La crise, quelle crise ?

Auteur/autrice : marc

  • How to kick the fear of public speaking in the b…

    public-speakingIt is said that on the fear list, public speaking comes before the fear of death. It has even its own word: glossophobia, coming from the Greek glossa, meaning tongue, and phobos, meaning fear. The symptoms of glossophobia can vary and are numerous: dry mouth, trembling body, sweating, just to name a few. In her article How I Got Over My Fear of Public Speaking, Kelly offers a good set of advices, from her own experience, on how to overcome glossophobia. I although introduced 3 simple hacks to better speak in public and 5 deadly mistakes to avoid to be a good speaker.

    Whatever your audience, whatever your topic, and whatever your public speaking skills, anxiety and fear always kicks in. There’s a story one of my mentors of public speaking that I particularly like: A young actress, after a play, goes to see the great Sarah Bernhardt and asks « madam, I never add stage frights, is this normal? » Sarah Bernard answers « Don’t worry, it comes with talent ». Just to say it’s completely normal to have stage fright, it’s actually a nice feedback loop that helps us remember the essential things to do to get good at what we are about to do.

    Here are a set of behavioral tips and tricks to feel better when you are about to deliver a public speech:

    • Shout! If you can find a secluded place when nobody hears you, go there and shout the loudest you can. It will help a lot empty the tension you have.
    • Stand right! Pull your shoulders backwards, push your breast forward and stand right. Exaggerate the movement before setting the foot on stage, it will relieve the tension in your upper body.
    • Put one foot slightly ahead of the other! A little bit like martial art practitioners. This will provide a better balance.
    • Breathe slowly and deeply! Breathing is essential, breathing slowly will lower your cardiac speed and lower your anxiety
    • Look at your audience, spotting friendly faces! There are always friendly and smiling faces in an audience, look at them like you were speaking to them one on one, but do not speak only to them, move your eyes around, and come back to those friendly faces.
    • Accept mistakes and failures! You tongue will trip. You will forget a sentence or a paragraph. All this, and more, happens, even to the best. The only way to avoid this is to rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse. If you do not have the time, accept little mistakes

    One thing that most people do not realize is that the best speakers, the Obamas, the Jobs, etc. are prepared to the max. They have a prompter, they have coaches, and they have rehearsed dozens of time. There’s no shortcut to being a great public speaker, but the above simple tricks will help you getting better and better.

    All the best!

  • Space Oddity, a dreamlike ode to space travel

    Since last Monday, there have been overwhelming tribute to the late David Bowie. Sales of BlackStar, his last album, launched two days before he died, have surged to a point of becoming number one in the UK. I have not been a die-hard fan of Bowie, but have enjoyed many of his songs, danced on Let’s dance. Modern Love and China Girl, listened thousands of time to Ashes to Ashes, but no other songs made as strong an impression on me as Space Oddity.

    480px-Bowie_SpaceOdditySingle

    While thinking about Space Oddity and browsing Youtube, I found the original video of the song:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D67kmFzSh_o

    It’s a very interesting version compared to the one that is most commonly known:

    I do not know which I prefer, but it almost seem two different songs, the 1972 version adding more instruments and changing the voice completely. Not even talking about the almost dreamlike images of the 1969 versions, compared to the almost dull images of the 1972 one (honestly, the guitar rifs are not even synced with the music, but eh, we are in the 70’s…)

    I discovered the version Chris Hadfield recorded in the ISS while reading his book (wrote a blog post on this):

    This last one takes a new flavor now Bowie’s gone. It’s probably not the best version of the song, but it’s the only one (with some changes in the words) that is resonating with a real in space experience.

    One of the reasons this song has such an impact on me is probably the fact I always been interested into flying and I wanted to be a fighter pilot until the day I was forced to wear glasses, and needed to forget my dream (that I overcome by getting my windglider pilot license at 17, more than a year before my car driving license). I still love flying today, although I do not pilot gliders anymore, but I still believe it’s temporary.

    Having said all this, what is the song that made a strong impression on you and that you are still singing or whistling years after, and that makes you happy?

  • Apple may (will ?) abandon the headphone jack on the iPhone 7

    Hey, hey, this is the best news in years when it comes to plugs and connections. The jack, and particularly the 3.5mm jack (1/8 inch in the US), is the oldest connector used in modern technology. Actually, I discovered the 6.35mm (1/4 inch) jack, the one style used on most musical professional headset and cabling, dates from 1878… Yes, it’s not a typo, it’s from the nineteenth century. Remember those WW2 movies where you see those telephone operators plugging in cables on wooden panels, well those were 6.35mm jacks…

    Any phone, MP3 player or even laptop today has a 3.5mm jack socket… and once again, Apple may (will? This is only rumors for the moment) lead the way in ditching the 3.5mm jack for a modern connector, like the Lightning port. Of course, abandoning the 3.5mm socket will alienate users of current headsets, some having invested in expensive noise reduction ones for instance. But it will open the way to new benefits: waterproofing the phone, as it’s almost impossible to waterproof a jack socket, or high resolution audio to go beyond the CD sampling rate we are used to today.

    Apple has always created markets with bold moves. I can say that since Steve Jobs passed away, there has not been that bold move we used to see, this could be it! Yes, it’s just a plug, but ditching a 100-year old plug that is THE norm of an entire industry is bold!

    Update! I just discover a petition against the abandon of the jack. The main argument is the following: « Not only will this force iPhone users to dole out additional cash to replace their hi-fi headphones, it will singlehandedly create mountains of electronic waste — that likely won’t get recycled. » Well… nobody forces a current iPhone user to change iPhone and therefore to ditch headphones. Furthermore, for a couple of additional bucks, you can find a lighting to jack adapter which will increase the life of your headphones if you want to keep them. So yes, planned obsolescence is definitely wrong, but innovation requires choice and change. So instead of asking to come back to past technology, let’s see how we can adapt and make technology more relevant.

  • May be I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one

    Dear Reader,

    Four days ago, I was writing about who I am. Of course if you’ve found my blog, found it interesting, came back and, even follow it, then I tend to think we are digital friends and we may be friends in the physical world (actually, I know some of my physical friends are there sometimes, and I like that). Based on a couple of comments over the last days, allow me to explain the title and the URL of this blog. A picture is worth a thousand word they say:

    There are a couple of things to this picture. For those of you who were not born in 1975, it’s the fourth album of Supertramp, one of the iconic rock band of the seventies and early eighties that released hits like Dreamer, Breakfast in America, and It’s Raining Again. Think that in 1975, the year of the release of this album, the world was in the middle of the « oil crisis » with oil prices going to the roof and recession all over the place (sounds a bell no?), and just one year after resignation of president Nixon following the Watergate scandal.

    Now in the middle of these crisis, of the increasing industrial footprint (40 years before the COP 21), sits this guy, relaxing on his lounge chair, getting tanned. Some can see a selfish dude not caring about what’s happening around him, I see hope. And this is the meaning of the title of the album, Crisis? What Crisis? that I chose for this blog (I chose it before realizing it was the title of the Supertramp album, read it here). To me this means that yes, there’s a crisis outside, there are many crisis actually, financial, moral, etc. But since the beginning of mankind, crisis have been ongoing. In other words, there’s always a crisis somewhere. However, we all have the power to act positively against those crisis, to switch off the TV to avoid being bombarded by desperation, and to get happy with the little things in life.

    Finally, in this album you’ll find what I consider not only the best song of Supertramp but one of the best songs of all. A video if worth ten thousand words.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlmoOnZS8xI

    I had the chance last summer to see Roger Hodgson live in Carcassonne, A Soapbox Opera Fool’s Overture (See the correction footnote below) live was the best moment of the show.

    Supertramp may not be your kind of music and I understand this, I can say I love almost all kind of music because I believe in diversity and because music speaks to the soul. But beyond Supertramp, I truly believe in three things:

    1. Our happiness is between our hands. It’s a choice!
    2. The world is the best world right now. You have to live now, not in the past that is gone, not in the future that had not yet happened.
    3. The future is bright. Stop listening to the negative noise of many people, starting with TV. You make your future!

    Dear friend, if like me you want to look at the positive side of things and are constantly looking for ways to enhance your days, then I hope you’ll find ideas and posts that will make your day and contribute to your happiness.

    Crisis? What Crisis?

     

    Correction… I f***d up my mind… A Soapbox Opera is great but I mixed it up with Fool’s Overture, from the album Even in the quietest moments… And by checking my phone, I just realized that I videoed it during the concert in Carcassonne but ran short of memory on my phone. damn it! Anyway, here’s a wonderful version:

    For those who have been knowing me for a while, this was one of the pieces I was playing on my piano (when I played, a long, long time ago). and this is the one I put against Bohemian Rhapsody, not A Soapbox Opera… And this gives me an idea of writing about those two symphonic pieces of rock in a future post.

  • My life, my love, my work

    Happy New Year 2016! To get a new fresh start for this blog, I’m participating in the Blogging 101 of the WordPress Blogging University. As such, during the whole month of January, I’ll have tasks to do to improve the blogging experience, learn new stuffs and increase relevance of this blog to you, my readers. So here’s the result of Day One: Introduce Yourself to the World.

    I am Marc, a Geek at heart, as I introduced my about.me page. I am of this generation that knew the world before Internet, who embraced Internet with sheer delight, and is now moving to prudent usage. I have six passions in life: my family, technology, leadership, productivity, public speaking, and watersports. I have a seventh that has been set aside for the time being which is flying, as I am a licensed wing glider pilot, but cannot, yet, find enough time to fulfill this passion.

    My passion for technology led me to found my own IT company in the 90’s in Paris before selling them in the 2000’s and joining Microsoft in the sunny island of Mauritius. One year leading to another, I am now the Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft in Africa.

    Leadership, productivity and overall personal excellence are dear to my heart, as I believe that with the same 24 hours everyone has, a few uses those to create something bigger than themselves and this require all three.

    Public speaking is an old passion of mine that started in high school with theater and continued all along my professional life as an IT instructor, launch event speaker until my TEDx talk and my national winning speeches at Toastmasters convention.

    Finally, I am an avid fan of watersports like windsurfing, kitesurfing, wakeboarding, scuba diving, waterskiing, catamaran sailing, to name a few.

    So what about blogging? Well blogging is first writing, And writing I did: published 18 books in the 90’s (you can still find some on Amazon, although they are totally outdated), did one eBook and lots of articles in the press and on this blog, for one simple reason: I love writing. Like theater, it started a while back by participating to short stories contests (which I did not win any), then writing my first book in French on IT Training. I did it all by myself using Word for MS-DOS. Yes, I know, may people do not have a clue what DOS is.

    So what’s this blog about? I started it after the subprime crisis, because, although a lot of people were negatively impacted by the crisis, it ended up by becoming hysterical in France and across the world, increasing the gloomy future outlook. I named it Crisis, what crisis? because I felt the crisis, although real for the people who lost money everywhere in the world, because of the « global economy » or their properties in the US mainly, the crisis was created or at least kept up by the media, and people were frozen and felt gloomy, just because of the situation painted by media houses. It was recently I realized this was the title of a famous album by Supertramp, one of my favorite bands.

    So my purpose with that blog was to create a kind of a platform to show people that their future was between their hands and not of somebody else. Then I used it as a digital platform to my leadership articles published weekly in Le Matinal, until my collaboration with the newspaper stopped and I started the one day, one idea motion that led me to publish one article every day for a full year. Then last year was a struggle to keep the pace and the faith. So now, Blogging 101 provides the opportunity to give my blog a new start. Where it will go, I do not know but future and you will tell!