Thoughts

Recently I was working with a group of about 20 people at a residential workshop. It was morning tea time and we were all gathered in a room relishing our caffeine top-ups. As facilitator, it was my job to keep people on time. I considered how I’d let them all know when it was time […]

“May you live in interesting times. May you live in an interesting age. May you live in exciting times.” This phrase purportedly has it’s origins in China.  Over the past couple of hundred years, its popularity in the western world has tended to peak whenever the world goes into turmoil. I think it’s fair to […]

What if you could equip your next generation of leaders to deal with anything? If you could achieve that, what might happen? My latest white paper describes why this challenge is so important right now, and what you can do to future-proof your organisation, and our wider society, in the turbulent environment we find ourselves in. […]

When I was about 14 years old, I joined my school’s Army Cadet corps. It was attractive because I’d heard they did cool things out in the bush. I was having a bit of a hard time at boarding school, and I thought it would a great respite. It wasn’t what I expected. The rule-bound […]

You know and I know that training courses aren’t where we do most of our learning. But how deliberate are we about ‘doing our learning’ the rest of the time? Yesterday I wrapped up a leadership development programme that I’d been running over the past six months. Inevitably, participants want to know “how do we […]

  Lurking in our language, there’s a number of naughty words that we have conveniently categorised as “Four Letter Words”. You know what I’m talking about. Most of us typically utter these offensive tones to express our dislike of something, or someone. If you’ve ever been the unlucky “someone” on the receiving end of such […]

How valuable are you to your organisation? Or to your clients? You must add some value, right? Otherwise why would they hire you? In a disruptive, fast-moving world, what’s valued today is less likely to be the same as what’s valued tomorrow. Consider the plethora of evidence out there to show us that the jobs […]

  What’s better: when good stuff happens to you, or bad? Mull on that for a bit as you read on. I’ve just spent three days on an emotional rollercoaster. I was attending a workshop with Thought Leaders Business School to help me sharpen my thinking for how I run my business. Hugely beneficial. But […]

Recently I wrote about Do You Need Confidence, or Courage? It seemed to the hit the mark with plenty of readers. It’s a topic worth exploring more. A quick rewind: Confidence comes from courage. Courage is what you have when you face something scary, and you do it anyway. Confidence is what you have after you’ve […]

  I recently wrote about the idea that when you stop striving, you maximise performance and enjoyment. If you missed that post, I was training for a mountain bike race (done now, loved it) and I’d been tracking my times. I noticed that when I relaxed more, my times got better. Since then, I diligently […]