Well, I had a fantastic week last week, everything seemed to be going my way. When someone asked me on Saturday how I was feeling, I replied ‘Buzzing’, and that word has been going around my head ever since.
It’s great to be able to sit in my office at home with the window open listening to the sounds of what is increasingly like summer! A large bee just buzzed through the window and had to be kindly shown the way back out too!
So, let’s take a look at last week for me and see why it was so positive! Well, I received the first four chapters of my book back from Ruth, my proofreader early last week. Ruth had made a few changes but was very positive about the first part of my book and that was a huge boost to my confidence. Up until that point, no-one else had read my book, and I was on tenterhooks, waiting to see if Ruth even thought it was worth reading! I have also come up with a title for the book – it’s ‘Growing Forward’, which matches my initials and really describes what I was trying to do for the first part of my life quite well. Last week I was also asked to speak at the Young Enterprise awards ceremony for the schools in Milton Keynes. I arrived at the school where the ceremony was to take place in plenty of time and was amazed to discover that the event was taking place in a brand new school theatre – I had thought I would be speaking in a school hall!
I was miked up and had the opportunity to practice a little, then enjoyed watching the 16 school Young Enterprise teams deliver their presentations. Then it was my turn! I delivered my ‘From Borstal to Business’ speech with a few changes for a younger audience and was very pleasantly surprised to get quite a lot of audience participation and a cheer at the end. As I was walking over to my car, an hour after the event had finished, a young student came over to me and said I had inspired him. That was special, and made the trip very worthwhile for me. If I can do one thing with the rest of my life, I want to inspire people to have the very best life that they possibly can, and to achieve everything that they dream of.
On the way home from Milton Keynes I was thinking about some other ways that I could help people, and I have come up with the plan to run some goal-setting workshops for fellow business-owners and anyone interested in getting to a different place to where they currently are in life – this will be happening early next year! 2012 is going to be a very important year for many reasons and I think we need to focus on making it as great a year as possible, whatever that ‘great’ means to each of us individually.
I had a day off on Friday – I feel that it’s important to do that when you can, although the weather was so beautiful that I worked in my garden for three or four hours. Saturday was a brilliant day at the Division ‘B’ Toastmasters International Speech and Evaluation Contests in London, where I had the privilege of being Chief Judge and also attended great workshops on Motivation and Charisma!
This week my focus will be on completing some more editing work on my book, looking for more opportunities to inspire people through public speaking and working on some more ways to promote WorldHost customer service training. I’m going to have another buzzing week!
Picture courtesy of polyvore.com