get back to running right away."

No one ever complained after than. Sure the stories were unimportant in a entertainment sense but they played a huge role in our training.

I remember in college, on the first day of a new semester, every professor would start off class by saying what the class number was and what it was about. This was then followed by a question.

"Is this the class you signed up for?" the professor would ask.

Invariably, there would be two or three people who would get up and walk out. Maybe they went to the wrong room or maybe they didn't realize what the class would involve. Nevertheless, they were smart enough to leave when they had the chance.

Recently, I've had several reminders of situations where people are sitting in a class they should have left.

One takes place every week in one of my spinning classes. These take place on a stationary bicycle. During a vigorous workout, you can burn more than 1,000 calories in an hour. But only if your mind is focused on the class. Lately I've noticed a woman who sits on a bike in the front row but doesn't really seem to want to be there. During the entire class, she's craning her neck as she watches to see if she knows someone who's walking by the glass windows that separate the class from the rest of the gym. Usually she'll then smile and wave to them. I'm no fitness guru but I can't believe that you're getting all that great a workout when you're not devoting your full attention to the class.

A week ago I was sitting in a daylong seminar that was put on by the Florida Speakers Association. The group does a fabulous job of helping people learn how to succeed in the professional speaking business. For this session, where people paid around $70 to attend, I was seated next to a woman who had a confession to make.

"I really don't like the sound of my voice," she whispered.

She then asked for and I gave her several suggestions for ways that she might be able to improve the quality of her delivery."Yes, those are good," she said, "But I still don't like my voice."

This is when I pretended not to have a voice. I was tempted to tell her that if she didn't like the way she sounded then she needed to give up her dream of professional speaking and start writing a book instead. How does this woman expect to compete with the many speakers who don't have a problem with the way they sound or at least are willing to address their shortcomings? It sounded like she was happy to live in a quicksand filled pool of self-doubt.

But I didn't say all that. Instead I said something supportive that I would imagine Dr. Phil telling one of his TV patients before a commercial break.

Bottom line: If you're going to do something, do it with all your heart and hold nothing back. Otherwise you're just taking up space in the wrong room.

Here's something to think about:

Every day you will prove someone right. It's up to you to decide whether it's your supporters or detractors.

Imagine a room full of people who love to talk but are afraid to speak.

Recently I took part in an amazing opportunity that was offered by the Florida Speakers Association. For a reduced fee, members could have a short speaks recorded by a professional camera crew. The end product would then be converted to digital video, which I understand is the wave of the future. Sending someone a DVD of your work is apparently, very 2005!

The day before the taping was to take place a briefing was held for the dozen people who had signed up for the service. During the session I was surprised to see that some of those in attendance had looks of fear on their faces. This was a surprise because the briefing was covering the same material that everyone had received several months earlier. The message there was pretty simple: practice, practice, and then practice some more before you get to the taping. Despite that I sensed a wave of last minute jitters running through the room.

Maybe it was the pressure of spending several hundred dollars for only about a few minutes of video that put the fear of memories into the crowd. But I have to admit, I was surprised that some felt so nervous about doing something (public speaking) that they love so much.

Instead of embracing the opportunity, a few were wilting under the pressure. Why? I don't know how their final product came out but it made me wonder about the nature of success. With weeks to prepare, why did it seem like some people were rushing to finish their homework minutes before the start of class?

Maybe it's something in human nature to want that strong deadline pressure to make you kick things up into a high gear. In the end, I feel that this justs wastes energy and fear does suck a lot of energy out of you. That's why, in my news days, I would try to take care of the known variables ASAP. Sure, people like those movies where the journalist is rushing to get their story done agaist an impossible deadline. But it's not too much fun living in that world day after day.

Think about the things you need to do today and during the next month. What are you putting off to the last minute. Imagine what life would be like if you took care of those tasks first. Try it because when you reach your deadline, you'll notice you're not as stressed out as you used to be.

She walked into my life wearing too tight pink spandex. I walked away remembering an important lesson.

It all began with a declaration in a spinning class.

"Emily won't be in today so I'm your instructor," a highly tanned, highly spandexed, overbleached blonde said.

For those of you who don't know, spinning is a great form of exercise that takes place on a stationary bicycle. If done correctly you can burn around a thousand calories from just an hour workout. A key component is the instructor. Emily, our regular teacher, was known for crafting together heart pounding music, complex biking routines, as well as good humor. The more than 30 people who attended her bi-weekly classes came to them expecting to have a good time as well as have a great workout. This is a hard core group, who didn't mind waiting in line for more than ten minutes just to make sure that they would be signed up for a class that wouldn't start for more than a half hour away from starting.

So you might guess, there were some nervous looks when we found out that we'd have a new instructor. I'd tell you her name but I don't think she ever told us. She did mention that she was a last minute substitute.

"Should we leave?" I heard someone whisper.

I thought about it myself. But I decided that I should stay, which was made easier by the fact that my cycling shoes were already clipped into my bike. It's not easy to make a subtle run for the door in that kind of footwear.

I also thought that perhaps I was judging the instructor strictly by her appearance. Sure she looked as if she had just emerged fom some sort of time travel from the early 1990s but that didn't mean that she wouldn't know how teach a good class.

Be patient, I told myself.

Alas, a quick run to the exit probably would have been a better workout.

"Slow down," the instructor kept telling the room of people who looked forward to being drenched in sweat. Very quickly it became obvious that for this woman, fitness was about barely raising your pluse. I would have been better off spending 20 minutes on a treadmill.

"Don't work too hard," she yelled at people who were trying to pick up the pace on their own.

During the perspiration free hour, the only trickle was people flowing out of the class early. I stayed the whole time but later I cursed my need to not be impolite.

In the end, I realized that time is something precious. Are you keeping in mind how you spend yours and what you can do to get yourself out of situations that waste it?