Coaching for public speakers: Carmine Gallo at Business Week
I recently discovered Carmine Gallo, a Business Week writer who focuses on the craft of public speaking and giving presentations. I’ve been slowly working through his articles, trying to learn as much as I can to apply to my own preaching and teaching. Gallo is practical and entertaining. Check him out before you face your next crowd.
Here’s a link to the RSS feed for his articles. You can search the Business Week site for older postings.
PS - I found Gallo’s feed on another blog. As soon as I remember where, I’ll give credit.
Update: Ah, here is is - a post from Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion about the Business Week feed builder which mentions Gallo as an example.
Really good free software
Today I ran across one of the most helpful posts I’ve seen anywhere in a long time - this article called 30 Essential Pieces of Free (and Open) software for Windows. I use item #1, the Firefox web browser and I highly recommend it for ease of use, extensions (optional features you can add on yourself) and standard features, like a spell-checker any time you’re typing, whether composing email or filling out an online form. Microsoft’s recently-released IE7 is playing catch-up to Firefox in many ways - tabbed browsing, for example.
I also use #5 on the list, Open Office, a replacement for MS Office which has plenty of features and decent compatibility with Office; and #13, Audacity, for editing the audio files of my sermons before I post them.
I think I want to try #22, PDF Creator, which claims to make PDF creation as easy as printing to a file and #29, GnuCash, a Quicken/Money substitute.
NOTE: I found this link through LifeHacker’s post on it.
An alternative to Office
I try to rarely promote commercial products on this blog, but when a good FREE tool presents itself, I like to talk about it.
When I got my new computer awhile back, I really wanted to buy MS Office to go with it (so I could work at home easily) but I just couldn’t afford it. For just a few bucks, I got a basic office suite from Wordperfect included with my computer. Then I discovered Open Office, an open-source office suite that is available for free (legally, I might add). Open Office is backed by Sun Microsystems and is built by programmers all over the world who donate their time. It contains an excellent word processor along with a spreadsheet, database, etc. I basically just use the word processor, and it communicates SO much better with Word than Wordperfect does.
One qualifier: I word process all the time, but I don’t use many advanced features, and I’ve heard that people who do run into more problems with compatibility. But as a basic user, I can email my sermon or lesson to myself when I leave the office and pick it up at home and continue to work on it seamlessly, for the most part.
As for Powerpoint and Publisher, which I also use a frequently but for short periods, Bart Mayo (our church tech guru) showed me a program called LogMeIn which provides me simple remote desktop access for free, so I can sit at home and control my office computer as if I were sitting at my desk at church - and you don’t need Windows XP Professional to do it. It IS a bit slow to run a remote session, but it is definitely workable.
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Work anywhere
Back in 1993 or so, I picked up an old computer book in the used book store. The author, writing in the late 60s or so said that computers would evolve so that common people would have “terminals” in their home and they would pay for access to a central server. In ‘93, the internet was just starting to take hold among home users and the real story was the personal computer. As I looked at the book, I thought that the author was wrong in his predictions in that he didn’t take into account the power that each “terminal” or PC would possess, that we would in fact have the main computer on our desks and wouldn’t have to connect to the central server.
But thirteen years later, I have to admit that this author had the right idea. PCs have continued to evolve in power, but even more compelling than what’s on my desktop is the power and content I can connect to “out there” - not on a central server exactly, but on the millions of servers that make up the web.
With high-speed access becoming more common, possibilities about where we have to work are expanding. I used to have to sit in my office to work on my sermon, go over my list of church prospects, hospital calls, etc. For a long time I wished for a notebook, even though I find them tedious to use, just so I could take my work anywhere. But my paradigm is starting to change, and I’m realizing that it’s possible to have access to whatever I need anywhere there is a computer.
ITRedux.com recently posted a list of many applications on the web to take the place of MS Office, Wordperfect Suite or whatever you use. A lot of these are free and offer a basic feature set. Others are professional grade and require a monthly fee.
I used MS Outlook for quite awhile to pick up my Yahoo email and organize my tasks, but I have recently switched back to My Yahoo for mail and calendar (it has improved over the last few years) and I use Backpack for my to-do list. Last night I prepared my small-group Bible studies at home using Writley’s word processor and Bible Gateway’s Bible.
I’m really just getting started with this work anywhere concept, but I like it.
Access your stuff from anywhere
The exciting thing about the web to me is the growing ability to access your stuff from anywhere. Email went that route years ago, and now online email accounts provide so much capacity that you practically never have to delete anything. Yahoo mail gives you a gig of storage, and Google’s G-Mail offers 2.5 gigs, and these are free accounts. And since they’re web-based, you don’t have to change email addresses when you change Internet providers, which is why it amazes me whenever someone emails me that they’re changing from AOL to Comcast and their address is changing. Get web-based email and you can keep your address and collect your mail from anywhere.Anyway, now developers are moving beyond email to other applications. If you need a basic but very adequate word processor, writely.com has it for you (it’s free), and you can store all your documents online too. Then if you’re visiting your in-laws in Florida for a week and you want to do something productive, you can sign in to writely and continue working on your memoirs. Writely documents allow for collaboration too, which makes it useful for church ministry teams that need to work together to create an event schedule, a job list, nursery rotation, etc. You make the original and your team members can add to it at their own schedule, from home.
Along the same lines are some tools provided by 37signals.com. I especially recommend Backpack (a simple project organizer) and Ta Da List (a VERY simple to-do list). Both are collaborative, access-anywhere tools that could be very useful for the type of thing we do in church all the time - plan and work together in small teams. Try them out, let me know what you think, and if you know of other good access-anywhere tools, tell me about them.
