May
13
If you want the health and wellness benefits of steam without going to the spa, then you can either buy a home unit pre fabricated or create your own sauna design. It does not take a builder, planner or even an architect to draw up sauna plans. All it takes is a little knowledge and some creativity.
There are several things to work out before you start your design. The first thing is to figure out what you want the sauna for. Is it for medicinal and wellness purposes, such as to treat chronic back pain, soreness or sprains like an active person or athlete might need? Will you need an infrared one to try and help with such conditions as arthritis or obesity? The planned usage of the sauna will factor greatly into your sauna plans.
When choosing a sauna design, you must also decide if it will be located inside or outside. The type of wood and paneling you use to build sauna character as well as their functionality for indoors or out. If you want an indoor sauna, then your sauna plans can include electrical outlets and the wood on the outside is not as much of a concern. On the flip side, if you want an outdoor unit, you will need specially treated wood and some kind of paneling over the roof in your sauna design.
Now that you have these essential things decided on, you can start your sauna design. All units, no matter how big or for what use, usually have a few things in common. They have a space for the heater (no matter if it is electric or a more natural one such as a rock heater). There also has to be some empty or ‘wasted’ space to let the steam travel and ensure that the whole room does not get so hot or humid that breathing is difficult. Another thing you must include in your sauna plans build sauna benches. There should be an upper and a lower bench in each, with enough width so that the average person can comfortably lie down on one or both to relax.
The next thing to consider when building your sauna design are the little touches. For instance, what type of wood (some sauna-friendly woods are darker than others), should you have a window, and what kind of light fixtures do you want. Though some people have very basic touches in their sauna plans, others may want to go all out and get fancy in their design. The choice is really yours. Just make sure that anything you plan fits not only into your own personal taste, but into your budget as well.
If you find yourself overwhelmed with measurements in your sauna design, have no fear. All you need is a basic plan. Take your rough sauna plans to a reputable dealer or builder and they can take care of all the other details. With their help, sauna design becomes much less of a chore and much more of a pleasure and reality.
David Bloom is a health enthusiast and contributor to many fitness sites. He is the author of Home Sauna Designs, a blog dedicated to residential saunas and sauna equipment and accessories.
Share This
May
12
Frequent PublicSpeakingsSkills.com readers know that the only way to assure your presentation audience will stay with you every step of the way is to maintain proper eye contact throughout your presentation. Proper eye contact involves delivering your presentation as a series of one-on-one conversations with each member of the audience, and holding eye-contact with members through to the end of a thought or complete sentence. Most presenters hold eye contact with any one person no more than one second - to effectively bond with your audience, you need to pump that up to a range more like three to eight.
The image to keep in mind here is that you are never delivering to a group of individuals, but rather to individuals in a group. (When people ask me what’s the largest number of people I’ve ever spoken to, I always answer, “one”.)
When delivering a PowerPoint presentation, maintaining proper eye contact becomes difficult if your slides are structured like most we see in the corporate world today - with way more information than the audience can digest before the speaker feels compels to start speaking. In order to maintain constant eye contact with members of the audience, you must restrict the volume of information that you toss up on the screen at any one time. Otherwise, you will do what most presenters do, which is to spend much of the presentation looking at the screen. In fact, you must restrict each new parcel of information to that which can be absorbed by both you and the audience in just a few seconds - ten at the very most.
That will set you up to then smoothly and coherently transfer the information from the screen to the audience. We call the procedure for doing this “Absorb, Align, and Address.”
Absorb
When new information appears on the screen, all eyes will follow it, and at this point it is OK, and desirable, for you, too, to look to the screen. By doing so, you “give permission” to the audience to get prepared for what’s coming next. That’s all the screen info should include, too: just enough information to set the stage for what you are going to discuss. At this point, because you are not looking at any individual in the group, you must be silent.
Rule Number 9: If your eyes aren’t locked, your jaw must be.
When you have absorbed the data bite, you can now think for a moment on how to phrase what you want to say to start off. This would not include expounding on the point, but merely filling out the talking points to make a grammatically correct statement.
Align
Once you and your audience have had the opportunity to take in this info, you then need to turn your attention away from the screen, and lock eyes (align) with a member of the audience. This is the most difficult part, physically, to perform, as the natural tendency is to begin speaking as soon as you have formulated your statement.
Address
Locked on, you finally can address your selected member of the audience with your version of the talking point.
Understand that if what you’re addressing is a bullet point, this address should not be the actual words. You may always say more than the line on the screen, but never, never any less. Keep in mind that the group will read everything that’s on the screen, so if you put words up there but don’t speak to them, you are actually insulting your audience: These words aren’t important enough for me to bother with but I wanted to take up your brain’s time and effort just the same.
How many times has this happened to you: You go to a presentation and see slide after slide with all kinds of footnotes and small type, or graphs with legends and data to which the presenter never refers? You’re looking at all the elements on the slide trying to figure out which stuff is most important, and then the presenter never even mentions half the stuff you’ve read. How does that make you feel? For most people, the first slide that contains more information than the presenter chooses not to discuss is the point at which they check out, deciding to figure it all out later from the handout, which, of course, they trash at the first can they see outside the presentation room.
Once learned, the Absorb, Align and Address system is a beautiful thing to behold. Slides designed with this system never suffer from TMI, and thus never have too much for the presenter to deal with. Presenter confidence is high, and the audience feels this big time. The audience is forced to turn their attention to you, because there’s not enough information to allow them to jump to their own conclusions. By the same token, you are now able to direct all of your speaking to the audience and not the screen.
But here’s the really fun part: When you follow this simple plan for both design and delivery, almost anyone can look and sound like an expert on their subject, regardless of how much prep time they’ve put into rehearsing the presentation! We prove this in our corporate training classes by having participants deliver other participant’s presentations that we have edited and revised to comply with the “rules” (next chapter). Preferably, off course, you would have a good background in the subject matter, so that you can deliver the “meat on the bones” part effectively. But if you know to what the talking points refer, and you also know that no more material than you can deliver in just a few seconds will appear, you can actually give a presentation for the very first time and sound like you know what you’re talking about!
J. Douglas Jefferys brings twenty-five years of corporate training experience to his role as a principal of PublicSpeakingSkills.com [http://www.publicspeakingskills.com]. His firm changes presenters lives forever with their unique apporach to training presentation design and delivery skills. Discover how to design and deliver presentations that audiences actually listen to by visiting their website now.
Share This
May
11
10 Steps Towards Designing an Effective Questionnaire
1. What are you trying to find out?
A good questionnaire is designed so that your results will tell you what you want to find out. Start by writing down what you are trying to do in a few clear sentences, and design your questionnaire around this.
2. How are you going to use the information? There is no point conducting research if the results aren’t going to be used - make sure you know why you are asking the questions in the first place. Make sure you cover everything you will need when it come to analysing the answers. e.g. maybe you want to compare answers given by men and women. You can only do this if you’ve remembered to record the gender of each respondent on each questionnaire.
3. Telephone, Postal, Web, Face-to-Face? There are many methods used to ask questions, and each has its good and bad points. For example, postal surveys can be cheap but responses can be low and can take a long time to receive, face-to-face can be expensive but will generate the fullest responses, web surveys can be cost-effective but hit and miss on response rates, and telephone can be costly, but will often generate high response rates, give fast turnaround and will allow for probing.4. Qualitative or Quantitative? Do you want to focus on the number e.g. 87% of respondents thought this, or are you more interested in interpreting feedback from respondents to bring out common themes? The method used will generally be determined by the subject matter you are researching and the types of respondents you will be contacting.
5. Keep it short. In fact, quite often the shorter the better. We are all busy, and as a general rule people are less likely to answer a long questionnaire than a short one.If you are going to be asking your customers to answer your questionnaire in-store, make sure the interview is no longer than 10 minutes maximum (this will be about 10 to 15 questions). If your questionnaire is too long, try to remove some questions. Read each question and ask, “How am I going to use this information?” If you don’t know, don’t include it!
6. Use simple and direct language. The questions must be clearly understood by the respondent. The wording of a question should be simple and to the point. Do not use uncommon words or long sentences.7. Start with something general. Respondents will be put-off and may even refuse to complete your questionnaire if you ask questions that are too personal at the start (e.g. questions about financial matters, age, even whether or not they are married).8. Place the most important questions in the first half of the questionnaire. Respondents sometimes only complete part of a questionnaire. By putting the most important items near the beginning, the partially completed questionnaires will still contain important information.9. Leave enough space to record the answers. If you are going to include questions which may require a long answer e.g. ask someone why they do a particular thing, then make sure you leave enough room to write in the possible answers. It sounds obvious, but it’s so often overlooked!10. Test your questionnaire on your colleagues. No matter how much time and effort you put into designing your questionnaire, there is no substitute for testing it. Complete some interviews with your colleagues BEFORE you ask the real respondents. This will allow you to time your questionnaire, make any final changes, and get feedback from your colleagues.
Share This
