I started this blog last fall because I wanted to share with people outside of our community some of the great things we have going on here. I hope I have been able to at least give a small snap shot of the wonderful people in our community, some of the many great products and services we offer, and a lot of the fun events our community leaders work hard to organize.
Also, I have posted information as resources for our community members and anyone else who visits this blog.
I am getting married this June, and I also have a couple of other projects I am working on, so I will be taking a break from this blog. Although, I still may post from time to time.
I hope that all of us who either know of great businesses in our community, or know of great community members, or of fun events going on, will get the word out either through Facebook, or other social media and let the world know what a great community we have!
Take care, Everyone, and if I can be of help in any way, you can e-mail me at: cultureisart@gmail.com.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Innovation: The Key To Entrepreneurial Success
Recently I discovered a book by Sandra Bond Chapman, Ph.D., called, "Make Your Brain Smarter". Dr. Chapman is the Chief Director at the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas. It is a book designed to help you increase your brain's creativity, energy, and focus. In it, it will teach you nine habits to keep your brain fit at any age, it includes unique tests and exercises to improve your problem-solving and higher-reasoning capacity, and help you discover how to become a higher brain performer. These benefits not only help us as individuals, but just as importantly, it gives us our greatest capacity as innovators in our businesses, places of work, as students, and as family and community members. You can order the book here. And you can visit her website here
Below I have shared with you my notes from the book:
Establishing a brain bench-mark is important. It is a baseline to measure against with future brain evaluations. Also, if weaknesses are identified, you can take pro-active steps to regain cognitive ground.
The cognitive assessment is called the Brain Health Physical. Performance results are used to guide individuals on how to:
· Increase productivity
· Decrease brain fatigue
· Achieve higher levels of work efficiency
· Identify weaknesses in strategic attention
· Focus and stay on task
· Increase flexibility in thinking
· Be aware of habits that drain the brain
· Identify areas of strong mental reserve
· Recognize ways to strengthen core areas of vulnerability
· Increase brain energy
The brain health physical is a mental stress test that measures cognitive abilities that can be enhanced and remain robust as we age.
1. Strategic attention- How many people do you interact with during the day where you are “present” in the conversation without distractions- either doing another task or attending to thoughts in your head? Track the times it occurs.
2. Integrated reasoning-
3. Innovation
The key is to constantly push your cognitive performance to construct something novel and abstract.
Cognitive brain health depends not on how much information a person takes in but rather how deep the person is reinterpreting and creating new meaning from information.
Think of your brain as a bank, you must build your cognitive reserves.
Stretch yourself to take on new mental challenges you have a natural affinity toward.
How do you build up cognitive reserves? By constantly engaging in complex mental activity.
Your brain is your most important organ and deserves your attention.
Brainpower of:
· None
· One
· Two
What is a strategic brain?
When you use your brain strategically, it filters information by deliberately sorting input and output. The approach is two-pronged:
1. Attending to necessarily essential information while
2. Filtering out extraneous data that is less critical to the task at hand. A non-strategic brain takes in all information.
You need to be selective and keenly strategic in terms of what you store in your brain’s attic.
Retaking control requires daily prioritization of one or two predominant tasks, rather than jumping back and forth from one distraction to another.
The problem is, most tasks are done quickly, without thoughtful processing-and instead almost with mind numbing automaticity.
How often do you spend more than 10 minutes on one task at home or at work.
Just do one thing at a time.
Once you see how much more productive you are, you will not go back.
Internal thoughts can be a major obstacle to being present and focused on a single task.
Three strategies to implement in your daily life to enhance your strategic attention:
· Brainpower of none
· Brainpower of one
· Brainpower of two
The brainpower of none:
How often do you work harder and harder to solve a problem? What if the brain solves a problem best by taking a break from the matter? Have you ever noticed that when you struggle to solve a problem, you sometimes receive the answer just before you go to sleep or right when you wake up in the morning? Connections are built when brain activation slows and even when our brain is at rest. We are then able to connect the dots in new ways. Your brain works smarter when you make it slow down.
Taking a pause allows you to advance your complex thinking capacity. Practice the brainpower of none when you experience:
· Frustration and negativity
The Brainpower of One:
Multitasking diminishes strategic attention. It causes:
· Shallower and less focused thinking
· Increased errors
· A dramatic negative decrease on mental processing
High mental productivity requires periods of single-minded tasking.
· The concept of doing one thing at a time is not being rewarded in the workplace, at home, by individuals, or by bosses.
· Once interrupted, it takes, on average, 20 minutes to return to the original task.
Multitasking leads to a build-up of cortisol, the stress hormone that decreases our memory and contributes to increased brain cell death, and may eventually contribute to dementia.
Your brain is built as a single channel action system with limited capacity.
Focus on one task at a time, even if only for short segments of time.
The brainpower of two:
We often have too many items on our to-do lists without any reflection on prioritization, leaving us overwhelmed just by the sight of the list. They also fail to reflect a looming deadline and very often lack the necessary precision to tell us where to start and what to do here and now. Looking at an endless list of tasks freezes our minds.
We are working and attending to distractions immediately and continually functioning well below our brain’s potential. With a constant state of fragmented focus, our brainpower is kept at a very superficial level.
When you write your to-do list, focus on the two things- your elephants-that will have the most impact, require the most effort and strategic thinking.
Concentrate on my one or two elephants for the day, those are your top priorities. When in need of a break, take care of some rabbits. Be aware, rabbits should not turn into elephants.
To be mentally smarter, we must constantly re-evaluate and identify one or two top priorities that demand the bulk of our energized brainpower, not the left-over, burned-out energy. Even in the midst of doing an activity, we should ask ourselves: “Is the task that is currently consuming my brainpower the activity that I need to devote my longest attention to because it will have the greatest impact?
Strategically attend to your two most important tasks every day.
To boost your cognitive function, you must harness the power of strategic attention and build a brain that filters and focuses. Doing so will increase your productivity and lead to improved well-being.
Enhance integrated reasoning to accelerate performance:
Have individuals have taken advantage of opportunities and expended the effort to be an entrepreneur of ideas? Have they developed regularly practiced habits of complex mental processing?
Take the challenge to engage in complex mental activity daily by practicing integrated reasoning and you will advance your personal skills as a CEO, aka Cognitive Entrepreneur Officer.
Integrated reasoning is your brain’s platinum cognitive asset.
Integrated reasoning is represented by these mental activities:
· Generating synthesized ideas
· Reconciling and updating novel ideas within the context of your right knowledge base…
Integrated reasoning is transformative thinking.
You are promoting your integrated reasoning intellect when you actively synthesize new meaning continually.
Much of what your brainpower allows you to achieve is futuristic thinking- not just reactionary thinking.
· Think about talking with your boss
· Brainstorming at a board meeting
· Seeking medical solutions
· Probing wiser financial management practices
A good brain habit is to practice synthesizing ideas into one or two abstracted statements when presented with information.
Ex.- Before going into a meeting with your colleagues, boss, volunteer organization, or family meeting, ask yourself:
· What changes do I want or what crucial issues do I need their help solving?
· What do I want them to consider?
· What are the desired outcomes from this discussion?
· After a meeting, write down consolidated ideas, asking yourself:
o What are some new take-home messages?
o How does my thinking before the meeting compare with my thinking afterward?
o How can I use new information to redirect and reset goals?
o Write a synthesized brief of the meeting in 3-5 sentences and send it to those you met with to let them know you were listening and that the ideas and time they contributed made a difference. In doing so, you take pause and strategically engage your frontal lobes to reason continuously.
Extensive brain practices will help you:
1. Ask probing questions about the unknown
2. Offer new possibilities to advance ideas and projects
3. Determine new paths that fit with your life changes.
3 Strategies that help enhance integrated reasoning:
· Zoom in
· Zoom out
· Zoom deep and wide
Zoom-in:
The brain power of zoom-in requires attending to facts, content, and the situation at hand. Gathering facts and using them to support a novel approach is essential to enhancing integrated reasoning and deeper level thinking. However, it’s a delicate balance of knowing when to gather more information and know when to stop looking for more facts to develop a point of view. The key is to toggle back and forth from the immense raw details to form high-level ideas.
Zoom-out:
To be able to glean synthesized messages requires the brainpower of zoom-out, to see a broader perspective, to appreciate the big picture. It is important to harness the brainpower of zoom out and lift off to a helicopter view, assessing pieces of data and disparate points of view from above, merging them into major themes and core concepts, and broad principles. Consolidating facts and opinions into big ideas and perspectives is necessary to cultivate creative thinking and problem solving. The brainpower of zoom-out helps avoid silos of isolated or static thinking.
Zoom deep and wide:
The brainpower of zoom deep and wide is the cognitive strategy of incorporating the major principles and generalized lessons learned into broader applications. This is cognitive strategy transfer at its best. The brainpower of zoom deep and wide requires the deepest level of thinking where you apply novel developments from one area to other issues, other problems. It represents:
· Synthesized topics to guide effective meetings and gatherings
· Generalized applications to mentor new trainees, colleagues, and family members
· Intellectually energized writing in e-mails, speeches, and projects
The dynamic ability to assimilate information from multiple sources to apply to diverse, novel, and complex issues requires the integrated reasoning strategy of deep and wide. It is critical to solving new problems that have ambiguity or arise unexpectedly almost daily.
A + B = 0
A= Incoming Content
B= Knowledge/Experience
0= Meaning converted into a new transformed approach or product
Example:
Planning for an upcoming meeting based on previous gatherings requires dynamic toggling across all three brainpowers of zooming- zoom in to the issues at hand; zoom out to the broadest perspectives to see vast solutions and potential directions, and zoom deep and wide to figure out new framing for old problems and novel applications to proven practices.
Boost your brainpower: Make a concerted effort to transform your hundreds of thoughts each day to the highest level of thinking possible.
The brainpower of zooming is not a trivial skill; it is recognized as a vital cognitive skill that has not been easy to assess. A recent survey of 740 business faculty worldwide revealed that they believe incoming business students needed to assimilate, interpret, and convert data, evaluate outcomes, and listen- key skills for 21st century students and future leaders in business.
Integrated Reasoning Linked to Strategic Leadership
Integrated reasoning is one of our most complex and forceful thinking capacities that can be enhanced. As such, this skill is associated with decisive and strategic leadership.
William Duggar shares his definitions of three kinds of intuition- ordinary, expert, and strategic. “Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement”:
· Ordinary intuition is a gut instinct.
· Expert intuition is a snap judgement that is done at rapid speed, based on experience.
· Strategic intuition is a slow, thoughtful way of solving a problem.
The parallels between intuition and integrated reasoning:
· Zoom out is a quickly abstracted idea. This is similar to a gut instinct, a vague notion of key points and directions.
· Zoom in corresponds to the power of knowledge where one can make a very quick, snap judgement or decision based on extensive facts or expertise.
· Zoom deep and wide is a process that is not fast, but it is deliberate. It involves an effortful, integrative process of reflective thinking through all the possibilities. Strategic leaders will use this type of cognitive process to prime new ideas and advance lines of thinking, as well as rethink past misdirection.
This is the foundation for entrepreneurial and innovative thinking. When honed, the benefits of integrated reasoning and strategic global thinking spill over to many frontal lobe and other brain functions. The ability to harness this global perspective is fundamental to creative thinking, problem solving, and energizing productivity.
Brain Value of Integrated Reasoning:
· Become a mastermind of information
· Create fresh and bigger ideas rather than crank out rote facts
· Chart new insights by combining data with right experiences and knowledge
Ex.- Zooming deep and wide leads to better work, particularly on the most challenging assignments like strategy development.
The brainpower of zooming encourages deliberate, reflective thinking, not just a snap judgement or gut reaction. Using this strategic approach to understanding information in your daily life requires dynamically shifting from what is in front of you to a global view and transcending the literal surface to construct novel and deeper levels of meaning in contexts you never before experienced.
Integrated reasoning allows you to identify and group important details into condensed, global meanings; thereby efficiently limiting the massive amounts of information one has to manipulate, comprehend, encode, and recall.
The added bonuses of frontal lobe skill of integrated reasoning; it improves and spills over to other executive functions that were never trained, achieving gains in higher memory for details and faster speed of processing:
Higher- mental productivity, brain energy, idea innovation
Lower- brain fatigue, brain boredom, rote repetition
You can experience an increase in brainpower when you constantly practice being an entrepreneur of ideas.
Both creative capacity and smartness work hand in hand to energize the brain. The ability to continually engage in innovative thinking is likely a key indicator of who will retain their smart capacity, the ability to acquire and build new knowledge.
Knowledge is part of the creative equation, we cannot go the next level without knowing the basic facts. However, innovative thinking should work synergistically with analytical and practical thinking for the best results. Often we take in information as truth rather than pondering what we do not know. Nor do we consider how we can add or modify that knowledge or practice.
Your innovative capacity:
However, innovation as a skill becomes paralyzed from lack of use, limited challenges, and fear of failure. Below are innovations greatest enemies:
· A brain on automatic pilot
· An avoidance of new challenges
· A belief that your best and most creative work is behind you
· An opposition to being renewable, adaptable
· A strong separation from those who have radically different viewpoints
· An evasion of collaborations on major projects
If you have not been stretching your innovative skills, then now is the time to jump-start this immense brain capacity. How often do you:
· Figure out ways to deal with new circumstances?
· Adapt quickly and adeptly to novel challenges?
· Shake up regular meetings that tend to drain the brain?
· Break with past habits?
· Be more energized in creating knowledge than acquiring it.
Innovative thinkers invent again and again.
· Innovation needs novel thinking.
· This brain competency predominates as a key investment to enhance your intellectual capital.
· Often we get distressed rather than inspired when asked to rethink a project or action or mistake.
Frontal lobe connectivity supports innovative thinkers:
A neuroscientific team from Japan was among the first to document that individuals with higher innovative thinking scores also show increased structural connectivity between the frontal lobe and the corpus callosum- a deep portion of the brain that links both hemispheres. This research supports the view that the frontal lobe is positively related to pivotal dimensions of creativity- specifically cognitive flexibility.
More brain activation versus less is associated with more learning as a novice. That is, those with higher expertise, perhaps associated with greater practice, perform the task more efficiently, with less brain activation.
Brain plasticity studies offer high promise that the declining brain capacity can be positively altered in the healthy brain by exercising innovative thinking.
Open up your thinking to devise new ways of doing things.
All of the core brainpowers- strategic attention, integrated reasoning, and innovation, require hard work. You can become more creative and inventive with practice. You just need to recognize and fully embrace that you have the capacity to increase your genius.
Seek ways to uncover the maximum number of possibilities. You need to use and therefore design your brain to move from the known to the unknown- but with foresight about the risks and opportunities that are changing at the speed of light.
Become an entrepreneur of ideas.
Transformative thinking:
In work with executive and high level management, significant gain in innovative thinking after only six hours of concentrated brain training. The training provided strategies needed to innovate.
Brain networks strengthen in response to new challenges or wither with status quo thinking at all ages.
The advantages of neuroplasticity:
· Building creativity requires continually exercising habits throughout your day, not just every so often. Develop innovation daily when you:
o Seek to broaden and revamp your perspectives, to view life differently, by reading different types of books, exposing yourself to different types of people, changing routine work presentations, etc.
o Dismantle old linkages of information to allow new thoughts to brew. Ponder free-flowing ideas.
o Consciously and dedicatedly convert ideas into deliberate change.
o Recognize there is no roadmap to get you there.
o Reflect and learn from mistakes quickly.
You only need to apply these abilities toward critical issues or messy problems.
To revolutionize your brainpower, seek to be a change maker- now.
Work, passion, and a sense of purpose are the best nourishments for healthy brain function and innovation. As has been said before, our brain is remarkable. You must neuroengineer your brain in the most engaging ways to stay inspired.
Innovative ideas are created out of fragments of information. Good, creative, and novel ideas are a composition of knowledge, experience, and new exposures fused in different ways.
A bored brain is a brain in decline.
Expand your extraordinary capacity for innovation by exercising the:
· Brainpower of the infinite
· Brainpower of the paradox
· Brainpower of the unknown
Brainpower of the infinite-
Innovative ideas are created out of pieces of seemingly random data, recombined in such novel way that the whole that was comprised of the pieces does not even look the same. There are infinite possibilities of how information can be connected in new ways to innovate. There is not a single answer or only one way to do things.
Practice Tasks:
1. Create novel and innovative topics in your e-mail subject line.
2. If you give a lot of presentations, change the message and make it fresh each time
3. In this tough economy, think of at least 10 new ways you can cut your monthly budget by 30 percent.
4. Mentor and encourage small teams to be inventive problem solvers on crucial projects
5. Think of family gatherings that fall flat with the same old discussions. Stretch family members to engage in new ways they never have before, meet in new venues, discuss fascinating people of substance, or talk about current ethical dilemmas.
6. Buying the perfect gift for someone requires creativity and innovation. Watch what their preferences are and connect the observations to what you think they would want.
Brainpower of Paradox:
Innovation and mental flexibility require embracing and learning from mistakes and challenges- overcoming insurmountable odds. Paradoxically, the tenacity to not get stopped or stuck by failure is the fuel that leads to the greatest advances in these areas. The brainpower of paradox is enhanced when one reflects on a completed task and perceives the holes and then dynamically and flexibly reworks and reinvents for a better product or output. The mental flexibility required to reflect on, revisit, and seek better solutions engages the frontal lobe, optimizing learning, which leads to transformative new insights and fresh ways of approaching outdated tasks- large and small.
Practice tasks:
1. Reflect on a meeting that was essentially a time waster. Think about how to re-engage the issues to bring about mutually beneficial solutions. Attempt to garner more participation and ideas sharing to make gatherings more meaningful to attendees.
2. Rethink a project, presentation, or event that you think went well. Brainstorm at least 5 ways it could have gone even better, and how it could be improved if you had another opportunity tomorrow.
3. Remember back on a happening that seemed like the worst possible turn of events for you at the time and list at least 5 good things that eventually rose from that challenge.
4. Identify your favorite mistake weekly and see what you can learn by looking back.
Brainpower of the unknown:
The brainpower of the unknown requires valuing curiosity and asking “What if?” We are born with an unparalleled capacity to explore. As we age, we often set our brains on default mode until they become paralyzed in familiarity. A highly innovative person is never satisfied with the status quo (the known) and is always looking for ways to move to the unknown, where things are constantly improving, changing, growing, and expanding.
Practice tasks:
1. Volunteer to direct something you have never taken the lead on before; you will feel stretched with new ways of thinking
2. When a new opportunity approaches you, think of ways it will teach you something new if you spend the time to be innovative.
3. When you are feeling overwhelmed by a new position or major responsibility when 75% of what you are doing in unknown, practice earlier brainpowers.
a. Brainpower of two (see ch. 4)- identify your two most important tasks to learn to make the greatest difference in your new position next month.
b. Brainpower of zooming (see integrated reasoning, ch.5)- step back to appreciate how the important task you identified above fits into a bigger picture while continually breaking down important new learning tasks into doable steps.
As you expand your inventiveness, write how you have or will attempt to manifest each high-powered skill to increase your intellectual capital.
1. Cause new things to happen
2. Switch to novel modes of thinking
3. Energize out-of-box thinking
4. Construct ideas that relate to the future
5. Imagine how things can be beyond the situation
6. Seek ways to improve processes and products
7. Become an agent of peace in a difficult conflict within your sphere of influence.
Being smart is a state, being creative is an action.
Innovation drives national economic growth and well-being.
We need to train people- at every stage of life- to ignite their highest level of novel thinking.
This brain capacity predominates as a key investment to enhance your intellectual capital.
Below I have shared with you my notes from the book:
Establishing a brain bench-mark is important. It is a baseline to measure against with future brain evaluations. Also, if weaknesses are identified, you can take pro-active steps to regain cognitive ground.
The cognitive assessment is called the Brain Health Physical. Performance results are used to guide individuals on how to:
· Increase productivity
· Decrease brain fatigue
· Achieve higher levels of work efficiency
· Identify weaknesses in strategic attention
· Focus and stay on task
· Increase flexibility in thinking
· Be aware of habits that drain the brain
· Identify areas of strong mental reserve
· Recognize ways to strengthen core areas of vulnerability
· Increase brain energy
The brain health physical is a mental stress test that measures cognitive abilities that can be enhanced and remain robust as we age.
1. Strategic attention- How many people do you interact with during the day where you are “present” in the conversation without distractions- either doing another task or attending to thoughts in your head? Track the times it occurs.
2. Integrated reasoning-
3. Innovation
The key is to constantly push your cognitive performance to construct something novel and abstract.
Cognitive brain health depends not on how much information a person takes in but rather how deep the person is reinterpreting and creating new meaning from information.
Think of your brain as a bank, you must build your cognitive reserves.
Stretch yourself to take on new mental challenges you have a natural affinity toward.
How do you build up cognitive reserves? By constantly engaging in complex mental activity.
Your brain is your most important organ and deserves your attention.
Brainpower of:
· None
· One
· Two
What is a strategic brain?
When you use your brain strategically, it filters information by deliberately sorting input and output. The approach is two-pronged:
1. Attending to necessarily essential information while
2. Filtering out extraneous data that is less critical to the task at hand. A non-strategic brain takes in all information.
You need to be selective and keenly strategic in terms of what you store in your brain’s attic.
Retaking control requires daily prioritization of one or two predominant tasks, rather than jumping back and forth from one distraction to another.
The problem is, most tasks are done quickly, without thoughtful processing-and instead almost with mind numbing automaticity.
How often do you spend more than 10 minutes on one task at home or at work.
Just do one thing at a time.
Once you see how much more productive you are, you will not go back.
Internal thoughts can be a major obstacle to being present and focused on a single task.
Three strategies to implement in your daily life to enhance your strategic attention:
· Brainpower of none
· Brainpower of one
· Brainpower of two
The brainpower of none:
How often do you work harder and harder to solve a problem? What if the brain solves a problem best by taking a break from the matter? Have you ever noticed that when you struggle to solve a problem, you sometimes receive the answer just before you go to sleep or right when you wake up in the morning? Connections are built when brain activation slows and even when our brain is at rest. We are then able to connect the dots in new ways. Your brain works smarter when you make it slow down.
Taking a pause allows you to advance your complex thinking capacity. Practice the brainpower of none when you experience:
· Frustration and negativity
The Brainpower of One:
Multitasking diminishes strategic attention. It causes:
· Shallower and less focused thinking
· Increased errors
· A dramatic negative decrease on mental processing
High mental productivity requires periods of single-minded tasking.
· The concept of doing one thing at a time is not being rewarded in the workplace, at home, by individuals, or by bosses.
· Once interrupted, it takes, on average, 20 minutes to return to the original task.
Multitasking leads to a build-up of cortisol, the stress hormone that decreases our memory and contributes to increased brain cell death, and may eventually contribute to dementia.
Your brain is built as a single channel action system with limited capacity.
Focus on one task at a time, even if only for short segments of time.
The brainpower of two:
We often have too many items on our to-do lists without any reflection on prioritization, leaving us overwhelmed just by the sight of the list. They also fail to reflect a looming deadline and very often lack the necessary precision to tell us where to start and what to do here and now. Looking at an endless list of tasks freezes our minds.
We are working and attending to distractions immediately and continually functioning well below our brain’s potential. With a constant state of fragmented focus, our brainpower is kept at a very superficial level.
When you write your to-do list, focus on the two things- your elephants-that will have the most impact, require the most effort and strategic thinking.
Concentrate on my one or two elephants for the day, those are your top priorities. When in need of a break, take care of some rabbits. Be aware, rabbits should not turn into elephants.
To be mentally smarter, we must constantly re-evaluate and identify one or two top priorities that demand the bulk of our energized brainpower, not the left-over, burned-out energy. Even in the midst of doing an activity, we should ask ourselves: “Is the task that is currently consuming my brainpower the activity that I need to devote my longest attention to because it will have the greatest impact?
Strategically attend to your two most important tasks every day.
To boost your cognitive function, you must harness the power of strategic attention and build a brain that filters and focuses. Doing so will increase your productivity and lead to improved well-being.
Enhance integrated reasoning to accelerate performance:
Have individuals have taken advantage of opportunities and expended the effort to be an entrepreneur of ideas? Have they developed regularly practiced habits of complex mental processing?
Take the challenge to engage in complex mental activity daily by practicing integrated reasoning and you will advance your personal skills as a CEO, aka Cognitive Entrepreneur Officer.
Integrated reasoning is your brain’s platinum cognitive asset.
Integrated reasoning is represented by these mental activities:
· Generating synthesized ideas
· Reconciling and updating novel ideas within the context of your right knowledge base…
Integrated reasoning is transformative thinking.
You are promoting your integrated reasoning intellect when you actively synthesize new meaning continually.
Much of what your brainpower allows you to achieve is futuristic thinking- not just reactionary thinking.
· Think about talking with your boss
· Brainstorming at a board meeting
· Seeking medical solutions
· Probing wiser financial management practices
A good brain habit is to practice synthesizing ideas into one or two abstracted statements when presented with information.
Ex.- Before going into a meeting with your colleagues, boss, volunteer organization, or family meeting, ask yourself:
· What changes do I want or what crucial issues do I need their help solving?
· What do I want them to consider?
· What are the desired outcomes from this discussion?
· After a meeting, write down consolidated ideas, asking yourself:
o What are some new take-home messages?
o How does my thinking before the meeting compare with my thinking afterward?
o How can I use new information to redirect and reset goals?
o Write a synthesized brief of the meeting in 3-5 sentences and send it to those you met with to let them know you were listening and that the ideas and time they contributed made a difference. In doing so, you take pause and strategically engage your frontal lobes to reason continuously.
Extensive brain practices will help you:
1. Ask probing questions about the unknown
2. Offer new possibilities to advance ideas and projects
3. Determine new paths that fit with your life changes.
3 Strategies that help enhance integrated reasoning:
· Zoom in
· Zoom out
· Zoom deep and wide
Zoom-in:
The brain power of zoom-in requires attending to facts, content, and the situation at hand. Gathering facts and using them to support a novel approach is essential to enhancing integrated reasoning and deeper level thinking. However, it’s a delicate balance of knowing when to gather more information and know when to stop looking for more facts to develop a point of view. The key is to toggle back and forth from the immense raw details to form high-level ideas.
Zoom-out:
To be able to glean synthesized messages requires the brainpower of zoom-out, to see a broader perspective, to appreciate the big picture. It is important to harness the brainpower of zoom out and lift off to a helicopter view, assessing pieces of data and disparate points of view from above, merging them into major themes and core concepts, and broad principles. Consolidating facts and opinions into big ideas and perspectives is necessary to cultivate creative thinking and problem solving. The brainpower of zoom-out helps avoid silos of isolated or static thinking.
Zoom deep and wide:
The brainpower of zoom deep and wide is the cognitive strategy of incorporating the major principles and generalized lessons learned into broader applications. This is cognitive strategy transfer at its best. The brainpower of zoom deep and wide requires the deepest level of thinking where you apply novel developments from one area to other issues, other problems. It represents:
· Synthesized topics to guide effective meetings and gatherings
· Generalized applications to mentor new trainees, colleagues, and family members
· Intellectually energized writing in e-mails, speeches, and projects
The dynamic ability to assimilate information from multiple sources to apply to diverse, novel, and complex issues requires the integrated reasoning strategy of deep and wide. It is critical to solving new problems that have ambiguity or arise unexpectedly almost daily.
A + B = 0
A= Incoming Content
B= Knowledge/Experience
0= Meaning converted into a new transformed approach or product
Example:
Planning for an upcoming meeting based on previous gatherings requires dynamic toggling across all three brainpowers of zooming- zoom in to the issues at hand; zoom out to the broadest perspectives to see vast solutions and potential directions, and zoom deep and wide to figure out new framing for old problems and novel applications to proven practices.
Boost your brainpower: Make a concerted effort to transform your hundreds of thoughts each day to the highest level of thinking possible.
The brainpower of zooming is not a trivial skill; it is recognized as a vital cognitive skill that has not been easy to assess. A recent survey of 740 business faculty worldwide revealed that they believe incoming business students needed to assimilate, interpret, and convert data, evaluate outcomes, and listen- key skills for 21st century students and future leaders in business.
Integrated Reasoning Linked to Strategic Leadership
Integrated reasoning is one of our most complex and forceful thinking capacities that can be enhanced. As such, this skill is associated with decisive and strategic leadership.
William Duggar shares his definitions of three kinds of intuition- ordinary, expert, and strategic. “Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement”:
· Ordinary intuition is a gut instinct.
· Expert intuition is a snap judgement that is done at rapid speed, based on experience.
· Strategic intuition is a slow, thoughtful way of solving a problem.
The parallels between intuition and integrated reasoning:
· Zoom out is a quickly abstracted idea. This is similar to a gut instinct, a vague notion of key points and directions.
· Zoom in corresponds to the power of knowledge where one can make a very quick, snap judgement or decision based on extensive facts or expertise.
· Zoom deep and wide is a process that is not fast, but it is deliberate. It involves an effortful, integrative process of reflective thinking through all the possibilities. Strategic leaders will use this type of cognitive process to prime new ideas and advance lines of thinking, as well as rethink past misdirection.
This is the foundation for entrepreneurial and innovative thinking. When honed, the benefits of integrated reasoning and strategic global thinking spill over to many frontal lobe and other brain functions. The ability to harness this global perspective is fundamental to creative thinking, problem solving, and energizing productivity.
Brain Value of Integrated Reasoning:
· Become a mastermind of information
· Create fresh and bigger ideas rather than crank out rote facts
· Chart new insights by combining data with right experiences and knowledge
Ex.- Zooming deep and wide leads to better work, particularly on the most challenging assignments like strategy development.
The brainpower of zooming encourages deliberate, reflective thinking, not just a snap judgement or gut reaction. Using this strategic approach to understanding information in your daily life requires dynamically shifting from what is in front of you to a global view and transcending the literal surface to construct novel and deeper levels of meaning in contexts you never before experienced.
Integrated reasoning allows you to identify and group important details into condensed, global meanings; thereby efficiently limiting the massive amounts of information one has to manipulate, comprehend, encode, and recall.
The added bonuses of frontal lobe skill of integrated reasoning; it improves and spills over to other executive functions that were never trained, achieving gains in higher memory for details and faster speed of processing:
Higher- mental productivity, brain energy, idea innovation
Lower- brain fatigue, brain boredom, rote repetition
You can experience an increase in brainpower when you constantly practice being an entrepreneur of ideas.
Both creative capacity and smartness work hand in hand to energize the brain. The ability to continually engage in innovative thinking is likely a key indicator of who will retain their smart capacity, the ability to acquire and build new knowledge.
Knowledge is part of the creative equation, we cannot go the next level without knowing the basic facts. However, innovative thinking should work synergistically with analytical and practical thinking for the best results. Often we take in information as truth rather than pondering what we do not know. Nor do we consider how we can add or modify that knowledge or practice.
Your innovative capacity:
However, innovation as a skill becomes paralyzed from lack of use, limited challenges, and fear of failure. Below are innovations greatest enemies:
· A brain on automatic pilot
· An avoidance of new challenges
· A belief that your best and most creative work is behind you
· An opposition to being renewable, adaptable
· A strong separation from those who have radically different viewpoints
· An evasion of collaborations on major projects
If you have not been stretching your innovative skills, then now is the time to jump-start this immense brain capacity. How often do you:
· Figure out ways to deal with new circumstances?
· Adapt quickly and adeptly to novel challenges?
· Shake up regular meetings that tend to drain the brain?
· Break with past habits?
· Be more energized in creating knowledge than acquiring it.
Innovative thinkers invent again and again.
· Innovation needs novel thinking.
· This brain competency predominates as a key investment to enhance your intellectual capital.
· Often we get distressed rather than inspired when asked to rethink a project or action or mistake.
Frontal lobe connectivity supports innovative thinkers:
A neuroscientific team from Japan was among the first to document that individuals with higher innovative thinking scores also show increased structural connectivity between the frontal lobe and the corpus callosum- a deep portion of the brain that links both hemispheres. This research supports the view that the frontal lobe is positively related to pivotal dimensions of creativity- specifically cognitive flexibility.
More brain activation versus less is associated with more learning as a novice. That is, those with higher expertise, perhaps associated with greater practice, perform the task more efficiently, with less brain activation.
Brain plasticity studies offer high promise that the declining brain capacity can be positively altered in the healthy brain by exercising innovative thinking.
Open up your thinking to devise new ways of doing things.
All of the core brainpowers- strategic attention, integrated reasoning, and innovation, require hard work. You can become more creative and inventive with practice. You just need to recognize and fully embrace that you have the capacity to increase your genius.
Seek ways to uncover the maximum number of possibilities. You need to use and therefore design your brain to move from the known to the unknown- but with foresight about the risks and opportunities that are changing at the speed of light.
Become an entrepreneur of ideas.
Transformative thinking:
In work with executive and high level management, significant gain in innovative thinking after only six hours of concentrated brain training. The training provided strategies needed to innovate.
Brain networks strengthen in response to new challenges or wither with status quo thinking at all ages.
The advantages of neuroplasticity:
· Building creativity requires continually exercising habits throughout your day, not just every so often. Develop innovation daily when you:
o Seek to broaden and revamp your perspectives, to view life differently, by reading different types of books, exposing yourself to different types of people, changing routine work presentations, etc.
o Dismantle old linkages of information to allow new thoughts to brew. Ponder free-flowing ideas.
o Consciously and dedicatedly convert ideas into deliberate change.
o Recognize there is no roadmap to get you there.
o Reflect and learn from mistakes quickly.
You only need to apply these abilities toward critical issues or messy problems.
To revolutionize your brainpower, seek to be a change maker- now.
Work, passion, and a sense of purpose are the best nourishments for healthy brain function and innovation. As has been said before, our brain is remarkable. You must neuroengineer your brain in the most engaging ways to stay inspired.
Innovative ideas are created out of fragments of information. Good, creative, and novel ideas are a composition of knowledge, experience, and new exposures fused in different ways.
A bored brain is a brain in decline.
Expand your extraordinary capacity for innovation by exercising the:
· Brainpower of the infinite
· Brainpower of the paradox
· Brainpower of the unknown
Brainpower of the infinite-
Innovative ideas are created out of pieces of seemingly random data, recombined in such novel way that the whole that was comprised of the pieces does not even look the same. There are infinite possibilities of how information can be connected in new ways to innovate. There is not a single answer or only one way to do things.
Practice Tasks:
1. Create novel and innovative topics in your e-mail subject line.
2. If you give a lot of presentations, change the message and make it fresh each time
3. In this tough economy, think of at least 10 new ways you can cut your monthly budget by 30 percent.
4. Mentor and encourage small teams to be inventive problem solvers on crucial projects
5. Think of family gatherings that fall flat with the same old discussions. Stretch family members to engage in new ways they never have before, meet in new venues, discuss fascinating people of substance, or talk about current ethical dilemmas.
6. Buying the perfect gift for someone requires creativity and innovation. Watch what their preferences are and connect the observations to what you think they would want.
Brainpower of Paradox:
Innovation and mental flexibility require embracing and learning from mistakes and challenges- overcoming insurmountable odds. Paradoxically, the tenacity to not get stopped or stuck by failure is the fuel that leads to the greatest advances in these areas. The brainpower of paradox is enhanced when one reflects on a completed task and perceives the holes and then dynamically and flexibly reworks and reinvents for a better product or output. The mental flexibility required to reflect on, revisit, and seek better solutions engages the frontal lobe, optimizing learning, which leads to transformative new insights and fresh ways of approaching outdated tasks- large and small.
Practice tasks:
1. Reflect on a meeting that was essentially a time waster. Think about how to re-engage the issues to bring about mutually beneficial solutions. Attempt to garner more participation and ideas sharing to make gatherings more meaningful to attendees.
2. Rethink a project, presentation, or event that you think went well. Brainstorm at least 5 ways it could have gone even better, and how it could be improved if you had another opportunity tomorrow.
3. Remember back on a happening that seemed like the worst possible turn of events for you at the time and list at least 5 good things that eventually rose from that challenge.
4. Identify your favorite mistake weekly and see what you can learn by looking back.
Brainpower of the unknown:
The brainpower of the unknown requires valuing curiosity and asking “What if?” We are born with an unparalleled capacity to explore. As we age, we often set our brains on default mode until they become paralyzed in familiarity. A highly innovative person is never satisfied with the status quo (the known) and is always looking for ways to move to the unknown, where things are constantly improving, changing, growing, and expanding.
Practice tasks:
1. Volunteer to direct something you have never taken the lead on before; you will feel stretched with new ways of thinking
2. When a new opportunity approaches you, think of ways it will teach you something new if you spend the time to be innovative.
3. When you are feeling overwhelmed by a new position or major responsibility when 75% of what you are doing in unknown, practice earlier brainpowers.
a. Brainpower of two (see ch. 4)- identify your two most important tasks to learn to make the greatest difference in your new position next month.
b. Brainpower of zooming (see integrated reasoning, ch.5)- step back to appreciate how the important task you identified above fits into a bigger picture while continually breaking down important new learning tasks into doable steps.
As you expand your inventiveness, write how you have or will attempt to manifest each high-powered skill to increase your intellectual capital.
1. Cause new things to happen
2. Switch to novel modes of thinking
3. Energize out-of-box thinking
4. Construct ideas that relate to the future
5. Imagine how things can be beyond the situation
6. Seek ways to improve processes and products
7. Become an agent of peace in a difficult conflict within your sphere of influence.
Being smart is a state, being creative is an action.
Innovation drives national economic growth and well-being.
We need to train people- at every stage of life- to ignite their highest level of novel thinking.
This brain capacity predominates as a key investment to enhance your intellectual capital.
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Economic Security For Our Community- Home Based Businesses
I came across a great post on LAF about home based businesses, and I think it's something eveyone who is not currently a business owner should consider. There are great tax advantages to owning a home based business, and it can also ensure greater economic security for you and your family if you are laid off from your job. I have run a home based business myself, and I also have experience selling insurance and investments. Currently, I work full-time for a paid salary, but I am considering starting a part-time business on the side, since my youngest daughter is getting a little older. Being a business owner is something I really love. You get to work with people who you really connect with, and it gives you a lot of freedom and empowerment. And, of course, having your business online is vital, in my opinion. So, if you are currently working for a minimum wage job, and are having a tough time making ends meet, consider starting a home-based business. One avenue to consider is direct selling through home parties. The book I use as a resource is "Be A Party Plan Superstar", by Mary Christensen. Other business books I would recommend is:
"EntreLeadership- 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches", by Dave Ramsey.
"The New Business Road Test- What Entrepreneurs Should Do Before Writing a Business Plan", by John Mullins.
"Selling In Tough Times- Secrets To Selling When No One Is Buying", by Tom Hopkins.
"The Handmade Marketplace- How To Sell Your Crafts Locally, Globally, and Online", by Kari Chapin.
You might ask, what could I do? What could I sell? Well, the possibilities are endless. You can go to either the library, or to a used bookstore, Amazon.com, or You Tube videos and learn how to make crafts, repair appliances, sew and make clothing and home decor, jewelry, candles, soap, canned foods, or fiber art. Or maybe you know how to play an instrument or sing, well, then you could give lessons.
I personally believe in having a knowledge of how to make just about anything we use or consume. So, even if you make something and you don't sell it, it can be for your own personal use, or given as a gift. And, the more you know how to make yourself, the more you wealth you can create for your family.
Anyone looking for specific instructions on how to make something, you can e-mail me at: cultureisart@gmail.com.
"EntreLeadership- 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches", by Dave Ramsey.
"The New Business Road Test- What Entrepreneurs Should Do Before Writing a Business Plan", by John Mullins.
"Selling In Tough Times- Secrets To Selling When No One Is Buying", by Tom Hopkins.
"The Handmade Marketplace- How To Sell Your Crafts Locally, Globally, and Online", by Kari Chapin.
You might ask, what could I do? What could I sell? Well, the possibilities are endless. You can go to either the library, or to a used bookstore, Amazon.com, or You Tube videos and learn how to make crafts, repair appliances, sew and make clothing and home decor, jewelry, candles, soap, canned foods, or fiber art. Or maybe you know how to play an instrument or sing, well, then you could give lessons.
I personally believe in having a knowledge of how to make just about anything we use or consume. So, even if you make something and you don't sell it, it can be for your own personal use, or given as a gift. And, the more you know how to make yourself, the more you wealth you can create for your family.
Anyone looking for specific instructions on how to make something, you can e-mail me at: cultureisart@gmail.com.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Article From Gallup's Healthways Blog
Click here for link.
MARCH 30, 2015
Well-Being Improvement: The Path to Population Health
At the 15th Population Health Colloquium in March in Philadelphia, PA, innovators across the health care industry gathered to discuss building a culture of health and examine real world examples of population based care being implemented by leading companies and organizations. Participants discussed the value of having a scientifically validated measurement of well-being in order to enable public- and private-sector leaders to know where they stand and how best to develop and prioritize strategies that help their populations live their best lives. All attendees received a copy of the ‘‘Best of Population Health Management’’ supplement, which compiled the most requested articles of 2014. The introduction to that supplement was authored by Ben R. Leedle Jr., President and CEO of Healthways, and appears in its entirety below. It is reprinted with permission of Population Health Management.
Introduction by: Ben R. Leedle Jr., President and CEO, Healthways
“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”— H. James Harrington, Ph.D., performance improvement expert
The United States is facing an unprecedented health crisis. Rising costs, declining quality of life, lost productivity, stress, care provider shortages and an aging population continue to place a heavy burden on the American economy, on the vitality of our communities, on the viability of our enterprises and on individuals in need of both health improvement and services to optimize their care. How do we effectively, sustainably reverse these trends?
Our industry has been grappling with this question for some time now, a question that propels us to bring our research to increasingly more rigorous levels, to collect richer data from myriad perspectives, to continuously refine metrics of value and to innovate at a faster pace than ever before. Where we collaborate on these endeavors, the best results ensue.
On January 2, 2008, Healthways began a journey with Gallup to define and measure well-being. Our goal was to understand what is fundamentally important to people, how we experience our day-to-day lives, how we make thousands of decisions every day, and what we think our lives will be like in the future. This information would help us look beyond just physical health and more fully explore its multifaceted nature, including what causes our behaviors and habits to move in positive or negative directions.
The concept of health encompassing more than overt physical symptoms or disease was nothing new, but organizations like ours that deliver population health interventions largely had physical health data — primarily retrospective effect data — to direct our efforts. Without a deeper understanding of what distinguishes a thriving life from one spent suffering, we realized, those interventions would fall short of our three aims: to keep healthy people healthy, to reduce or eliminate lifestyle risks, and to optimize care for those with known conditions or chronic disease. In other words, we needed to uncover and address other aspects of life that either reinforce or work against our best intentions — we needed real-time root cause data.
Decades of clinical and behavioral economics research as well as experience delivering interventions aimed at positively changing behaviors formed the foundation of what eventually became the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index®, an in-depth, real-time view of how individuals, organizations, communities, states and countries perceive their well-being. Why are perceptions valuable? Measures such as unemployment, GDP and health statistics are essential, but they do little to help us understand why people change or do not change. Without that information, determining how best to support the improvement of their health and well-being is impossible.
Since 2008, we have fielded millions of well-being surveys around the world. This accumulated data has enabled research indicating us that improving well-being is the best — indeed, the only way — to positively influence populations, and to sustain positive change. When we have a strong sense of purpose, supportive relationships, financial confidence, and strong connections to our community inaddition to good physical health, we truly thrive. Scientifically proven and published in the pages of Population Health Management as well as other peer-reviewed journals, this fact is also basic common sense.
Having a scientifically validated measurement of well-being enables public- and private-sector leaders to know where they stand and how best to develop and prioritize strategies that help their populations live their best lives. As David B. Nash, MD, MBA, Dean of the Jefferson School of Population Health, noted recently, “Researchers, policy makers and healthcare leaders need good information about the well-being of populations that they serve. Well-being sheds light on the issues that drive quality, cost and productivity. A well-being metric also supports the creation of an action plan for our nation, in order to achieve sustained improvement in the health of our citizens.” Well-being measurement affords diagnostic, design, process and value outcome specificity and clarity. Perhaps most importantly in terms of creating the change we all want, such measurement ensures the accountability of leadership.
Population health is important work for us all. In fact, our recent analysis of global well-being revealed that only 17% of the world’s population is thriving in 3 elements of well-being or more[1]. This tells us much work remains to be done to improve well-being and population health around the globe. Insights and best practice for improving well-being are universal — applying to all humans — and transcend the traditional boundaries for understanding health that are often ascribed to a population’s education, demographics, location and economy.
Encouragingly, population health is getting the recognition it deserves as a strategic competence for healthcare and other organizations. As just one example, businesses are now hiring chief population officers. The need for the expertise, evidence and next-generation of leadership underscores the importance of the work being performed at the Jefferson School of Population Health. Another example of dynamic growth in the field is the new partnership formed between the Jefferson School of Population Health and the Population Health Alliance. The relationship blends the best of each group and assures the development and execution of innovative solution in our field.
Healthways is proud to support these organizations and sponsor this inaugural “Best of Population Health Management” supplement, which compiles the most requested articles of 2014. Clearly, the rising incidence of chronic disease both in the United States and throughout the world shows that we are ready for a new approach, and these articles highlight some of the exciting advancement in our collective study. Together, we are learning from those on the front lines of population health practice and discovery, collaborating with greater transparency than ever before, and establishing the best practices in total population health that will truly transform health and care.
[1] As defined by Gallup and Healthways, the five elements of well-being are: 1) purpose (liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals), 2) social (having supportive relationships and love in your life), 3) financial (managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security), 4) community (liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community), and 5) physical (having good health and enough energy to get things done daily).
Another New Country Has Viewed St. Albans- Switzerland!
21 new views from a new country in one day! Switzerland!
Pageviews by Countries
Monday, March 30, 2015
Latest Newsletter From Franklin County Regional Chamber of Commerce
| Director's Desk March 30, 2015 |
Tuesday with FCCQ
Tomorrow morning I will be heading nord to visit with the La Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec (FCCQ) as they launch their new Programme COREX and I understand just enough French to know what that all means.
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Opportunity for Trade
The FCCQ, the Quebec Federation of Chambers of Commerce (I bet you got that part) has invited a team of commerce executives from New England to join them as they unveil their newest program to stimulate trade between Quebec and their neighbors sud de la frontière.
Is This a Good Thing?
If we take a look at the infrastructure changes that are being put into place on the Canadian side alone, we can see this is another step in bringing more commerce and tourism into Franklin County. Fourteen miles of four lane highway has been opened just nord de la frontière that now speeds up the commute between our businesses and and St. Jean, Brossard and Montreal. That is Good!
What Are We Going to Learn?
Well, here is what I see, Franklin County is one of the major gateways between nord un sud. No matter what they propose, it will most likely have to come through our neighborhood. The more we know about what le Programme CODEX offers, the better prepared we will be to welcome them as they cross la frontière. We'll know much more when we come home tomorrow afternoon than we did when we head out in the morning. I'll keep you posted.
Ah, Disaster Planning
Last week we had planned to host Steve Paddock and "Disaster Recovery Planning"when disaster struck - Steve got the flu. Good thing we had a back up plan - we have rescheduled the seminar for this Thursday from 4:00 - 5:30 pm at the St. Albans Libray. Please respond to this email if you can make this rescheduled event - even if you were registered for the first one, we'd still like to hear from you yes or no. Thanks.
Did You Know?
On March 14, 1909, Isaïe Préfontaine, president of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, sent his sister boards of trade a circular letter announcing the first meeting of what would become the Fédération des chambres de commerce de la province de Québec (FCCPQ) on April 15, 1909. Today, with its network of more than 140 chambers of commerce, the FCCQ represents more than 60,000 businesses and 150,000 business people involved in all sectors of the economy throughout Québec.
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| I heard it said this week; "The Chamber represents everybody but, not everybody is a member of the Chamber." Please make Chamber membership a part of your success strategy. Thank you for your continued support of the Chamber in your community. |
Dave Southwick
Executive Director 802 524-2444 |
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Meet Lauralee M. Green, Real Intuitive Counselor
I met Lauralee when I was living in Glastonbury, CT, back in 1993. I was introduced to her through a mutual friend, and my first meeting with her was a psychic channeling reading for both myself and my friend. I have to say, I was amazed. This woman seems to have a very clear and direct line to the higher vibrational energies, and can pick up on things that are very accurate with complete strangers. She had even predicted certain national events, back in 1993, that have since come to pass. Some of her readings alone have gotten me through more difficult challenges in my life than just about anything else. Currently, she just moved back to Connecticut from Arizona. So, I am planning on having her up sometime maybe this year to have a "psychic party". If anyone is interested, e-mail me at cultureisart@gmail.com to reserve a spot. It probably won't be until sometime in the fall. Her prices are reasonable, and very worth it. Check out her link here.
Also, she can do your reading over the phone, if you would like to have a reading sooner.
Also, she can do your reading over the phone, if you would like to have a reading sooner.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Upcoming Events from the Franklin County Regional Chamber of Commerce
TOMORROW! Strategy for Success: Disaster Recovery for your BusinessThursday, March 26, 4:00 - 5:30 pm - St. Albans Library
Learn simple steps to better protect your business in the event of an unexpected disaster. All participants will leave with a disaster plan toolkit to begin the planning process for your business. Instructor: Steve Paddock, Vermont Small Business Development Center Free to Chamber members; $10 for non-members.Register HERE |
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Taylor Park Easter Egg Hunt
Saturday, April 4,10:00 am - Taylor Park. Hunting areas for 3 age groups: --3 years and under --4 & 5 year olds --ages 6-8. Parents and older siblings kindly do not assist in the "hunting and gathering" of eggs. Kids only, please! Questions? Contact the Rec Department at 524-1500 X266 or X268 |
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Essentials in Board Membership Seminar
Monday, April 6 - 4:30 - 8:30 pm, BFA LibraryDefine and strengthen your board's productivity and fundraising skills and learn how to work efficiently together as a team. Presented by the Friends of Northern Lake Champlain and the Women's 'We Can" Expo. Registration required. Light dinner included. $25 per person; $20 per person if 7+ board members attend together. Information and registration: Marilyn Grunwald- 802-527-8237. |
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Franklin County Home Health
Three sessions - April 7, 14, 21, 8:30 am - 4:30 pmStart the Conversation Training New State Office Building - Federal Street A 3-session workshop designed to prepare people in assisting others with crucial healthcare decisions, before they are unable to do so. The goal is to increase the number of people familiar with updated advance directives within our community. Space is limited. Registration required. To sign-up or learn more about this facilitator training opportunity, please contact Tamira Martel (802) 393-6767. |
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| 2015 Annual Awards Dinner
Celebrating Community Strength
Friday, May 8, 5:00 pm - American Legion
Guest Speaker: Dr. Bob Arnot, Emmy-winning broadcast
journalist & author.
*Hors-d'oeuvres, Cocktails, Buffet Dinner, Cash Bar
Online ticket sales preferred - tickets also available at the Chamber Office. Online sales: awardsdinner.fcrccvt.com*Catered by the culinary students of NW Technical Center Tickets: $45 per person; $320 for tables of 8 |
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Premium Plus-Up Member Profile
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Hampton Inn & Conference Center
The newly renovated Hampton Inn Burlington hotel is, located off Interstate 89 in Colchester. Relax and unwind in a cozy guest room, equipped with free WiFi, a 37-inch HDTV, mini-refrigerator and microwave oven. Take a swim in the salt water pool or enjoy a fully equipped fitness center. Free hot breakfast or On the Run breakfast bag during the week. Adjacent to fine dining at the Lighthouse Restaurant & Lounge. Visit their website for additional information!
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