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Your present moment – this moment – the one you are in right now – is the intersection between your past and your future. If you let them, your time choices come alive in this moment.

At once profound and mysterious, your present moment is a place of stillness. As you allow yourself to settle in and fully experience the stillness, your moment reveals itself as both an opening and a turning point.

Always, your present moment offers you the potential for deep insight and transformation. But the paradox is that it doesn’t work to aggressively mine your moments for meaning.

No, it’s with openness and stillness that you need to start. I’m not talking about developing a time management skill or implementing a productivity tool but rather about letting yourself experience an encounter.

That is where you need to start, to truly live the power of your present moment. As Marianne Williamson has written:

The present moment, if you think about it, is the only time there is. No matter what time it is, it is always now.

The past is gone and the future has not yet arrived. You are alone with yourself and a wealth of powerful choices as you pause and let yourself just BE in the present moment.

Last week I wrote about living mindfully in your present moment, and one of the things I noted is that:

Living in your moments, breathing in what they have to offer, you get to know yourself. Your wants, needs, and interests are constantly evolving, and they emerge from your moments if you let them.

I’d like to continue and build on that idea today by picking up on an article from zenhabits titled Savor Discipline: Merge the Interests of Your Future & Present Selves. Here Leo Babauta explores the challenge that being disciplined presents us with in our moments. What do we do – how do we choose – when, essentially, our present and future interests aren’t in sync?

The first thing that he does – and I love this – is to frame this as a relational issue. We have our present and our future self in dialogue about whatever choice we’re wrestling with.

Next, he removes the self-critical component that so often trips us up and keeps us stuck by suggesting that we treat this conversation as an exchange between two friends.

Imagine you were going to lunch with your friend, and you had to decide where to eat. You each have different preferences. Choosing one over the other – going to Japanese food (your friend’s preference) instead vegan Mexican (yours) – isn’t fair. So maybe you pick a third choice that you both like (a place that serves sushi burritos, perhaps). Or maybe you choose this time, and your friend chooses the next time. Either way, both are happy.

You pause, in your present moment, and your present and future self work out a compromise. As soon as you pause, you are introducing an element of mindfulness. This, in and of itself is transformative, no matter what you decide.

And of the options available, Savor Discipline is a path that opens new doors that your present and future self hadn’t even known existed. I’ll explore this exciting option further in my next post, so stay tuned.

And in the meantime, here’s to your time success!

While the exact content or tone of public speeches may vary, many of the top communication skills and techniques are the same.

Students that take courses in public speaking tend to learn the following ten tips and techniques, to help improve their confidence and delivery.

1. Practice your speech in front of an audience. Before the big day, it can be helpful to practice your speaking and presentation skills in front of friends or family members for support and feedback.

2. Test your audio and visual equipment ahead of time. A common reason why presentations can go wrong is with faulty equipment. This will help you focus solely on your speech, without worrying about the visual aids.

3. Make your speech fun for the audience. Presentation skills courses will help you to try to connect with the audience, using humor when necessary or relaying facts that are relevant to their lives. This will help keep them interested in your message.

4. Focus on a strong opener. Courses in public speaking will help you learn how to begin your speech with a way to capture your audience’s attention. A startling fact, a personal story, or amusing anecdotes are all good ways to achieve this.

5. Practice your delivery. A good speaking skill is the ability to deliver your speech with a confident, yet conversational tone. You don’t want to sound like you are preaching to your audience.

6. Don’t forget about body language. Well-placed gestures can draw the audience into your message and help emphasize a point.

7. Slow down. A major factor that you will notice through your courses in public speaking is the tendency for amateur speakers to rush their speech, usually due to nervousness.

8. Don’t apologize to your audience. If you make a mistake, just keep speaking. Chances are that no one will even have noticed your flub, and if they do, it will make you appear more confident if you keep going.

9. Anticipate your audience. Any information that you can gather ahead of time on your audience will help you tailor your speech to their needs.

10. Videotape or record your presentation. It’s remarkable how much you can learn from courses in public speaking and when watching your own speech later. This will help you make adjustments if you are speaking too fast, using pauses inappropriately, or making other mistakes that you might not be aware of at the time.

The best courses in public speaking allow students to work at their own pace. This is why speaking courses that are downloadable can be so helpful, as they often include speaking tips and techniques available from public speaking experts.

When you add narration to a presentation, especially with slide timings, you create a self-running presentation. It’s almost a video-like effect. Such a presentation is great for sending to potential customers on a CD, posting on your website or a presentation-sharing site, or displaying at a trade show or in your company’s lobby.

Usually, I prefer to record my voice using Audacity, a free sound recorder and editor.  If you download it, be sure to also read the instructions for, and download, the LAME MP3 encoder, which lets you save files in MP3 format. The advantage is that it’s easier to edit the files, in case you tend to trip over your own tongue, as I do!

However, recently I wanted to post a presentation with narration at authorSTREAM.com. This slide sharing site has some nice benefits:

    * You can upload presentations with embedded sound

    * It plays many animations

    * You can convert presentations of under 5 minutes to video for free, to post at video-sharing sites (like YouTube) or on your own site.

But the sound must be embedded, which means using the narration feature (or doing a trick with MP3′s to make PowerPoint think they’re WAV files-because PowerPoint can only embed WAV files).

** Get the best quality sound

So I tried the narration feature and discovered that the quality was awful! There was a huge amount of noise in the background. When I tried used the same equipment in Audacity, the sound was just fine. That’s when I discovered the first secret: CD quality.

To start narration, you go to the Slide Show tab and click Record Narration (in 2002/2003 choose Slide Show> Record Narration).  Click the Set Microphone Level button to set and test your audio setup.

Then be sure to click the Change Quality button! You need to do this every single time; you can’t change the default.

Change the quality when you narrate

Then, in the Sound Selection dialog box, choose CD Quality from the Name drop-down list, and click OK twice to start narrating.

Use CD Quality for your narration

You then go into Slide Show view automatically. Narrate the presentation, clicking to move from slide to slide. At the end, you’ll be asked if you want to save the slide timings. Do so to set the timings for each slide to match the narration.

** Edit narration successfully

If you make a mistake, you can re-narrate a slide. Go to the slide, re-open the Record Narration dialog box and start again. Record the narration for that slide and then press Esc. Be careful not to go to the next slide.

However, if your new narration is longer than the original, you may run into a recognized problem-truncated narrations! This can be very frustrating. It apparently happens because PowerPoint saves narration timings separately from slide timings. Even if you increase the timing for the slide, PowerPoint will truncate the narration!

I’m going to tell you what Microsoft says to do and then tell you what worked for me.

Microsoft’s instructions are:

1. Make sure that all animations are set to advance on mouse click and not automatically.

2. If the last item to be animated on the slide is a text frame of an AutoShape that contains text, create one new shape and place it outside of the slide’s area. Set the shape’s Custom Animation setting to Appear. Make sure that the shape is the last item to animate and that it is set to animated on a mouse click.

3. Make sure that any slide transitions are set to advance on a mouse click and not automatically.

4. Re-record the narration and click No when asked if youwant to save the slide timings.

5. Preview the presentation in Slide Show view manually and check the narrations.

6. Then add the automatic slide and animation timings.

No matter what I did, my new narration was cut off. I made it shorter than the original and still the same amount was cut off. Finally, I realized that that the problem wasn’t the length. PowerPoint was cutting off a certain amount no matter what the length. So, I recorded a silent period at the end  of a narration. Then, when PowerPoint cut it off, I was fine!