Tag Archives: Writing and thinking

Do the Write Thing Personally

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to encourage you to write more personal notes. Reading time: 3:14.

If your word is your bond, then your signature is your imprimatur. No wonder a leader’s personal handwriting in general and signature in particular is a meaningful leadership tool.

Making a Signature StatementSignature-Abraham-Lincoln2

Through their personal handwriting, leaders more directly dip into the ink well that bottles their being.

Write-sizing leaders become more reflective than reflexive; more self-less than selfish and more personable than procedural.

Fountain-Pens Through their personal handwriting, leaders more readily squeeze their most productive and instructive feelings and thoughts onto the page like so many drops of blood, sweat and tears embedded within the drops of ink.

With that emphasis on personal handwriting, the most effective leaders invest mightily in their fountain pen of choice as a validating tool of their leadership. Their fountain pen of choice prescribes their personal elan and the savoir faire requisite in a leader. Their fountain pen of choice also projects as much of the leader’s performance portfolio as the Rolex on their wrist.

2000px-JohnHancocksSignature.svg The investment is well worth it since the pen just may be mightier than the sword.

After all, handwriting analysis as a behavioral tool — a key leadership indicator-predates the formal study of psychology, according to author Bart Baggett, a leading handwriting analysis expert and founder of Handwriting University. And today psychologists focus on handwriting to better define that person’s personality and fears.

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Writing S-l-o-w-l-y: Tracking Your Train of Thought

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to enhance your decision making process. Reading time: 4:24

Of course you can text and tweet with the best of them. You have the fastest thumbs on executive row and you relish every opportunity to prove your digital dexterity -at your fingertips and in cyberspace. Whoa! Hold on there Thumb Dumb.

How sweet would your tweets be if you could use only one thumb?

What if you then you had to stop every five keystrokes?

What if you then had to take a two second break-before continuing your tweet -five strokes on, two seconds off? No way you say.

Now let’s up the ante. What if you had to write a status report -or even a book- with that same texting limitation -one thumb, 3 key strokes on 2 seconds off? No way, you say.

Hold On There Thumb Dumb

Yet slowing down your tweets and text just might speed up your transition to the executive suite . After all, tweets and texts are anathema to the most effective leadership thinking. At least if you consider the writing process our forefathers used to write the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States. With a quill pen. An ink well. And the forced intermittency to dip one in the other. S-L-O-W-L-Y.

How would your leadership decision-making change if you were forced to tweet and text more slowly? Continue reading →