grace

… filling in the negative space with positively everything

Save a Life: Get Emergency Response Training!

With Hurricanes Ike and Katrina fresh in our memories, not to mention the everyday dangers of fire and other household disasters, it only makes sense to get CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) trainingso you know how to respond in an emergency situation.

The CERT program is a 24-hour course, one evening per week over an 8-week period. Training sessions cover a wide variety of disaster preparedness scenarios; from fire suppression to terrorism. Training concludes with a disaster simulation in which participants utilize skills learned throughout the course.

DETAILS:

Wednesday evenings Jan. 21 – March 11
6:30-9:30 p.m.
HCC Administration Building
3100 Main at Elgin
Conference Room A
Free Parking in the Garage

For registration and further information, contact Joyce Gigout at jjggo@aol.com or Tara Smith at birdita@yahoo.com
or by phone at 713.894.8460.

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Everything Old Is New Again

With all this talk/hype about social media, I’m beginning to think we’re all new media douchebags. The plethora of “how to” articles and posts on ways to increase your followers, friends, fans, and other cult hangers-on seem to be regurgitating what Dale Carnegie wrote about long ago (1936) in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Even then, Carnegie was working off of case studies that he’d culled into his 1934 workshops.

Check out some of Carnegie’s core principles and see if any of it rings a bell:

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People:

  • Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
  • Give honest and sincere appreciation.
  • Arouse in the other person an eager want.

Six Ways to Make People Like You:

  1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
  2. Smile.
  3. Remember that a man’s Name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
  4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
  5. Talk in the terms of the other man’s interest.
  6. Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

The strategies haven’t changed, people: it’s only the tools that have evolved.

We may couch these terms in more marketing-friendly speak – I don’t think I’d ever recommend a client to “arouse in the other person an eager want” for fear of promoting sexual harassment – but they’re all the same principles we espouse in the 2.0 universe. The updated version, for social media-ites:

Happy New Year! Sublime in ‘09 …

So far, I’ve managed to start the year out right:

Day 1: Spent (most of) the day in bed, sans hangover & drama. Spent other bits of the day in good company.

Day 2: Met with BooTown on doing Public Relations for the Houston Fringe Festival; then focused on personal plans for the year: a) avoid/reduce time suckers, b) develop better habits, c) lead by example & cultivate stewardship/proactive responsibility among others. First time-worthy task: Redesign my blog & website to get my “personal branding” in order.

Day 3: … Who knows what goodies tomorrow will bring?

My mantra for 2009: We are not the problem. WE ARE THE ANSWER.

Learn it. Love it. Live it.

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