[Brutha]

Speaking in terms described in PDSP, I have to bring people into alignment with both truth and power. How to empower them best?

In PDFSP Steve describes his approach to truth the following:
Someone makes a prediction about the future. If the thing he predicted happens he learns something.
If it didn't happen he also learned something about the world.

Goalsetting also provides people with some kind of feedback. If you successfully make the first step towards a goal it feels good.

Truth in that sense isn't about having a model that describes objective reality. Steve doesn't really believe in objective reality anyway.
It's about making intuitive predictions that turn out right in the future.

I got myself into situations where I wouldn't follow through. I noticed the biggest distinction is that I made excuses for why it's OK not to do it.

I'm not sure that you got the relationship between cause and effect right.

There an experiment that done with people who's two brain hemispheres got disconnected:
You project the command stand up to the left eye with afterwards goes to the right brain hemisphere.
The person stands up.
Afterwards you ask the person why they stood up and the left brain hemisphere answers because it's has the job to process language.

The person answers something like:
I wanted to grab a coke.

If you use electrodes to stimulate a motoneuron of someone and he moves he will also make up a reason for his movement if you ask him.

Human beings always find reasons to justify their behavior after they have decided to do something.

I want to create a lasting positive difference in my readers' lives. How can I do it?

Why does toastmasters work so well in teaching people good public speaking skills?
You make all the time evaluations of whether something is good or bad in regards to being a good public speaker when you hear someone speaking.
After you make a speech you get written evaluations from all members a specific evaluation for your speech.
You also have goal for the speech that the manual sets and that you can use to self evaluate yourself.
You can look at your audience while speaking to get feedback.
You have a Ah-Counter a timer and other functionary that provide you with additional feedback.
Afterwards a lot of clubs provide you with a video of your speech that you can also use to further understand what you did well and what didn't went well.

Toastmasters provides a structure that gives you a lot of feedback on how to improve your abilities as a public speaker.
That the important thing: Having a structure that gives you feedback. Goals do that for some people and for some tasks.
But in general that's the key, having some sort of feedback.