That (and a tad more) describes Maddy Dychtwald. She’s pretty well known, ridiculously successful and, dang, good looking to boot.

She’s the author of Influence: How Women’s Soaring Economic Power Will Transform Our World for the Better. She’s also the co-founder, along with her husband Ken, of Age Wave. Together they’ve been warning us for a long time now about the dangers of ignoring the demographics of aging and the talents of our senior citizens.

(Ken Dychtwald, by the way, is one of the very best speakers we’ve ever seen. He’s always understood intuitively what Seth Godin warns about in Really Bad PowerPoint – that bullet points slaughter audiences, but the right emotional images help deliver the message).

So, why in the world would someone like Maddy Dychtwald feel it necessary to tweet? She’s got it all, already.

Contribution

Chris Brogan (one of the most knowledgeable social network experts on the planet) will tell you that online social networking is not about selling – but instead about contributing, mentoring and giving back.

In Maddy Dychtwald’s case she contributes her expertise. She’s intimately involved with issues like the marketing power of women and the implications of demographic shifts. She uses that expertise to link her followers to news, resources, studies and articles on the topics she knows best.

Sure, she tweets about her own books and appearances. (we should be so lucky to have such success and such a schedule!).

But, she also uses her background to lead us to intriguing articles like a Christian Science Monitor article about the popular television show, The Closer; and an NPR story about Sarah McLachlan’s fight to keep her wonderful concert series, Lilith Fair, alive.

And, those are just a couple of examples. Follow her and you’ll see a lot more.

So, what makes Maddy tweet?

Well, it’s certainly not what makes Sammy run.

Nope, those who are already successful, accomplished and knowledgeable are in the best position to give back – and they’re the ones who most need to pick up their keyboard and tweet with us.

Maddy does. Now, we just need to work on her husband Ken.

Our mission was accomplished a hundred times over when we met Steve. If you’ve been to one of our workshops you already know him. We rarely miss the chance to feature this Lishansky quote:

The hardest people to work with are those who’ve been reasonably successful doing unsustainable things.

And, that’s Steve Lishansky. If you spend any time with him you’d better bring a notebook. He’s a walking Bartlett’s – only they’re all his quotations, not Mark Twain’s or Thomas Edison’s.

Steve will be speaking at the Colorado chapter of the National Speakers Association this Friday, March 6. He’s speaking about “Getting Paid What You Are Worth.” Bring a notebook, but you won’t be able to write fast enough.

Just a Few Samples

Here is Steve on how speakers attempt to place a price tag for their appearances.

They’re trying for a gig rather than being a force for what they’re passionate about.

Or, a related quote that strikes right to the heart of today’s obsession with information (and speaks to the pricing issue):

I’d rather be an example than an explanation.

We have to warn you, though. He’s gonna’ get in your face about your desire to have a career as a speaker:

Are you being driven by hope and aspiration or passion and commitment?

I suppose we should tell you that Steve Lishansky is the Chief Executive Optimizer at Optimize International.™

Yet another reason we like him. He runs a company about optimizing your brain – not your web site. In the long run, which do you think will help your career more?

Oh, and it says here, his office is on Whits End Road. Not true. Much wit. Much quotable wit. Bring a notebook.

Last week Mark Sanborn took on that topic as he thanked and challenged philanthropists, volunteers and students who make Leader’s Challenge a reality.

(Leader’s Challenge is a variety of participatory learning programs for high school students called Ignite, Global Challenge and Colorado Close Up. They’re all designed to get students more involved in their community, government and world).

To be fair, Mr. Sanborn, whose speech was called “High Impact Leadership,” may not have completely been focusing on the topic of “text messaging.”

But, he did ask everyone in the audience a related question, “How many of us are trying something new.”

You see, today, years after it came into vogue with young people, still only a tiny fraction of adults know how to “text” their daughters, sons, nieces and grandchildren from their phones.

Try something new?! Certainly, that’s what Erin Riska and the staff at Ignite program at Leader’s Challenge had to do. She told us:

Students don’t really check their email that much anymore. Instead, they text each and check their Facebook accounts. So, if we in the Leader’s Challenge office were going to be able to reach them, we had to change our own behavior.”

In 2007, Leader’s Challenge raised $440,000 to support their new and inventive programs for young people. This year, they’re on their way to another successful fundraising campaign.

Mark Sanborn was thanking the audience last week for a job well done. A job that invests in the power and promise of the next generation.

John Maxwell has said that “Leadership is influence.” Mark suggested that we need to add one crucial word to that definition – “Leadership is positive influence,” he told us.

Sanborn’s best example of “Positive Influence?” Irwin McManus, the pastor of the Mosaic Church in Los Angeles, who has said:

We spend so much time worrying about our kids being good – not breaking the rules, getting into trouble, and basically behaving  – that we often forget to invite them to be great.

At Leader’s Challenge, they’re doing exactly that. And if you know of ways to help them raise more money, just suggest something new. I’m sure they’ll be willing to give it a whirl.

Fred is a honcho in the interior design business – and we’ve written about him before in “What This Guy Knows about Making Money Can Help You Make Some, Too.” And, while Mr. Design does speak all over the planet, even he doesn’t travel to Dubai every week.

One sure way for Fred to please his audience is to show that he understands design industry issues in their part of the world. Tall order – there’s lots going on in Dubai.

In fact, searching the “news tab” in a popular search engine like Yahoo or Google will reveal tens of thousands of stories about Dubai (see the photo at the beginning of this article).

But, Fred’s no dummy, and he knows enough to throw in a word or two that will reduce the number of stories he gets – and better target the ones that might be of interest to him.

That’s still a lot of stories (475 in Google). If you read much of this blog, you’ll know that limiting your search with phrases is the way to go. After all, good searching is all about getting less results, not more results.

But, if Fred limits his search too much – for instance, if he does a search for dubai “design industry” – he’ll actually get too few results, and miss some really good stuff.

Hidden treasure worth it’s weight in gold

Here’s a pretty cool strategy – and you can use this tip when you’re doing any search on the Internet – whether it’s in news, blogs, groups or just the general web.

When you are getting too many results for a topic, just add a phrase like “new ideas,” “latest developments,” or “innovative approaches” to your core search phrase.

By doing this Fred will come up with the most recent, innovative, and inspirational stories that will resonate with his audience. (If, by chance, he still has scores of results he can “sort” his stories by “relevance” or “date“).

In fact, one of the stories he would find by searching this way is a story about an architect commissioned by Fortune Magazine to design the skyscraper of the future.

But wait, there’s more! More than just a great article. Look closely and you’ll see that this article came from AMEInfo, which modestly bills itself as “The Ultimate Middle East Business Resource.” Do you suppose someone traveling to Dubai might want to keep that web site marked as a favorite bookmark?

In Fred’s case, though, it seems he already knew about AMEInfo, judging by the article pictured below. But, hey, how are Sheryl and I ever going to teach one of the “biggest international names in the business of interior design” anything?!

Good luck, Fred, and break a leg.

The Speed of Trust is Stephen MR Covey’s new book about the power of increasing trust in your team, your organization and your own personal development. Yesterday, he taught us some of the basics of his approach in a 3-hour workshop at the Littleton Marriot. And, you know what? He didn’t try to scare the pants off of us.

It’s important to know that he and his organization were indeed “selling” to this audience of business decision makers. Selling, after all, is not a dirty word. Mr. Covey is traveling around the U.S. to promote his new book, which will be released in just a few days. So, he is certainly promoting the sale of his new book.

He was also selling his consulting services. The CoveyLink training and consulting services probably cost big bucks. I didn’t see a rate sheet, but trust me. The mailing list that put the fannies in the seats for this event has to be quite sophisticated. His next stop on the tour was the Vail Leadership Institute. So, I’m not saying this was not a sales event. It clearly was.

But, for three hours yesterday, Stephen Covey did not “sell” or scare us. He just taught us. No, I’m not kidding, he spent three hours teaching. And, the most refreshing thing is that his positive approach seemed to be working – and the audience seemed ready to buy.

I won’t even try to summarize his bravura and thought provoking performance. You certainly know that trust is missing in the world today because you read the papers. It is likely missing in your place of work. It may even be missing in your family and personal relationships. We’ve got a worldwide trust deficit that makes our National Debt look like small change – and that’s saying something.

The audience yesterday often spoke (in breakouts and in the general session) of the lack of trust they see in their own employees, their peers and their supervisors. If Mr. Covey had wanted to, he could have just turned on the “pain machine.” He could have “customized his message based on the audience’s pain points,” as one marketing guru suggests. But, he didn’t.

CoveyLink is a high level company with sophisticated resources. Yesterday, Stephen showed us an inventive (and probably expensive) CoveyLink advertisement for his new book and consulting services. And, admittedly that ad did hit the pain points almost exclusively. But, his own speech did not.

I have no idea if what I’m going to write next is true or not. But, here’s my hunch. I’ll bet that he got advice from his own pain merchants to turn up the heat on his audience, and I’ll bet he resisted. I think Stephen MR Covey has made a conscious decision to take a positive approach to selling. Again, this is just my hunch.

There is something about the heft and stature of this man’s personal demeanor that makes me think at some point he may have told his advisors, “I’m going to teach people how to do a better job of creating trust. I’m going to teach them how important it can be to their company culture and to their bottom line. Then, I’m going to tell them that there is much more we can teach them. And, I’m going to do it that way because I trust my audience. I trust them to see the value of our services without callously manipulating their pain points.”

The teacher I saw yesterday was confident and assured that his message is needed by his audience. I think he likes teaching and I think he likes making a difference in people’s lives. I think he may just have told his marketing advisors and handlers to go jump in the lake. And, I think he’s doing it his way.

As Dennis Miller says, “That’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.”

When you use any of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or Ask.com, limiting your search results by using quotation marks around phrases is a basic skill that yields faster, more targeted results. But, did you know that you can use those same quotation marks to go looking for compelling thoughts and quotations that no other speaker will find – ones that your audience will find fresh, thoughtful, compelling and darn close to unique?

First, you need to warm up a bit and practice the power of using quotation marks to find some famous quotations, songs, poems and even jokes. Perhaps you remember only a small part of a song or poem. Put the part you remember in quotation marks into your search engine and you are likely to immediately get the rest of the story – er, I mean, poem.

Suppose you could only remember:
“clean favored and imperially slim”
“walk a little slower when you walk by me”
“shoot if you must this old grey head”
“and don’t be afraid of the storm”
Google and other search engines will bail you out immediately, almost always giving you author, artist and complete lyrics or complete poem.

So, that was quick. And that’s how to retrieve the famous stuff you just can’t remember. Next, we’ll work on finding the stuff that no one else can find.

The easy part is that your speech (or book or article) has a theme of some sort. Sheryl and I speak about the effect of technology on our lives, for instance. The typical way to search the internet for a good quote would be the way everyone else would do it – go to a web site that features thousands of quotations, find their “search” box and type in the word “technology.” Pretty straightforward – but this is the very reason that so many speakers are using so many of the same quotations.

The hard part is to think about what kind of quotation you are really seeking – what kind of thought you are looking for behind the quotation. Dress up your word – technology – with some of the trappings of what you are looking for. So, for us, since we are somewhat skeptical of technology, we might dress up our term with something like “technology can sometimes,” “if technology continues to” or “the more dependent we become on technology.”

By putting the phrases above in quotation marks we are “fishing” to see if someone, somewhere on the Internet has said something interesting that completes your phrase. With the amount of web content, articles, newsletters, e-zines, blogs and other Internet content, it is likely that someone has said something about what you are seeking.

In the case above, in just a few searches we found these two quotations:

“The more dependent we become on technology, the less time we spend deepening our connections to others and to ourselves.”
Mark Sincevich
Photographer, Author, Speaker

“…the more dependent we become on technology… the more it conforms our behavior to its requirements rather than vise versa.”
Don Closson
Minister

Now, neither Mark Sincevich nor Don Closson are famous. The first is a photographer (and thinker) in Washington, D.C. The second is a minister (and thinker) from Texas. They are not famous, but both of these gentlemen write compellingly about the effect of modern technology on our lives. Better still, no other speakers who speak about our topic are likely to have ever run into Mr. Sincevich or Mr. Closson. And, our audiences are likewise not going to be familiar with these thoughtful quotes. They present fresh ideas for our audience to ponder.

So, let’s try one more. Our friend Barbara McNichol is a top writer and editor who has worked with tons of speakers and authors. She was revising a promotional piece for a company that delivers extraordinary planning to its clients in higher education. The promotional piece begged for a quotation about being extraordinary.

So, Barbara tried typing “extraordinary” into some of those famous quotation web sites, but didn’t get what she wanted.

Instead, she dressed up her term, extraordinary, and thought about the quotation she would love to have. How might it start? – “find the extraordinary,” “extraordinary people sometimes” and “extraordinary is simply.” Next, she did a Google, Yahoo and Ask.com search with those phrases in quotes to see what she could find. We can’t tell you what she found because, well, after all, her client is paying for it.

However, we tried it ourselves, and here’s one of the quotations we found:

“It has been proved that achieving the extraordinary is simply a question of making that little bit more effort, giving a little extra attention to detail and doing it consistently.”
Dr Anne Heaslett
Director, Limavady College
16 December 2004

You ever heard of Dr. Heaslett? No. By, the way, the Limavady College is located in the scenic North West part of Northern Ireland. I guarantee you – no one else is going to have her quote.

One last great thing about finding your own hidden quotes is that Thomas McCaulay, Emily Dickenson and Mark Twain are all dead. Ms. Heaslett, Mr. Sincevich and Mr. Closson are all very much alive. You could write to them, and learn more about their thoughts.

Amazing what will happen when you combine your own ingenuity with the power of Internet search. And, that, I’d say, is pretty darn extraordinary.