By Dave Lieber
Fort Worth Star-Telegram Columnist
|| New works by Jana Stanfield and David Avrin ||
Two National Speakers Association favorites have released gifts that speakers should treat themselves to before crafting your 2010 New Year’s speaker resolutions. Both will make you smarter and more agile as you confront whatever changes and opportunities come your way in 2010.
Supreme musical motivator Jana Stanfield, returning from time away in Asia working with orphanages, has released a two-CD set called “What Would You Do This Year If You Had No Fear?” Her work ought to be considered her own personal Sgt. Pepper’s album because of the variety of musical styles she displays and for her vision of what’s next in life.

David Avrin's new book

Jana Stanfield's new album
Hers is a fully-formed album that lives up to its title’s promise. It’s also lots of fun.
Visibility Coach David Avrin of Colorado, known throughout NSA as someone who happily shares his ideas with others, has released a book, It’s Not Who You Know/It’s Who Knows You! (Publisher, John Wiley & Sons.) His is a “small business guide to raising your profits and raising your profile.” Using stories rather than bullet points, Avrin breaks down image-building barriers with simple ideas and solutions. Avrin’s passion becomes your motivator, something he and Stanfield both have mastered.
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Give Stanfield credit for making a leap in her two-CD set:
Disc No. 1 — called “Stay Brave, Do Good, Feel Better” — reflects her agility in all facets of pop — folk, rock, country — that enables her to inspire so many with her upbeat life outlook. Here, she takes her classic “If I Were Brave” song and ramps up the theme across the entire CD about who you are and what you want to do. The music, like her tremendous keynotes, opens up possibilities for you in the most personal of ways.
Disc No. 2 — “The Wilder Side Dance Mix” — is quite something else, even by Stanfield’s innovative standards. Most of the songs are modern techno-pop tunes with pulsating beats designed for either dancing or aerobics class. It’s Stanfield on steroids, and the music and the vocals (although they often don’t sound like her) definitely work to the listeners’ advantage because of the album’s high quality.
So while one CD is more traditional, the other, as Stanfield writes in the liner notes, consists of songs that were “created as ‘affirmatunes’ for a self-empowerment system called I AM Power. With Matt Wilder as producer, these ‘trance-formational’ songs are designed for repeated listenings, to help you stay brave, do good, and feel better.”
The combined package could serve as the soundtrack to the Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love that Stanfield admires so much. Stanfield asks listeners to “take action.” Women will adore her latest, but men shouldn’t back off. Stanfield touches hearts, both male and female, with titles such as Learning to Fly Mid-Air, If I Had No Fear, and her newest stunner, George Bailey.
The character from It’s A Wonderful Life, she sings so perfectly, is a “guy standing on a bridge, seeing all he ever wanted, all the things he never did, missing every minute of the life he never lived.”
Sample chorus:
“I don’t want to be George Bailey waiting, waiting, waiting for the right time, for a clear sign.”
“Even if I make mistakes, it’s time I do whatever it takes.”
Good thing Stanfield didn’t wait to give us What Would You Do This Year If You Had No Fear? She returned home from overseas and offers her most fearless work yet.
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As Stanfield is like no other “singing speaker,” David Avrin is like few other branding experts. What sets him apart from most image evangelists is that your excitement becomes his excitement and vice versa. He brings a little heart and soul to the creative process because he cares. He can instantly target the strengths he needs to promote, the weaknesses he needs to overcome and the values he wants to share. He understands, to use his branding term, visibility.
Branding powers, the ability to help others see what you are doing in such a quick and clear way that no further explanation is needed, are a gift. You either got ‘em or you don’t. Not everybody is a Don Draper or David Avrin.
For those of us who need help to come up with our phrases and descriptors, it’s a wonder to watch people like Arvin who get it so effortlessly and see things in you that you never noticed before.
The Avrins of the world can fix our problems, showcase our talents, and enable our dreams. Personally, other than customers, I don’t need much more.
His book (forward by Joe Calloway) is aimed at small businesses — speakers, lawyers, doctors, plumbers — but it’s not a business how-to book. Instead, the book is Avrin’s version of a Stanfield album.
“My goal,” he writes, “is to kick you in the pants to dig deeper for better marketing messages and strategies to grow your business.”
And following his own advice, here’s how he brands his own book:
He calls it an “open-to-any-page, stick-it-in-your-bathroom, pearls of wisdom, nuggets of marketing brilliance, best-practice, story-laden book filled with short essays and observations to help you recognize clever personal and professional marketing strategies and creative promotional tactics to help you be seen, be remembered and become the go-to resource for people looking for what you’re selling.”
Phew.
So I played his little game. I took the book into the bathroom and opened the book to any page seeking my pearl, my nugget, his brilliance.
On that page, he wrote about something I had done and wondered, in my case, if it was worth it. Why? Nobody ever noticed that I did it.
His subject was appearances on a city’s cable TV program. I’ve done a dozen and not once has anyone ever said, “I saw you on that.”
Well, Avrin explains that he is hooked on the guy who paints trees on his community access channel. He can’t skip past the tree painter when he’s going to a real channel. The guy is mesmerizing.
Avrin writes that these appearances on little-watched TV channels are good for you because: 1) you get practice time, 2) you gain new video footage, and 3) “you never know who’s watching.”
My suggestion, though, is that, his branding aside, this is more than a bathroom book. Like Avrin, it’s an idea generator. And as both Avrin and Stanfield show in their latest works, there’s little better than that.
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Avrin’s book and Stanfield’s album.
Read one and listen to the other; you’re set for 2010
Full disclosure: Author Dave Lieber uses portions of Jana Stanfield’s music, with her permission, on his Web site at http://www.WatchdogNation.com.