What we need to learn

Bring to mind one of your best working moments.  One of those times when you felt on top of the world, when you were just ‘flowing’ or when you felt the warm glow of success.  It could have been when that new client signed up with you…..when you finally worked through a long-standing conflict with…

The insight illusion

Confucius is quoted as saying, “When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine yourself.” …and yet we reinforce our “us vs them” in response to real human tragedies in Syria, Paris, San Bernardino.  It’s hard…

Your Work is Your Work

Charles Darwin is apocryphally quoted as saying, “It’s not the biggest, the brightest, or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.”  While he may not have actually said it, the sentiment stands. It is therefore vital that we develop ways and practices that assist us to learn about ourselves.  Much has…

A “working out loud” credo

I love the “working out loud” approach.  It’s highly social, which now, after years of personal work, runs through me like a stick of rock.  In that (ongoing) personal journey, I have learnt not only the benefits and indescribable joys (and sometimes, the excruciating pain) of joining the rest of the human race, but also…

The Red Pill or the Blue Pill?

I’ve written relatively little over the past few months and am feeling for the lack of it.  When I first set out to write this blog, my intention was to use it as an aid to digestion; that is, to assist me to synthesise the thoughts, feelings and experiences that come about in my work…

Can I trust you?

A poll in October of 2011 put the approval rating of the US Congress at just 9%.  When Rasmussen pollsters asked Americans if they approved of the US going communist, a full 11% said they were OK with that; two points ahead of Congress.  To put that into context, during Watergate Richard Nixon’s approval rating…

Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there

In an increasingly connected and interactive world, where your customers can directly engage with you via social media, where you can measure and survey in order to take your organisation’s pulse, one essential role for us all to develop is The Open Receptive Learner.  This role encapsulates those capabilities related to receiving, processing and making…

..so now do something about it

“More important than science is its results; one answer invokes a hundred questions.  More important than poetry is its results; one poem invokes a hundred heroic acts.” J.L. Moreno Some years ago, one of my teachers said, “It’s not so important what you do; it’s more important what you do NEXT.”  What he meant was…

Be careful what you wish for

“Why,” Henry Ford is reputed to have asked in exasperation, “when I only want to hire a pair of hands, do I get a whole person?” Sad to say, but there are still many managers like that.  They say they want real engagement from staff and customers, yet their behaviours convey quite the opposite: that…

What exactly does strengths-based MEAN?

Reflecting on a Guts of Leadership programme we have just completed, I have been going through a range of thoughts and feelings.  Immediately after was a sense of a job well done and satisfaction derived from participants’ comments that they had made some really significant shifts in themselves.  It is always good to know that…