You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘communications’ category.
I’m truly thrilled to announce that I’ve been invited to speak at the TEDx event in Stamford on Saturday, April 28. There are only 100 tickets available for this worthy program. Here’s a link for tickets which will go on sale this coming Monday. If you’ve ever watched a TED video, you know what an honor it is to be asked to deliver a talk through this organization.

I use mailchimp.com for my online marketing campaigns. I used to use Constant Contact, but on the advice of my virtual assistant, mailchimp has more capabilities, so I switched. I was looking around on it today at some recent activity and saw this message along with a list of people who had unsubscribed:
Nuts, you had a few people jump ship. Ah, who needs them anyway?
They’re encouraging when new people sign up for my information:
Nice! Guess people like what you’re saying.
I know it’s an inanimate object, but positive reinforcement helps, whatever the source.
I rely heavily on Scarlett De Bease of Scarlett New York for advice on my wardrobe. She’s created a look-book for me, which means that every time I need to go out in public and look presentable, I have a photographic album of outfits Scarlett has assembled for me to choose from. My bodily flaws are camouflaged by the shapes and accessories she helps me purchase and coordinate.
Naturally, any magazine would want to feature Scarlett’s expertise, not to mention her great good looks. In fact, she was recently contacted by O Magazine (Oprah’s rag for those of you who may not recognize it by name), to be in a makeover shoot for an upcoming issue. Scarlett had emailed me that she had a noteworthy interaction that might be of interest to the women I serve. Here’s the email invitation she received inviting her to be photographed for a spread on fashion makeovers:
Our team of fashion experts are here to help! Tell us about your “problem area” (not limited to the ones listed above [sic arms belly, neck, bust] and we’ll teach you how to dress in a way that will make you (and everyone else) forget all about it!
To which Scarlett replied (thank you, Scarlett, for letting me share your response verbatim for interested readers):
Thank you so much for contacting me, and I am so sorry to say that as much as I REALLY want to be in the magazine, I cannot participate in this feature as it is my specialty to show my clients how to solve the very same issue your feature is all about and it would discredit my work if I were a model for this particular story.
I know you are working hard tonight and I am truly sorry I cannot be a part of tomorrow’s casting. I do hope you will continue to keep me in your files for future features as, naturally, I would be delighted to be included.
Scarlett was relieved and pleased to receive an acknowledgment (often producers do not respond at all) saying “I totally understand” with a winking emoticon after the sentence.
I always love to hear, see or read what goes on behind the curtain. Thanks to Scarlett for sharing this story with all of us.

Getting specific around numbers is an awareness that continues to grow within me.
I still remember my 10th grade math teacher, Miss Stone, who always referred to things that happened “a hundred years ago.” Invariably, it meant something from two decades prior–or before us high-schoolers’ brief lives even existed. Now, hundreds of years later, I find myself using that phrase every ten seconds. Since the rise of the Internet and all it has brought with it, anything 20th Century does feel like eons ago.
It’s got me thinking about how and why we over-estimate numerical values. I rarely say I have 38 emails in my inbox. It’s “I’ve got a thousand emails.” Or, I won’t get specific and say I have to return 6 phone calls. No, it’s “I have to make a ton of calls.”
I was thinking of this today as time becomes more and more precious. I’ve gotten hundreds of new clients since the second or third week of September. Four, to be exact.
What is the correlation–for you–between what you say out loud and the truth?
Is it to make us feel more important? To pump up the numbers to foster our sense of significance? How much more trustworthy is the person who names the actual amount without exaggeration? There’s a ring of truth when it’s spoken, and that’s what I want to hear, no matter how low it goes.
Do you ever inflate your numbers, and if so, for what reason?













