162 Shares Staying motivated is hard, but sometimes the most simple tools are the most effective ones. Try this easy exercise to keep you on track, whatever your goal.
53 Shares As the old adage says, assume makes and ass of u and me!
174 Shares Time management issues belong to the organisation but in real life a lot of them simply have more impact upon our personal lives. Once we realise this, it makes a huge difference to how we approach trying to be efficient and effective.
153 Shares Everyone knows what it feels like to screw up, right? We all know exactly what it feels like to fail - or at least we can imagine it. But what does success look like? You're about to find out.
79 Shares I loathe timed presentations. A presentation should take as much time as it takes to do what it needs to and no longer. That, of course, assumes that that it needs to do is worth doing but let’s pretend that it is. That said, it’s important to know how long your rehearsed presentation is going to take when you perform it live. The best way to find out, of course, is to give the presentation so that you know how long it will take the next time. The second best way is... More »
184 Shares One of the things I like about my job is that I can do things like watch iTunesU…and claim it’s work. While doing that recently I came across a lecture by Dr Margaret Chesney of the UCSF Osher Centre for Integrative Medicine. It’s a long (nearly 90 minutes long) lecture ,but the contents are great if you’re trying to find tools for coping and dealing the crud life throws at you. So I’ve put together a summary in this piece. (If you want the subtlties you’ll just have to listen through for... More »
77 Shares How often have you been given some really, really good advice in your life? I’ll put money on it being a lot more often than the number of times you’ve taken it. And conversely I’ll bet you’ve offered really, really good advice far more often than it’s been taken. (As an aside I’ll wager that the times good advice is taken is pretty similar to the number of times the advice matched what the person receiving the advice wanted to do in the first place! But that’s very much an aside to... More »
55 Shares A while ago I wrote about how to predict the questions you might get asked in a presentation – after all, if you can predict them you can prepare answers to them, right? You can even rehearse those answers so that you look really slick. So much for planning, but it doesn’t always work. With the best will in the world you’re going to get ambushed occasionally. The best laid plans of mice and men… So what to do if you don’t have a pre-prepared answer to to the question? Well the... More »
109 Shares Fortunately, this article isn’t going to start with an embarrassing confession that I’ve let the car’s tank run dry and found myself stranded at the side of the road… I’ve only ever done that once and I was barely out of nappies! (Honest) Instead, I’m going to look at the idea that cars do need filling up. Yeah, I know. Obvious…right? The thing is, when we’re planning journeys we all too often do something which is barely more sophisticated than estimating how long the journey is on a map, and (assuming an... More »
107 Shares I’m sure you’ve felt it: the horror at the end of a presentation (which, let’s face it, can be a bit of a trauma in its own right) when you ask the following: “Any questions?” There seems to be one of two ways things can go at that moment — and neither fills you with delight. Firstly, there’s the Tumbleweed Option. Silence. Nothing — save perhaps for an embarrassed cough. Was your presentation really so bad that no one could understand it enough to think of a coherent question? Did you run over... More »
80 Shares Let’s face it, no matter what your business is, or who you work for, the chances are that you’ve been on the receiving end of bad presentations. My working definition of a bad presentation here is one that costs more than it saves or makes for the organization involved. If it’s a business presentation, that’s obviously the company employing whoever the presentation involves – there’s always (almost always) someone who’s responsible. Of course, it’s hard to work out how much a presentation will save or make for the organization in the long... More »
99 Shares Time in pubs with friends is rarely wasted. At the very least you get in a good chat with your friends, and at best you get a life-changing revelation. This one started out as the traditional: “If you knew then what you know now, would you do it again?” We worked on it and developed it and made it into something ‘more’. We made it into this question: “Knowing what you know, would you start again from where you are — if you had the choice?” From that, we developed a whole... More »
213 Shares Learned helplessness is the condition when we’re so used to being able to do nothing that we, in effect, give up trying to do anything – even though the circumstances might have changed so that we could do something if we tried. It can be learned by animals when given electric shock and by babies who, for example, get no feedback from their mother: They learn that nothing they do gets any response. (Presumably human babies can also learn it from receiving unavoidable electric shocks, but to my knowledge this particular scientific... More »
