Black Belt in Australia is almost here

This past week, Adrian and I have been working with Melcrum putting the finishing touches to the Black Belt Australia brochure. It’s now all confirmed:

Sydney: Thursday 1 and Friday 2 November, then Thursday 15 and Friday 18 November at Macquarie Business School

Melbourne: Monday 18 and Tuesday 19 February 2008, then Monday 17 and Tuesday 18 March at Melbourne Business School Mt Eliza

We’re both really excited about it and looking forward to forming our very own dojo of Aussie Black Belt alumni. With the backing of Melcrum’s fantastic research, our combined 30-plus years of comms experience (gulp!) and the shared learning from all the participants it’s going to be one intense experience.

From the interest we’ve seen already it looks like it may be quite an international group, with queries from as close as New Zealand and as far away as India!

My interesting experience of this week that I’d like to share with you is talking with a friend of mine who has just completed the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ training with Al Gore. My friend Nick, an environmental campaigner for many years, was selected from among thousands of applicants to be trained by Al Gore to deliver his environmental message. Nick’s classmates included Oprah’s new Aussie favourite Jamie Durie as well as many ‘normal’ every day people with a passion to protect our environment.

As well as sharing the research and facts and figures behind his messages, Al Gore had some wonderful presentation advice for his budding trainers. One of the things Nick told me about struck a chord and I thought it was pretty good advice for any type of message where your goal is to persuade others. Gore says while speaking you must meet three ‘budgets’: time, complexity and hope/opportunity.

Time: obviously if you’re booked to speak you have to start and finish on time, but you can sometimes add to this budget if you are humorous and engaging – the audience won’t mind if it’s five or ten minutes over.

Complexity: there is a limit to how much information people can absorb from one presentation.

Hope/opportunity: you have to be aware (particularly with a potentially depressing message such as climate change) about the balance between hope and despair – ultimately Gore aims to leave people with a sense of hope so they will take action. In the case of a business audience, he says it’s about opportunity rather than hope – what opportunities exist as a result of this information?

Read the thoughts of someone who blogged about the experience here.

My guest blog spot is almost over, but I will be back with one last post before the end of the month. It’s been fun!

Comments

[Sarah]

Well done on your expansion! I look forward to you introducing the Masterclasses there. I'd love to do the BB but can't aford 2 plane journeys to Oz.

[Sue]

Thanks for being our September guest blogger Melissa and have fun with all the BB preparations.

I have tried persuading Melcrum that I should fly over and sit in for the purposes of sharing best practices, networking, etc. etc., but for some reason they're not convinced!

Adrian is our guest blogger for November, so I'm looking forward to hearing how it all goes.