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 […]

  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 […]

A lot of people say that networking is hard, and they’re not good at it. And, we know (or at least, we hear) that a healthy network is good for us. So there’s this tension that we live with. If you’re one of those people feeling that tension, let me help you ease the pain. […]

  Lately I’ve noticed a little trap that people can fall into. One they set themselves up for. Like so many barriers to our own success, it comes down to a choice of words. That choice is between ‘confidence’ and ‘courage’. Example: A client says she needs to build up the confidence to put a […]

  Late in 2015, I published ‘Three Things I’ve Learned This Year’. The most popular of those three with readers was the idea of ‘Be The Flower, Not The Bee’. In essence, strive less. I’m going to build on that idea here by showing you how to see and work with patterns to be more […]

Do you ever feel like the way to get better results is to try harder? Here’s a story that might give you reason to rethink that approach. I’m training for a mountain bike race right now, putting in the time on the bike, using an app (Strava) to track my times. Last week, I went for […]