I just came back from a very inspiring District 59 Toastmasters Conference where I have attended several workshops. My favorite was by Conor Neill and I would like to share some take ways I got from it.

Conor Neill is a professor in the Department of Managing People in Organizations at IESE Business School. An entrepreneur who has founded four companies, he is the former Area Director of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO). He maintains the blog, “The Rhetorical Journey” at www.conorneill.com

The Workshop topic was: The Magnet and The Hammer: The twin Pillars of Executive Leadership

He used several case studies of prominent leaders over the past 50 years to explore the keys of developing your leadership during turbulent times.

1. The first example he used is by Warren Buffett’s criteria for selecting the people to invest in (and therefore who will most likely achieve financial success in life):

Number 2 is Energy (yes, I got it!) – people with high energy have more power to do more things
Number 3 is Intelligence – (yes, I got it!) – and by that he means not just IQ, but the ability to respond to changes in life and making any corrections to the course (learning from your mistakes and implementing positive changes)
And Number 1, which is the most important and without which the other two do not make any sense, is … Integrity! I was surprise to hear that. By integrity he means having discipline and a system to follow up on the goals you are setting in life. How great! This is exactly the area I am working on at the moment.
Now look at the whole package – do you have all you need to achieve financial success? If not – you have some ideas that you can work on.

2. The next example I found to be very useful, it was an example of Jim Collins who apparently had 3 stopwatches in his pocket all the time to monitor the time he is spending on 3 of the most important projects he was working on, for example: teaching, writing, and white space thinking.
I once had a concept to track the time I was spending on different types of activities at the office, and there are some great iPhone apps out there to time project activities, but I stopped it which was a shame. I should try it again as it can really open your eyes on how you can plan your day and I should definitely dedicate more time to white time thinking which is currently not in my priorities.

3. The last piece of advice I got from Connor Neill is to spend 5 min EVERY DAY writing. He mentioned that he had a teacher when he was 14, who asked the class at the end of every lesson to spend 5 min writing. It doesn’t matter what, the task is just that a pen should touch the paper for 5 min. I do like to write some things down, but every day? I think it’s a great system and I will try to do that from now on. Starting today!

At the end of the presentation I asked Conor to give one piece of advice to speakers at a conference. What is the most important when you prepare your presentations?
This is what he said: