it is definitely not on home plate.
Clearing yourself on the key words and acronyms you are going to use in the presentation will give you a solid foundation to stand on and confidence when delivering your data. It will also give you the advantage in managing any resistance that comes from the audience because you can bet they have not cleared themselves on the words and acronyms.
Following several steps will allow you to satisfy yourself that you are using the words correctly. First, look each of the words up in the dictionary, then look up each of the words in the definition of each word. Check for any synonyms of the word and, finally, demonstrate the word using physical objects or what I call mass (see footnote on page 2).
Think of it like the ringing of a bell. When you strike the bell, it sends out a sound vibration. Once the sound vibration has ceased, you strike the bell again. Dropping data into the space is like striking the bell. Once the sound vibration has stopped, go ahead and drop another communication packet. The more important the point is, the louder the ring and, therefore, the longer the pause.
This completes this section on wireless communication. Your power as a speaker will increase enormously when you shift your awareness from the content to focusing on creating space packets between the communication packets. This ability is the mark of an extraordinary professional speaker.
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* Mass: Most presentations employ PowerPoint® slides, whiteboards, and flip charts, which are two-dimensional tools, to explain abstract concepts. One of the barriers to clarity is that people don’t have enough mass around the concept. Mass is the use of physical items in the space. As a presenter, you should always be looking for mass to help the audience understand abstract IP concepts.
Through the Firewall and Beyond
A firewall is a network device that protects a private network from public network attacks. Everybody in the audience, including the presenter, has their own psychological firewalls created by their minds.
Where Did the Firewall Come From?
We can draw an instructive analogy from dinosaurs. When a dinosaur woke up in the morning and looked out over the Jurassic plain, it might have seen either dinosaurs that were larger than itself or dinosaurs that were smaller. If it saw a dinosaur that was larger, its reptilian brain would tell it to turn around and run away. If it saw a smaller dinosaur, its brain would tell it to attack and have breakfast. Therefore, one of the primary design functions of the reptilian brain comes down to one word: survival.
Millions of years later, our brains have evolved. The human brain now has three parts: an outer cortex, a mid-brain, and a reptilian brain, which to this very day is still concerned about survival and the survival of whatever it considers itself to be. Understanding the it in whatever it considers itself to be is critical if you ever want to escape from the prison of your mind and experience life on the other side of the firewall.
In using the pronoun it, I am referring to psychological concepts such as I, me, mind, ego, my story, myself, my interpretation, my beliefs, my database of thoughts, my point of view, my little story of me, etc.
When you are born, your database of knowledge is empty. Thereafter, life becomes a conditioning process of filling your database with thoughts, education, and experiences. The thoughts and experiences you have depend on the environment into which you are born and the life experiences to which you are exposed.
As a child, your awareness of this conditioning process is negligible and you really have little if any choice about what is being programmed into your database. For example, you are told your name, family, nationality, religion, tribe, sex, etc. You agree with these labels automatically. And, once you agree, they become the things you consider yourself to be. They become the I, the me, the ego, the mind.
You are also programmed with a language, which are the word symbols or protocols your culture uses to communicate. For example, you asked your mother, “What is that?” and she said, “A tree.” And now, for the rest of your life, when you see an object that has a trunk and leaves, you know it’s a tree. It cannot show up in your conditioned conceptual reality as anything other than a tree.
The word Tree is a mental label you place on an event that gives you the illusion of knowledge. As soon as you create the mental label it reduces the possibility of the event showing up as anything other than the label you put on it and traps you in a prison of “knowing.” However, being able to observe the part of you that automatically generates the label you place on every event in your life creates a space that leads you to a state of presence or stillness. Stillness could be defined as awareness without thought. In aware presence you don’t automatically label each event in your life and therefore, everything you see is a mystery.
I suggest you change the labeling of your life events in this way: “We call that a tree,” “We call that the sun,” “We call you a woman,” etc. By shifting your language, you move from being trapped in an is world to living in a world of mystery, openness, and possibility.
Einstein acknowledged this by saying that the knowledge we have accumulated so far is insufficient to get us to the next level of awareness.
Growing up, you learn a variety of beliefs from your teachers, family, and direct experience, such as the following: The Earth is round, the Earth is the center of the universe, the Sun is the center of the universe, white people are bad, black people are good, communism is bad, socialism is good, democracy is great, and if you eat meat on Fridays, it is a sin.
What does this all mean to you?
As you evolve and become more conscious, you begin to distinguish your database of beliefs from the part of you that observes those beliefs. This is one of the most important distinctions you want to make in researching your own reality. All the spiritual teachers I have read and heard grapple with this concept of observer or witness. There is a separation between what you have identified yourself to be, which we call the I or me, and the observer of the I or me.
How this distinction works in my reality is that when an event occurs in my field of now, I automatically put a label on it based on my past conditioning and then I notice the label I put on that event. As soon as I notice the label, the power it had over me is reduced. It is as though a gap is created between the event and the labeling of the event. I also notice that the labels I put on events stir up thoughts, images, and physical and emotional reactions. The major benefit I experience from being able to observe this labeling process is that my physical, emotional, and mental body enters a state of relaxation and calm. Examples of this labeling/relaxation process occur all the time—a cigarette being lighted, traffic jams, flight delays, late people, bad weather, the slaughter of whales, winning business contracts, losing business contracts—the list of events goes on and on.
After a while, you begin to realize that you have been living your life in a state of unconsciousness or, as Eckhart Tolle would say, in a conditioned conceptual reality, programmed from birth, which you have unquestioningly believed to
