The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall is now accepting applications for the 2011 National High School Choir Festival. Selected High School Choirs will enjoy:

• One full day of rehearsal, on their home campus, with Norman Mackenzie
• Three days of rehearsal in New York City
• Performance at Carnegie Hall with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s under the baton of Mr. Spano

The best part is that there is no participation fee!  While groups are responsible for their own travel expenses, there is no cost for this once-in-a-lifetime performance opportunity.

If you would like to find out more about the National High School Choral Festival, please feel free to contact me at (877) 328-2583 or pconnor@directorschoice.travel.

Festival Application Download (pdf)

Festival Brochure Download (pdf)

Without a doubt, the training that we received provided us with an entirely new way for our sales team to help our customers consider and navigate through their buying decisions – providing a fantastic vehicle for us to better serve our customers. Thanks to Sharon Drew’s fantastic work, her visionary ideas, a well-thought out coaching plan and a tireless effort by our eager team, I am excited to report that we have already begun reaping measurable benefits – just a few days after being immersed into a concept that was totally foreign at the outset. I cannot wait to see how our skills will progress over the next 7+ weeks, but I feel confident that we are headed for a level of success that was previously unattainable!

In addition to the application of Buying Facilitation® as a sales concept, it became immediately apparent that this ideology could – and will – weave its way throughout our entire corporate culture. In fact, we have already applied this decision-facilitation methodology to several aspects of our business with great success. Indeed, Sharon Drew also taught us how Buying Facilitation® can be used as a leadership/decision-making tool for us to us internally (team building, executive decision making, etc.) and with our clients (customer service, negotiation, problem solving, etc).

Isn’t it great when the right team, information, and presenter collide to create excellence in a form that helps to provide students with positively-life-changing experiences!!

Unlike some other topics to which I have been recently drawn, I have been able to find much helpful material written on this subject.

One of my favorite resources for professional learning, the Harvard Business Review, has a great collection entitled Effective Communication. Contained within are a number of articles regarding the skills and goals required for effective verbal communication. Out of this collection, two articles stand out. The first is How To Run A Meeting by Antony Jay, which talks about the functions of meetings and offers advice for planning and implementing a successful meeting. The other is Listening to People where authors Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens discusses the importance listening and how each of us can work to improve our listening skills.

Additionally, I have found myself reading and rereading Robert’s Rules of Order – Simplified and Applied. While found the expected detailed explanation and examples of Parliamentary Procedure contained in this text, I also found it to offer a tremendous insight to human communication and interaction.

So now what? If you have any ideas for must-reads on this or other topics, please let me know. Otherwise, I am off to Amazon.com to find new material with the intent of satisfying my growing curiosity of verbal communication.