At The Ego Café

It’s 6:20am on Tuesday morning and I’ve been at the Ego Café since 5:30am completing a review of the day ahead for my client calls at 7am, 8:15am, 10am and 10:45am. In between, I’ll have a call with Peter Lantos of The Elite Advisor. Laura and I will have lunch and then it’s back to Pro-Seminars to deliver 7 Actions To Take Now To Meet And Exceed Your Goals For 2007 & 2008 at 1:15pm.

In yesterday’s speaking presentation, because of being pressured for time, I didn’t publicly thank Tom Miller and Alex Nicholson of Pro-Seminars for the commitment and the investment of time that it must take to produce a yearly out of country event for nearly 400 Canadian financial advisors. On behalf of all of yesterday’s speakers, I empathize on how they must be feeling about the AV company’s poor performance.

Yes, yesterday was a tough pill to swallow with none of the lapel microphones working ( the AV company tried 3 ), forcing me back to the podium in the first five minutes of my presentation because the microphones were crapping and cutting out.

I am NOT a podium speaker and because of the complexity of the material that I deliver, I need to connect with the audience level moving through the audience. No matter how great the speaker is, they will go to sleep, back into the trance that they are in.

To give you an idea, here is a picture of me half way into the audience so you can see how deep the room is.

That is me stuck on the podium hyper-delivering my 50 minutes of material in about half the time allotted. In essence I want to connect with the audience and it is near impossible for me to connect stuck behind a podium. To make it more challenging, I could not see the power point slides on the computer screen in front of me because of technical difficulties so I was delivering right from the hip and referencing my power point on the big screen over my shoulder when I needed it.

Why didn’t I just run over the time? It is really simple. The audience has it drilled into their mind that 1:10pm is lunch and they simply just start walking our whether you are finished or not. That is what started to happen and a number of the audience in the back or the room walked out early.

There is some irony in the following e-mail message that I client sent on Monday morning;

You are in the perfect place at the perfect time. Wow! Your message in Las Vegas…….what a venue.

If New Orleans was the brothel of the south, Vegas is the brothel of the west. It is perfection for your story.

Some of your audience will be hung-over, over-gambled, smoked-out, or just peopled-out.

If ever there was a place to bring “something so much more” to the unconscious, this is it.

Bless you as you speak and minister to the sleepy hoard.

A member of the audience came up to me right after the presentation and said; “That was a great presentation and please forgive the ignorance of the members of the audience that could not give you the courtesy to stay for the few extra minutes respecting the fact that you started late and were experiencing equipment problems” .

Many thanks to you kind sir. These thoughts were echoed by a gentleman and his wife that stopped by to speak with Laura and I that evening at The California Pizza Kitchen at The Mirage in advance of Beatle’s Love Show by Cirque Du Soleil.

The Beatle’s Love Show by Cirque Du Soleil was just fabulous and tingles come back to me as I am writing this and I would go and see it again in a heart beat. Laura and I had the absolute best seats in the place.

Wow! Speaking of the Beatles, it has been a Magical Mystery Tour this trip. First with yesterday’s speaking and then with being woken up by the guest in the next room to ours at 3:30am this morning. It’s Las Vegas and one should expect crashing and banning, loud voices, the shower running and bang of their door 20 minutes later to go back to the casinos.

When there is understanding, their can be forgiveness. When there is no understanding, their can only be judgment. When there is judgment, there is no forgiveness or understanding.

The key here is to forgive “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away” for today is another beautiful day. It’s another of those Beatles tunes!