Watch this and you’ll never clammer for the victim seat again.
I love this guy already. I want to get him to our church and to Like Minds without a shadow of a doubt.
What resonates with me the most? “I may not be able to hold my wife’s hand, but I can hold her heart.”
Recently, a woman by the name of Phyllis Wills passed away.
Type her name into Google, and you’ll find nothing about her. Ask people on the street about her, and you’ll find no body knew her. In fact the only person I know who knows much about Phyllis is my dad.
About 21 years ago, in response to a desperate phone call from a drunken and depressed man who had reached the end of himself along with his wife, Phyllis went down to their home with curlers still in her hair (as she was mid-perm at the point of the phone call), and spent time counselling them. That was the night that my family became Christians, when I was 5 years old.
My dad knew Phyllis because when he was 3 years old, he was run over in a car accident. The doctors told his mother (my grandmother) that he wouldn’t make it through the night, so she went to the local church and it was Phyllis who prayed with her late at night that my dad wouldn’t die. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know what happened!
The point was that she was there for him. She mattered.
The reason why I write this is it’s just one way that someone has effected my life – without whom I wouldn’t even exist. In other words, Phyllis mattered to my life. My life was built on her contribution.
We’re running the He Saved The Day Men’s Conference tonight. I wanted to share some of the thoughts behind how we’ve changed the format to make it more about learning and connecting:
A lot of this comes from what I’ve learned from Jeff Hurt and Dave Lutz at Velvet Chainsaw. It seems like common sense that an event should be about talking and learning rather than just listening, but it’s not that common because of the ego issue.
The reality is that most times speakers (in church and without) like to hear their own voices and get the promotion that comes with speaking more than they want people to learn. Or, they want people to learn but incorrectly think the key to is people listening to their wisdom, more than discuss with them. We discussed this in Let Attendees Be Participants, in which I also reference Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning.
I put this out on the Like Minds blog this week. It’s a fabulous talk by John Cleese on creativity, mainly about how to be more creative by setting boundaries in space and boundaries in time.
He makes the following 6 points:
I want to focus on what John says about creating an oasis that is separate from ordinary life, set by boundaries in space and boundaries in time.
Here’s my dilemma. I have no space like this. I am “balls to the wall” as the saying crudely goes, and I consider myself as being quite creative in this tight space. I wonder how much more creative I could be. I must be wasting a lot of time without having this time to focus and think clearly.
Likewise I’m sure this is true of many people – do we have time to reflect? I’ve written a lot about this, but just don’t seem to be able to get this right. I would say that my problem is one of delegation – I have too much to do myself but struggle passing it down the line. The catch 22 is of course, if you don’t delegate, you don’t get time, but you need time to delegate!
One comment on this blog was bang on with this, by Robin Dickinson, with regards to “Harmony”:
Harmony is achieved when the inner me and my outer actions are in-synch. It’s almost the opposite of GTD thinking where different aspects of me get scheduled and prioritized. Imagine the body try to schedule your breathing or your pulse??
I need you help here today as I have got to sort this out:
answer email = good = engagement
not answer email = totally,without doubt, unacceptable = no engagement
#saynomore
Words by Michelle Rodger. Follow her on Twitter.
![past the point of love, (made it to #2 explore !) [10,00streamviews!]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3201/2529813630_b2124b701f.jpg)
I think one of the greatest gifts you can give someone is exposure to new things. Exposure opens the mind, giving it new possibilities and fresh perspective on it’s current place in the world.
My favourite thing to do is to take kids who have closed mindsets and show them around places they’ve never been before, like Like Minds Conference. It makes them realise what is possible.
Photo by Ashley Rose
I read a great post a while ago from Jonathan Arehart on why he quit Foursquare and Gowalla. There’s privacy concerns, frustration with checkins, boredom with badges and more. Certainly, others are feeling the same. I haven’t used either since February, and I’m not into Facebook Places either.
In talking to James Poulter and reading his exceptional work on The Recommendation Economy, we’ve come to understand that much of what we use Social Media for (and brands have thrived through) is expression of identity. James goes into details about it here, but I think it does quickly translate into location based games like Foursquare and Gowalla:
And this is fine. But it’s a very slow way of expressing my identity and a very clumsy way compared to a quick tweet, like, update, etc. Speed is of the essence today, hence the popularity of the like button.
So then what would be the other reason to checkin? – as it certainly is useless for social networking itself…
So Foursquare now have promotions where, based on your location, a nearby service provider can tell you about their 10% off for Foursquare users or 25% off for Mayors, or whatever promotion they have.
This for me is now the only reason why I would use Foursquare, given that it’s a slow way to express my identity. And the issue there is that if it’s Mayors that only get discount, I’d not interested unless I’m already a regular.
If Gowalla doesn’t do this, it’s dead (well, it almost is anyway, despite being better designed), and if Facebook places doesn’t, I can’t see it being a popular feature. Fatigue sets in quickly.
This for me is a precise reason why we must get to the bottom line with what we do and MATTER.
I had the chance to catch up with Matt Young last week, who runs Rokk Xpress, a company dedicated to creating websites only under the value of £2,000 and thus filling a huge gap in the market for quality low cost websites.
I really like what Matt is doing, because let’s be honest, most people forget about the little guys and instead look on to being the next big thing.
What’s particularly special to me is that as Matt mentions, he got connected with my friend Adam Stone who runs the Rokk mothership through Like Minds. It’s what it’s all about. It’s a sterling reminder to me to MATTER.
I’ve always maintained that you can find everything about marketing and social media in the bible. Why? Because it’s all about human behaviour at the end of the day and the bible is a fantastic documentation of human behaviour whether you agree with it’s conclusion or not!
My ultimate framework for Social is based on ‘Scatter, Gather, Matter’, a three step proces to becoming more and more social by socialising channels (scatter), then content (gather), and then culture (matter). These are the three social strategies that I consider exist today.
What you might not know is that this framework comes from Mark 4, something that I spoke about at The River Church, Exeter earlier this year. You can listen to the podcast episode on iTunes by following this link.
In this podcast I go through the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4, which Jesus tells as an analogy for how the gospel message is spread and also received. Scattering is the act of spreading your message without discrimination. Some seed will be eaten up, some won’t take root, and other seed will be chocked by thorns, but some seed will take root and grow, and the point is that it is dangerous to custom pick which seed you sow in which location because you don’t know what will prosper.
Most people when it comes to spreading a message like to carefully plant their seeds. They narrowly define who they want and focus on a very small number of people (normally people just like them) but expecting their message to get mass attention. It’s like fishing with a fishing rod, carefully planning which fish you want and how you want them, but then expecting to pull in a boat load.
We’ve all had times when the ones we thought who would come through for us didn’t, and the ones we didn’t expect did. In fact, this isn’t just some of the time, it’s all of the time. We have to continually readjust our expectations.
Seed becomes wheat that needs to be harvested else it will dry up, and this the act of gathering. When, out of the seed that you’ve scattered, some begins to participate back with you and bare fruit, you have to draw it to yourself.
The key here very much is to participate at the level to which you are being participated with. This is where volume becomes value. The volume play is in scattering the seed, in not limiting who follows you, in posting your content in various places, in putting your marketing where people are, in getting your organisations message slogan to become a mantra that everyone shares. The value play is then participating with those who participate with you – gathering.
The trick of gathering is that you don’t draw them to you as much as you respond to their first step towards you. You must provide a place for people to gather.
Gathering means you know who you have, and provides a way for you to increase your relationship with those people. In church we have many “gathering points” and these serve to increase the involvement of someone in church and increase their spiritual life.
What do you do with the harvest? What happens with the seed that is planted in the ground? A harvest feeds people and a tree bear fruits that feeds poeple.
The whole aim of this is tied up in mattering to people, because people matter. It’s not enough to say “add value”, we must matter to people by helping them matter for others. This is the two folds of the point – mattering to people, in order for them to matter to others. Thus the crux of this third and final stage is empowerment.
I had a very valuable conversation with Catherine White and others over the weekend about social media campaigns. It appears the end of many is just awareness. They would get far more long term return if instead they focussed on empowerment. What use is an aware person if they do not build upon that awareness and become empowered? Then, they can help themselves and help others.
Again, You can listen to the podcast episode for FREE on iTunes by following this link.
I had a video interview with Dan Blank last week on how to serve and grow communities. We talked about what communities really are, how Facebook community rarely exists, and how communities are full of micro-communities, among other things.
The interview came at just the right time, as I’d written about communities in a number of recent posts, with regards to Facebook Groups, and again with regards to Warmth and Light in Church.
Thanks to Dan for conducting the interview. I gained a lot from the discussion and it’s really helped me frame some of what I was thinking.
You can watch the video of our interview here.