Today is Go Red for Women Day. Share with a woman you love how she can protect against heart attack and stroke. Love your hearts, ladies. Learn the signs of heart attack and stroke, and react quickly if you ever observe them.

Women are notorious for not taking care of themselves first. Heart attack and stroke are dramatically under-diagnosed in women, so badly that survival rates for women are worse (I will find a stat later, but wanted to get this post up fast). UPDATE: Some links below.

• Spain, 1998, women 70% more likely to die of their first heart attack.
• heart disease is THE leading killer of women
• 65% of women who die of heart attack had NO prior symptoms

You are better off, every time, to seek medical attention and have it turn out nothing was wrong. Too many women ignore their symptoms and risk factors until it’s too late.

Know the risk factors, but don’t be lulled into a false sense of security. I had no risk factors or warning signs prior to my stroke, and I ignored the (fortunately subtle) symptoms for hours. I got very lucky.

Women, love your hearts. Please.

UPDATE: @heizusan in line with that you can point people to www.americanheart.org - it’s a good site about heart health & awareness.

Hurrah — scientific evidence that reading your slides makes the audience less likely to understand you. They’ll remember you, perhaps, but not in the way you want them too! More on Professor John Sweller’s work to come…

3 Vs Disease, or, poor ol’ Albert Mehrabian

Anyone ever try to tell you what you actually say only supplies 7% of your credibility? Please tell me somewhere inside your skull someone jumped up and yelled “bullsh*t” when you heard that.

Mehrabian broke communications down into what we popularly call “3 Vs”: Verbal, Vocal & Visual. His research assigned 7% importance to the verbal (what you say), 38% to the Vocal (tone, or how you say it) and 55% to the Visual (facial expression, body language).

The research pertains ONLY to communication of emotions (feelings and attitudes) and situations where you are projecting “mixed messages” (face of misery, words of glee). In his words:

Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.

I still talk about the 3Vs, explained properly, for two reasons:

• It’s valuable to break communication into the Verbal, Vocal & Visual to show why communication breaks down when limited to just two (telephone) or less (email) of these 3 contributing factors. Even if the recipient won’t know it, you can use the missing one/s to help a little. Try standing up and smiling on your next important call to see what I mean.
• You often need to use emotional credibility for certain aspects of your presentation to work. If you are blase about the project and you shouldn’t be, you have a problem.

UPDATE: Another good explanation of this.

3 Vs Disease, or, poor ol’ Albert Mehrabian

Anyone ever try to tell you what you actually say only supplies 7% of your credibility? Please tell me somewhere inside your skull someone jumped up and yelled “bullsh*t” when you heard that.

Mehrabian broke communications down into what we popularly call “3 Vs”: Verbal, Vocal & Visual. His research assigned 7% importance to the verbal (what you say), 38% to the Vocal (tone, or how you say it) and 55% to the Visual (facial expression, body language).

The research pertains ONLY to communication of emotions (feelings and attitudes) and situations where you are projecting “mixed messages” (face of misery, words of glee). In his words:

Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.

I still talk about the 3Vs, explained properly, for two reasons:

• It’s valuable to break communication into the Verbal, Vocal & Visual to show why communication breaks down when limited to just two (telephone) or less (email) of these 3 contributing factors. Even if the recipient won’t know it, you can use the missing one/s to help a little. Try standing up and smiling on your next important call to see what I mean.
• You often need to use emotional credibility for certain aspects of your presentation to work. If you are blase about the project and you shouldn’t be, you have a problem.