Four years ago I wrote a blog post about returning from researching some boarding schools in Canada for our son who had expressed an interest in taking a different path in his education journey. This summer he graduated from Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario. Three weeks ago he started his college career, studying economics at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, with his first semester actually being spent in Berlin, Germany. Yeah, I’m proud of him.
The other day my wife had a coaching session with our business coaching company, Shirlaws Cayman. At the end of the session as papers were being gathered and coloured pens put away, Kristen, our coach, asked Christina to take a moment and jot down her ‘key learnings. Why is this so important? Read on.
Every day in business we participate in meetings. We pull out the requisite notepad, scribble away, then generally conclude the meeting with some tasks to be done before the next meeting. What is different about recording ‘key learnings’? I thought about this for a bit, and reflected on my own past reporting of key learnings after my coaching sessions. The list below is not exhaustive, by any means, but reflects my thinking on the value of recording ‘key learnings’.
During the Platform Conference in Franklin, TN, I took a crazy amount of notes. In the two weeks after the conference I posted recaps of all the presentations. Looking back on it, they are a bit hard to find so this, for your convenience, is a roundup of the 10 posts in my epic recap series. As I noted in one of the first recaps, this information in no way replaces the experience of actually being there. Please, if any of this information resonates with you, go ahead and make the commitment to attend the next Platform Conference or find out where any of these presenters are speaking and make it your mission to get there and interact with them. They are all delightful, caring, generous people who succeed because they genuinely want you to succeed.
All presenters have their websites and featured resources linked in their individual recap post. For ease of following them on Twitter I have linked each name below to their twitter feed. Thus the first link is the twitter feed for the speaker, and the second is to my blog post recapping that speaker. Enjoy, and please take a moment to comment here on this roundup post or directly in any of the individual posts that may have spoken to you.
This sixth post covers the session delivered by Andrew Buckman. He spoke on the 10 things we can, or should, be doing to improve our websites. While it may seem a bit technical, this is critical stuff. Think about it. We have spent the first five sessions preparing a groundwork for launching a platform. After this session we will again turn to creative and distribution matters. But here in the middle we spend time gaining insight from a web professional on the common pitfalls we so often find ourselves in once we launch. Read on. Oh, and the photo is not of Andrew.
Andrew outlined 10 areas that he as a web design / WordPress professional sees his clients have challenges in. To give some point of reference here for my readers I will note if my blog DOES or DOES NOT comply with the advice given doing. They 10 tips are:
Session #2 of Platform Conference was presented by Michael Hyatt’s business partner, Ken Davis. It was titled, ‘Creating WOW.’ In a field of younger presenters Ken is the proverbial elder statesman, but his topic really resonated with what all the subsequent speakers would talk on.
As an aside, while in Franklin, TN, my wife and I stayed with our longtime friends, the McKeehan’s. Toby is now better known by his stage name TobyMac, but over 20 years ago he was a struggling artist working to get his first band, DC Talk, booked onto shows. Chatting with Toby one night I listed the speakers at Platform Conference. Ken Davis was the name that suddenly jumped out for him, almost his ‘wow’ moment. Toby recounted that one of DC Talk’s early gigs was performing at an event organized by Ken Davis, a booking that Toby remembered he gained through sheer persistence and hard dogged tenacity. Well, DC Talk, and later TobyMac, have gone on to wow many since those early days. Through it all the principles of wow still hold. Talent will get you so far. Contacts may get you a little further. However, it is tenacity, authenticity, openness and a passion for what you do that will see you to the goal. Please read on for my recap of Session #2 by Ken Davis.
Ken started by noting examples of where leaders who really ought to have had more of an imagination ended up making fairly poor predictions. These included: