World Domination Summit - Sunday Recap

This is my recap of the second day of the World Domination Summit that I attended earlier this month in Portland. My day one recap can be found here. Here some of my “takeaways” from Day 2.

Chris welcomes us to Day 2

Our first speaker was to be Neil Pasricha, however, due to a last minute illness, he was unable to attend. Neil is the founder of the blog 1000 Awesome Things. If you need a little light and joy, I recommend checking out the 15-minute talk he did for TED. You really get a sense of how he came to his project. My take away from Neils' TED talk was all about the Three A's of Awesome:

• Attitude
• Awareness - see the world through the eyes of a child ... like it's your first time seeing everything
• Authenticity - be authentic and real

And the final message: You will never be as young as you are right now.

Next up was the powerful duo behind Mondo Beyondo, Andrea Scher and Jen Lemen. These two rocked their presentation. It was all about dreaming big and taking your life list (and life) to the next level. Key things in order to make your big dreams real:

• Trust
• Courage
• Vulnerability
• Intuition
• Flexibility/Openness

One of the activities we had to do was to write a word on our body that we wanted to carry with us for the day. We arrived at the word through some storytelling activities with the people we were sitting next to. My word was genuine. I wrote it on my hand and looked at it throughout the day. For me, a reminder to be genuine means being open and sincere in my interactions with others. No false fronts, just real Sophia.

I was so impressed by their talk, I am signing up for their Mondo Beyondo on-line course which is starting early July. I am looking forward to keeping the energy and inspiration going. Want to join me?

The Mondo Beyondo Team, Jen and Andrea

John T. Unger, amazing fire bowl artist, was our speaker after lunch. My biggest take away from him was to clearly distinguish what is an emergency and what is just a problem. It is way to easy to elevate issues, which are really just little problems, into full-on emergency mode. It was not until I was working outside of an office setting that I realized how much of the work day was filled with a "fire drill" mentality.

John T. Unger

After John's talk, I sat in the break-out session with Michael Bungay-Stanier from Box of Crayons. His whole thing is Do Less Good Work and Do More Great Work. I learned the best acronym ever ... it's WOMBATS. These are thing in your life that are a Waste Of Money, Bandwidth And Time. Where are the WOMBATS in your life and how can you ditch them in order to make room for the great work?

The final speaker was Jonathan Fields. I've got pages of notes from Jonathan's talk, as many things resonated with me. The message that I got from his talk was about risk taking. People, generally, want to go for the safe option. Perhaps it's an evolutionary thing, better to go the safe route than try something risky, but potentially more rewarding. Also, we don't want to be wrong and we don't want to be judged. So, how do you harness those butterflied and "go for it"?

• Create  the right internal environment - find a network of judgement-free people based in non-competition.
• Create work flow practices - are there certain aspects of your work day you can ritualize? This helps you maintain focus and productivity.
• Create personal practices - e.g., meditation, mindfullness attention training

Jonathan Fields

In closing, it is still hard to describe the feeling I walked away with after the weekend. It's very inspiring to be around people who have consciously shaped the life they want or are close to being there. Creating my recap blog posts will remind me of the key points and to keep working towards the correct balance in my own life.

I have some projects in the works that I am excited about, and the enthusiasm from the World Domination Summit will be important in carrying me trough the potential times of self doubt.

 Note: All photos credits are to Armosa StudioFlickr page for heaps more photos from the talented team at Armosa. They really captured the feeling of the event!