For the Beer Drinkers Among You

If you've been following me here for long, you know I try to share any resources I find that are useful for anyone planning special events. Well here's a fun one I just came across for anyone who's planning a party for a beer drinking crowd. It's a handy online application that calculates how much beer you should purchase for a party based on the number of people and how much each of the people are likely to drink.Just in time for your holiday party planning!!!  Just click on the link below.

Just Had to Share This...

I quote Einstein a lot in my book.  I loved this one:

Holiday Entertainment Article

I just discovered that my article on How To Use Entertainment to Make Your Holiday Party a Smashing Success is currently ranking number 3 on Google for the search term "Holiday Party Entertainment".  Not bad, eh?  Of course I have been helping companies and other groups make holiday parties unforgettably fun and entertaining for over 25 years.  (OK, it's actually considerably more than that, but I'm starting to give away my age here!)  If you haven't read the article yet, it has some great tips for planning entertainment for your party.

Anyway, the holidays will be upon us all too soon, and it looks like yet another of those "hot dates" in December is about to fill up.  If you need entertainment, don't wait too long.

On the publishing front, my book, A Call to Magic: the Artful Science of Transforming Self and World, is in the final formatting for the paperback and Kindle versions, and I should have news of a release date sometime soon.  Stay tuned!

Family-Friendly Meetings

Here's something that will be of interest to my corporate and meeting planning clients.  It's an article I just found that notes a rise in popularity of "family-friendly" corporate meetings.  According to the article, many companies are seeing the benefits of holding meetings that include activities and events for employees' families.  They can be a strong factor in employee job satisfaction,company loyalty, and productivity.  Here's the article:  The Rise of the Family-Friendly Meeting.

Magical Book Update: A Call to Magic

This week I received the Foreword for my book from my friend and colleague, Dr. George Catlin.  George is a psychologist with a Ph.D. and author of (among other books) The Way to Happiness.  I'm also really excited that after reading my book George came up with a much better title for it, which I'm going to use.  The new title is:  A Call to Magic: the Artful Science of Transforming Self and World.

With the Foreword from George in place, the final formatting is getting wrapped up right now, and I'm doing the final photo shoot for the cover this weekend.

The book should be ready for purchase sometime in September!!!  Yay!

Omigosh! Look at the Time!

I know, you wouldn't think anyone would be thinking ahead to the Holidays yet.  But some of my "hot weekend dates" in December have booked up already.  So if you're planning to hold events during the holiday season and need help with great entertainment, it's definitely not too soon to be getting in touch.

I have some great resources on my website too, that are geared to help you make planning your event much easier.  And even if you're not looking for entertainment right now, I'm also available for free event consulting to help with ideas and advice on making your event go smoothly.  Feel free to get in touch!

Book Update and Working with Artists

A quick update on my book:  we're just wrapping up the editing, and in the process of doing photo shoots for the cover design.  I'm really excited to be working with artist and photographer Tracey Frugoli.  With a background as an award winning artist and painter, Tracey has a terrific eye for color, composition, and balance, and I'm really enjoying the creative process of working with her on my photos.  You can see some of her paintings HERE, and her photography HERE.

On a related topic, I'm also really excited to be working with Tracey Frugoli, photographer Craig Stocks (see my blog post from May 21), and a handful of other highly talented artists and arts enthusiasts creating a special marketing campaign for local arts events during National Arts and Humanities Month in October.  Tracey and Craig have been spearheading a truly amazing project featuring a series of artistic photos of local artists and supporters of the arts that will appear on television and other media during October.  Stay tuned for more details as it gets closer.

With Tracey's help, the cover photography and design on my book should be pretty cool.  I won't give it away just yet, but in the meantime, here's a little teaser:  at the end of our first photo session, Tracey wanted to take a few simple headshots of me just for fun.  Here's her favorite:

World Class Experience

I'm always inspired watching the Olympic athletes exhibit the incredible degree of peak performance they've worked so hard to achieve.  As many of you know, I teach Judo, and when I was younger, was fortunate enough to train with many of our nation's top Judo players at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.  Ever since my teen years, peak performance of all kinds has held a deep fascination for me.  It's much akin to magic, in that those who go far beyond the norm achieve seemingly impossible results.

How is this possible?  As I discuss in my book, peak performance, as well as self actualization, both come quite often from surprising sources.  Yes, hard work and determination most definitely play a huge part.  But paradoxically, true achievement often comes in those moments where we simply allow ourselves to become completely immersed in the moment.

Rather than trying harder to be more, to do more, a certain surrender also comes into play.  Surrender to the experience of the moment:  body and mind merge into a single, highly focused field of experience, a one-pointed, yet relaxed level of heightened awareness.  This, the 'Magical Moment' experience, is often where we transcend our limitations and go beyond mere 'trying'.

The 'in the zone' experience that many athletes describe is one form of what Abraham Maslow described as a "peak experience", and they are common to those who are peak performers in all fields of human endeavor.  In the words of that great philosopher Jedi, "Do.  Or do not.  There is no 'try'."

And that's the real magic of achievement.

The Magic of Perceptions and Beliefs

Another topic I address in my upcoming book is the fact that our perceptions of the world are always inaccurate.  As a performing magician, I experience this regularly, and it is in fact the reason that I can accomplish what I do as a 'weaver of wonders'.  Unfortunately we tend to forget that our perceptions are faulty, we then base our beliefs about the world and how it works on those perceptions, and then we more often than not staunchly defend those beliefs as though they were the ultimate truth about the world, even though nothing could be further from the 'truth'.

And therein lies the source of all our unhappiness.

In my book I quote a bumper sticker I once saw:  "If you can't change your mind, are you sure you still have one?"  What if instead of thinking we "know" what is true, we instead went through life in a state of open-minded curiosity?  This attitude is the foundation of all true creativity.  And it's the secret to living our lives as the magical, creative beings we were always meant to be.

When life is a continual dance of discovery, it's tough to get bogged down in thinking there's something "wrong" with the way things are, and therefore in resisting them and making ourselves miserable.  And ironically, it's our open-mindedness that also allows us to respond more capably to challenges when they do arise and to resolve them more effortlessly.

So the next time you're tempted to think you know better than someone else, stop to remind yourself that it's really nothing more than a belief based on your necessarily limited perceptions of the situation, and see how that shift in perspective serves you to live more peacefully and joyfully.  You might just surprise yourself with some real magic!

Richard Wayne Clark: 1944—2012

My wife, Kathi, and I unexpectedly lost a good friend this past week—our neighbor and creative co-conspirator, Wayne Clark.  Wayne lived cattycorner across the street from us, and we met several years ago when I called him about a plumbing problem we were having.  Wayne ran his own plumbing and heating business, but to call him just a plumber would be a serious misrepresentation.  Wayne was a creative artist at all that he did, and a true intellectual in his own right.  He brought ingenuity and artistry to even the most mundane of activities.  After completing that first plumbing job for us, when he discovered that I was a magician, he refused to take payment for the job, insisting instead that I barter with him to do a show for a small private party at his house.

We quickly became good friends, and Kathi and I were enriched time and again by his generosity.  Allowing me unhampered access to his woodshop, Wayne taught me the art of cabinet making, and assisted and advised me through numerous projects, including new cabinets for our kitchen, a variety of "crafty" Christmas presents for our family, and a large hall tree/seat, to name just a few.  In turn, Kathi and I helped Wayne with decorating his house, creating curtains and window treatments, and with a wide variety of creative projects for both our houses.

Whether it was helping me to build magic props for my act, offering advice on home repair, or just thinking through some building project, Wayne was an absolute wealth of information, expertise, and creativity.  His artistic solutions to a variety of problems never ceased to amaze me.  And he shared it all freely, never holding back.

Late night talks at Wayne's house also become a regular occurrence, with topics ranging from creativity and art, to philosophy and religion, to science and technology, to politics, to cooking, to just about anything and everything in between.  Wayne loved to argue and debate and would often take a contrary position on something just to get a rise out of someone.  He took great delight in getting under your skin and seemed to find tremendous joy in the intellectual banter.

But he was also one of the most caring and generous people I've ever known.  While he'd be embarrassed to have anyone acknowledge it openly, he nonetheless cared genuinely about other people and consistently tried to offer help whenever and wherever possible.  Even at his most cantankerous, he was never mean spirited, would never dream of doing anything intentionally hurtful, and in fact had a huge and compassionate heart that served as his moral compass.  I would have trusted him with my life.

I can't help but think that in his need to be contrary he's finally gotten the last laugh:  he left us long before we were ready to be done sharing our lives with him.  I just can't believe I'll never again be able to walk across the street to get his advice on something, and I suddenly feel this big hole in my life where Wayne used to be.

Thanks for sharing with us, Wayne, we'll miss you more than you could have imagined.