Are You Ready to Mingle & Make An Impression This Holiday Season?
The holiday season is upon us and for many that means more events, parties, and socializing with relatives, friends, and co-workers. While most of us just think about the fun and good times these moments bring, the savvier among us realize that this time of the year can either be ripe with opportunities to successfully connect with others or be a landmine of awkward, tense, or potentially-damaging interactions and conversations.
So how does one prepare to handle a nosy relative or rude co-worker at this year’s holiday dinners and gatherings?
How do you set limits with others on what you find acceptable topics of conversation or behavior during this festive season while maintaining a sense of composure and professionalism?
How do you keep yourself from ruining relationships with friends, family and co-workers as the music plays, drinks flow, and inhibitions decline?
If you ask Kevin McCarney, a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, restaurant chain owner, and author of THE SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL COMMUNICATION, it’s all about learning to control our impulses, words, and messaging in order to create positive results for ourselves.
McCarney introduces the Big Brain vs. Little Brain® concept: Use your Big Brain to win the moment, improve your relationships and get the life you deserve, while preventing your Little Brain from getting you into trouble, creating problems at work, damaging your relationships and limiting your success.
In an interview, McCarney reveals the 21 Big Brain Tools to use and 21 Little Brain Traps to avoid in every conversation. He also shows how living a Big Brain life can:
• Help us say the right thing at the right time every time and, just as importantly, how not to say the wrong thing at the wrong time.
• Alert us to the situations and people that activate our Little Brains and help us avert a communication disaster.
• How to create “good gossip” about coworkers or family members that
create positive repercussions for us in the future
Think about it! How we choose to respond (Big Brain) or react (Little Brain) has an immediate impact on us as well as a residual impact. We will be living with our choices long after we make them. McCarney explains that if we are aware of the outcome we want from a situation, it’s easy to make the right choices in how we respond.
His book is chock-filled with dozens of simple yet profound insights and superb illustrations that make his ideas easy to understand and apply. Here’s a sample:
* You are always creating moments. Every day brings dozens of opportunities to create moments that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. The choice is yours as to what kind of moment you want to create.
* The biggest influence on choosing between your Little Brain and your Big Brain isn’t always something external. It’s often you yourself.
Trust is the single most important element in any relationship. Every conversation, every encounter is an opportunity to gain trust with those around us or undermine their trust in us.
* Every encounter is an opportunity to make a good choice. A positive encounter sets the stage for positive, Big Brain–driven, successful moments and legacies.
Every conversation has opportunities to create memorable moments. Just by being present and attentive in the conversation, you’ll learn to recognize whose moment it is—and be able to make the most of it for everyone.
THE SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL COMMUNICATION is a powerful toolbox filled with valuable ways to help people have effective encounters in business and in their personal lives this holiday season.
Kevin McCarney is available for in-studio television interviews throughout California, Portland, and Seattle, as well as radio interviews by phone throughout the holiday season. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
For more information visit www.BigBrain.com
About the Author
Kevin McCarney is the founder of the Poquito Más® restaurant chain, which opened in 1984 and currently has twelve locations serving over four thousand customers every day in the Los Angeles area. Based in Burbank, California, the restaurants specialize in fresh Mexican food. Because each restaurant produces over nine hundred tortillas a day, Kevin invented an aluminum tortilla press, a machine on which he holds multiple patents.
Kevin has been a guest speaker at the USC Marshall School of Business, the UCLA Anderson School of Business, and Woodbury University. He has served on the board of directors of the California State Compensation Insurance Fund, the California Restaurant Association, the Burbank Arts in Education Foundation, the Boys and Girls Club of Burbank, and the Universal City-North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
He grew up in Hollywood, California, where he worked as a janitor, a switchboard operator, a waiter, a manager, a trainer, a doorman at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and a tour guide at Universal Studios.
He currently lives in Burbank, California, with his wife and children.
