The Elite Blog

Preparations for Visitors' Day.

10 February 2010

By Paul White

Positivity was the prevailing perfume wafting over the group this morning. Everyone was very upbeat and looking forward to the fragrant nosegay of the opportunities ahead.
A person with an excellent nose for business is Elizabeth Hicks of Irwin Mitchell Solicitors, whose pens are fantastic at stirring one's coffee, should the Hotel fail to put out any spoons. The Park Inn Hotel even obliged with the provision of individually-sized Nutella portions, to the delight of Sarah, Mads, Adrian and me. That reminds me of a comedian, who went down to breakfast, while away from home, saw the tiny container of honey and said to the Waitress: "I see that you keep a bee."
I must admit to being naughty this morning and setting up Adrian Nettleship, our Photographer, for a 60s Pop Song-themed 60 second pitch, by telling Sarah Lloyd-Hughes, that that decade was his favourite for music.
It is absolute baloney that you need to have been alive during the 60s to appreciate its music. I'm partial to a bit of Mozart myself and he died in 1791! He lives on through his music, so all you have to do is be alive at any time since that year and listen to it. Parents may be interested in learning more about the "Mozart Effect", where listening to K448 resulted in a "short-term improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as "spatial-temporal reasoning" http://bit.ly/TSBwz
Mads Nybo Jorgensen of Mac Million Ltd Video Producers also fell into this trap, by exempting himself from the task with the excuse that he was born in 1970. Pish and Piffle! Richard Loren: experience. Anyone with ears: knowledge.
Roving Professional Kiwi, Darryl Buchanan, dropped in to our meeting to keep up-to-date with the progress of the Chapter. My referrals section invitation to comment on the Blog with anything you like, such as "What Rubbish!" was marked down by Darryl as diminishing my own Credibility. What I was doing there was using the time-honoured rhetorical device of "Praecipitio", where the Speaker humbles themselves before the audience. Elizabeth I's address at Tilbury was a case in point; "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman", pre-empted all the cynics present, who are muttering "Well, you're not going to be doing any of the fighting", before countering that with the uplifting "but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm". That told them!
He who who blogs last, laughs loudest. The pun is mightier than the sword.
From the "Six and the City" event of last night (BNI Lite), I spoke to Nicola Dexter, a Hypnotherapist. I related my visit to Mike Blissett, NLP Practitioner, where he put me under hypnosis and spoke directly to my subconscious with a tale of a path "less travelled by" to a glade with a pool. My conscious mind was saying to me, "that's Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken", isn't it?", proving that you are still aware of your environment, even under hypnosis. Mike told me that I was very suggestible after a couple of exercises, which raises the paradox of what happens if you suggest to a suggestible person that they are not suggestible?
Mike came to our meeting of a couple of weeks ago, stating that most of us have about nine different voices competing for dominance in our heads. On the basis that I only have eight voices, too often they fail to achieve a Working Majority, resulting in a Hung Mind. Nicola introduced me to the idea of "parts integration", where these disparate, often contradictory, voices all start to sing the same tune.
That leads me on to Benedict Pippet of Arbor Contracts Ltd, our "Singing Builder", who read out a list of people he wanted to see after Class, sorry, after the meeting.
Best news of the morning from Lisa Kent, Personal Trainer, was that we already have a lovely six-pack of abs. They are just obscured by the flab, that's all.
The meeting ended with the sweet smell of success, with a "Downtown, Top Ranking" of number five in the London area being proclaimed. Darryl explained the need for the Chapter to grow to thirty members. Mathematically, a Chapter of 20 has 190 pairs of relationship, (x^2-x)/2, whereas a 30-strong Chapter has 435. The Chapter that catches on to the Maths, collects the cash.
Vivat, Crescat, Floreat!

Permalink: http://www.bni-elite.co.uk/BNIBlog10thFeb2010 (copy'n'paste)

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