Thoughts

  Whatever you’re working on now, it’s bigger than that. Whatever your plans are for the next twelve months, it’s bigger than them. Whatever your job title, your profession, your organisation, your industry. It’s bigger than all of them. The poet David Whyte says what you can plan is too small for you to live. […]

Rules. We live by them. We need them, actually. Otherwise, we’d be overloaded with decisions. Like having to think about which way to veer when we meet a car coming the other way on the road. Sticking to the left is a useful rule. Some rules are not so useful. Some rules limit us too much, […]

  Fresh ideas are powerful currency. New thinking can lead to renewed energy to tackle gnarly issues. Flashes of insight can spur new actions and new results. When you want to make change happen, your ideas are the starting point. And, for most of us, life is super-busy. It flies by like your view from a rushing […]

Do you want feedback about you when you’re at your best?   Are you wondering how you can make a difference to others in the most authentic way? Then read on.   Getting honest, affirming feedback helps you to grow your self-awareness, and better understand what you are all about. In the Havard Business Review, […]

Last week, I was reminded of the awesome, and underutilised power of leading with questions. A colleague and I spent two days together with a group of up-and-coming leaders. They’re an energised, talented group, hungry to learn and to make an impact on their organisation. A joy to work with. As facilitators, my colleague and I […]

I’ve been working with a senior leadership team of late that has, shall we say, quite a forceful executive at its head. Having been in the role just over 18 months, he’s been instrumental in reshaping the direction of the organisation and lifting its performance. Things are tracking well, morale is lifting across the board, […]

Got a flat mojo? Do a ‘Hell Yeah’  audit. Derek Sivers talks about getting to the point where you only say ‘Yes’ to stuff if it’s a ‘Hell Yeah!’ Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that some of the stuff I’ve been delivering hasn’t been feeling as much of a Hell Yeah as I’d like. […]

When people face something big and scary, they’ll often say “I need to muster up the courage to tackle that.” Kind of like courage is something that’s scattered around the place in small bits, and they just need to gather up all of those small bits and create a big courage ball. Then they’ll be […]

Are your days ‘lurchy’ or ‘flowy’? For many of us, it’s more often the former, when we’d love it to be more of the latter. Let’s get some definitions down: ‘Lurchy’ = you’re moving from one thing to another, feeling fragmented, scattered and often ending feeling unproductive and shattered. ‘Flowy’ = stuff feels effortless, you’re […]

I was in Bali in June last year, chasing some much-needed sun in the midst of the dark New Zealand winter. I took a surfboard with me, of course. Like about one million other people who had the same idea that I did. I’d never surfed in Bali before, so I didn’t really know what […]