Dan's Weekly Blog - 17 December 2011

I have been remiss, too busy doing too many things to write! For those of you who read it and follow me I am sorry for not being as prolific as I should be! 

What is happening, well a lot!

Firstly, Family First!  My son Howard is now engaged to be married to his lovely fiance Casey! Congratulations to the both of you and I only wish you happiness. As soon as I know when the Wedding is I will let everyone know too!

Reflections, wow the year is almost over. It was a year of ups and downs, but is finishing out well. We have survived the floods, Thailand is on an upswing. I was lucky in our area there was a lot of flooding, all of it on the other side of the main road so our house and our office have stayed dry the entire time.  My heart goes out to friends, colleagues and ordinary Thai people all of whom have suffered during this crisis and were inundated with water inside their houses forcing them to evacuate and now to cleanup and rebuild.

Everyone needs to believe in the Law of Attraction and to apply it! It sure works.  Save our Planet 5 is coming on January 5, 2012 and it will be fantastic, working with my good friend S. Roy founder and chairman of Asean Affairs and Creator of Save our Planet, plus my other good friend and PR Partner, Karin Lohitnavy from Midas PR.  This will be the Green Event of 2012, in partnership with the BOI and the BMA, with great speakers and well known personalities like M.R. Sukhumbhand Paribatra, Governor of Bangkok, Former Nasa Scientist, Dr. Art-ong Jumsai na Ayudhya, MD of Sirindhorn Research Insitute and Rangsit Disaster Centre, Dr. Seree Supratid to name a few of the notable speakers at that event.

We are also working with a large US Software Company now, helping them with their large and critical accounts. Lot of fun, lot of work.

My good friends at Hines Aircraft (Chris Bracey-Gibbons and Paul Hines) are moving forward full steam, look for more news here as the project takes off.

Everyone have a great holiday season, be thankful for all that you have, be grateful and focus on the good, so you will get more of it!

5 October 2011

Can't believe how fast time flies when you are having fun! (Or working a lot)!

Lot happening here...spending my time with my good friend and business partner S. Roy who runs AseanAffairs Magazine, I handle Business Development for him and we are working hard in putting together the 5th Save our Planet Conference on the 17th of November at Muang Thong Thani in partnership with BOI and BMA. This will be the Green Event of the Year here for sure.

More details at www.aseanaffairs.com/sop5 and the full series on www.aseanaffairs.com/sop

This is a great cause, we all must do our own individual parts, if we don't no one else will that is for sure!

Back to work, just wanted to do a quick note here for all! 

Bangkok 18 September 2011

Someday I will get this blog to close to almost daily, with all that is going on sometimes it is hard to find the time to do my own thing! Demands from clients, opportunities and even the occasional go out and have a good time and then get some decent sleeps intrudes on my time to spend sharing here! 

Few things for today, one of which is something I do not normally do.  I am very close to the founders and owners of Hines Aircraft out of Toronto (operationally based there, incorporated in BVI and also have a US company as well) which has a very special opportunity for my friends and colleagues.  They are building a revolutionary new aircraft, driven by a patent-pending propulsion system that allows you to fly from Toronto to Miami and burn less gas than you would driving a car! They are in the final days before taking over an existing manufacturer which propels them significantly forward in both the new aircraft program and the existing aircraft manufacturing. There is an opportunity for regular people to invest in this, and with the takeover of the existing aircraft company the investment moves from a speculative Venture deal to a much lower level of risk. Of course any investing carries risk (look what happened to the stock market in 2008/2009) but the question comes what is the potential return.  I will send out details to anyone who is interested to learn more plus for my friends/colleagues who participate will get a bonus issuance of shares.

Training is another subject of passion to me, I love to work with people and help them. I taught a speech class here at St. John's University a year ago, not for the money but to help the students and see how they improved their public speaking skills. Covey's 7th Habit: Sharpen the Saw focuses on self-improvement. I find it hard to understand why people are not as interested in training as they should be. In this day and age you are only as good as your skills and what you can deliver, just showing up and putting in time will not lead you anywhere. So you should be focused on how to improve, training is one way that will help you immensely, reading personal development books is great too, but how do you put the ideas into practice? Working with a trainer/coach will help you wade through it all and be able to focus on what is most important. 

I did some coaching as part of a full week training class in late August, and have spent time with each of my coachee's following up. Amazing to see how they are putting their learning into practice. It is not easy, as we find out in our follow up as life happens, they are back at their offices confronted with all that they are responsible for. So working together we are getting them to implement what is important from their training to enable them to be significantly more effective.

The Planet is next on my mind, been spending a lot of time working on Save our Planet 5 Conference scheduled for 17 November at Muang Thong IMPACT Diamond Ballroom in Hall 9. Taking the message of Climate Change, Sustainable development, Air-Water-Earth (AWE-some) to the Thai people with my friend the Founder and Ceo of AseanAffairs and the guy behind Save our Planet, S. Roy. This will be a not to be missed event being held in conjunction with BOI Fair and in partnership with both BMA and BOI.

That is it for today!

27 August 2011

Another busy and enjoyable week! Did some training work with this week, coaching and role playing helping the seminar attendees to practice new leadership and coaching skills. Lot of fun, love to work with people who are engaged and actively learning. The two scenarios were on delegation skills and coaching skills, very enjoyable. Then of course on to action planning and scheduling follow up discussions to measure progress again in a few weeks.

Everyone needs to follow Covey's 7 Habits, one critical one is Sharpen the Saw, get training, work on personal development, improve your skills because in the end what you have is what you are capable of producing, not a company not a job, you have yourself and your skills. So improving your skills will always protect your ability to earn money.

Hope many of you had a chance to see some of the previews and highlights of my good friend Mark McClure's new show: Sitting on Milliions which aired on Fox Business Network and will soon be available in Thailand as well. Just go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGG4lF3Qorc to see!

That's it for today, more to come soon!

18 August 2011

1159am Bangkok Thailand

Blogging, Exercising, What is Important and Make Sure You Make the Time!

What to write about this week?  Well I have been remiss in doing my own blog! Too busy doing work for everyone else, kinda like the shoemaker's wife who doesn't have shoes for her children!

Have to practice what we preach, Blogging is critical for our online success. You have to make it a habit. The inventor of permission marketing, Seth Godin, with his many clients, businesses, etc. finds the time to send out a daily blog, so what has been my problem?  Just have to be disciplined and do it! Daily, Weekly or Monthly, create something of value for your clients, friends, subscribers.

It is not so difficult to do, just put your mind to it and write something useful. Each of us is an expert in our own areas of expertise, we read, we talk to people, there is always something useful to say, or why would our clients hire us in the first place?  Set the schedule, and get down and do it, it is a lot like exercising! We all know we need to do it, but do we make the time?  Another one for my list.  A friend sent me a funny email today, it showed the doctor talking to the executive saying:  So you don't have 1 hour a day to exercise? Would you rather have 24 hours a day to be dead?

Make the time to do what is critical to your success, to your health! A blog post takes maybe 5 minutes, we all can find 5 minutes a day or a week to do it! Same thing with exercise, 30 minutes a day, take a walk, do some sit ups or pushups, take the stairs instead of the elevator! All doable, just decide to do it!