Here’s to a ripsnorting 2025!
The start of a new year is always a good time to consider how you and your team members are coming across to others – to clients, to potential customers and to everyone else.
As business success is often directly dependent on the way you and your organisation communicate, focusing on how you and your team can potentially come across EVEN better than you already do is well worth doing.
At a time when the term “post-truth era” is, sadly, further working its way into public discussion, a potential role model for truth-tellers in this time of so much misinformation, has been big in the news over the holiday season.
He’s the former American President Jimmy Carter who has died at the age of 100 after a fantastically long, varied and often highly successful life.
As Governor of the southern U.S. state of Georgia, as President of the United States, and as a Nobel Peace Prize winner – for his international work for fair elections and better world health – long after his presidency finished, Jimmy Carter’s communication style can be consistently summed up as “straight-talking”.
Despite a string of career successes, Jimmy Carter is not viewed as one of America’s most successful presidents.
But amidst the many challenges he dealt with during his time at the White House – from inflation surging due to oil price hikes, through to more than 50 American citizens being taken hostage by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran – Jimmy Carter was a remarkably honest, thoughtful and straight-forward communicator.
How else could someone negotiate that seemingly impossible peace deal between the former enemies Israel and Egypt which still endures in 2025 despite so many ongoing troubles in the Middle East???
And if you’re amongst those (understandably) quivering at the next American president taking office on 20 January – one who seems to be constantly angry, constantly outraged and constantly truth-bending – remember that it hasn’t always been like this.
Before, during and after his presidency, the Jimmy Carter approach to all his communication tended to be respectful, calm, measured and truthful.
Jimmy Carter ran for the highest office in the wake of the multitudinous lies of the Watergate scandal from the corrupt and devious Richard Nixon – still the only person ever to have resigned in disgrace from the U.S. presidency.
The Carter appeal to voters was as an honest common citizen of high integrity and personal principles.
His presidential election win in 1976 had much to do with his pledge to the American people: “I’ll never lie to you”.
It provided a massive contrast to the approach of the less-than-truthful Richard Nixon who had won the two previous presidential elections.
That second Nixon win involved particularly devious and illegal methods – from his team members organising the break-in at the opposition party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel through to endless cover-ups of a range of dastardly deeds.
At the time, the prospect of a straight-talking President Carter started gaining national voter support.
The following video – “Farmhouse To White House” – gives an easy-to-absorb, tough-but-fair assessment of Jimmy Carter’s massive leap from “Jimmy Who?” the peanut farmer to the presidency and beyond.
The video makes much of his “I’ll never lie to you” commitment.
If you are committed to communicating your organisation’s message honestly – and more effectively – to your target audiences, there’s a range of communication-boosting sessions that can help.
For “Presenting With Confidence, Impact & Pizzazz”, visit:
https://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/presenting-with-confidence-impact-and-pizzazz/
For “Give Great Answers To Tough Questions” in your workplace, there’s information at:
https://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/give-great-answers-to-tough-questions/
And for media interview response training, check out:
https://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/media-master-classes/
Growing up in Sydney in the 1970s I had three American heroes – all of them impressive truth-focussed communicators.
There was Bob Woodward and Carl Bertstein – the Washington Post investigative journalists who did so much uncovering of the tangled threads of the Watergate scandal which had engulfed the Nixon presidency.
You may remember Woodward and Bernstein more from their movie portrayals by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
The third American to gain my admiration was the slow-talking unconventional national political outsider, Jimmy Carter, when he begun winning a series of state primary elections in an initially improbable bid to become the Democratic Party nominee for president.
He signalled his intentions with green-themed election posters symbolising national renewal.
I remember in early November 1976 coming out of one of my final year high school examinations in Sydney and taking the bus to sunny Dee Why Beach while glued to the transistor radio.
The radio – usually reserved for test cricket commentaries and top 40 hits – was giving rolling news updates on the 1976 presidential election count to decide whether Jimmy Carter – or Richard Nixon’s replacement, President Gerald Ford – had gained more electoral college votes.
News that Jimmy Carter was edging ahead made it feel – looking out across the Pacific towards America from Dee Why Beach – that on the other side of the ocean things were at last moving in a better direction.
Here’s the final result – with blue for Carter and red for Ford.
If you’d like some insights into the Jimmy Carter approach to life, politics and communication, the following video from the American Broadcasting Corporation features the man himself – and others – shedding light on the full sweep of his 100 years on the planet.
His positive impact on the world continued – and continues still – long after the hostage crisis of the Iranian Revolution helped bring his presidency to an end after a single term.
As a deep and broadminded thinker, Jimmy Carter’s thoughts as president were sent far beyond planet Earth.
He played his part in seeking out contact with those who might be living many light years away from our small part of the universe.
This was underlined by the presidential message he wrote which was fired into deep space with the aim of reaching potential intelligent beings way beyond the Earth.
This message continues to be transported by the spacecraft Voyager 1.
It was launched in 1977 by NASA – America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration – and has so far travelled further than any other human-made object.
After making its way past Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 headed further out into “interstellar space” where it continues to collect data – and seeks to convey Jimmy Carter’s message to the other inhabitants of the universe.
It’s now more than 14-billion miles from Earth.
Who knows what any distant beings will make of the message if they manage to decipher it?
Will they be impressed by the fact that President Carter’s message indicated it was not just sent on behalf of those in the United States of America, but from everyone on Earth.
The message is recorded in electronic impulses which can be converted into printed words if any non-human recipients have the technological capability to figure this out.
The wording is set out at the foot of this ezine.
So Jimmy Carter’s enormous reservoirs of goodwill live on ahead of his forthcoming funeral service.
If you, or any other being in the universe, read Jimmy Carter’s message directly from this ezine – rather than straight from Voyager 1 – feel free to send your thoughts about it to:
michael@michaeldoddcommunications.com
Here’s to a great year on this planet – and on any other planet you may happen to be on!
Keep smiling,
Michael
THE VOYAGER 1 SPACECRAFT STATEMENT BY PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER – July 29, 1977
This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America.
We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth.
We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.
We cast this message into the cosmos.
It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed.
Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some – perhaps many – may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations.
If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings.
We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.
This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.