When I think back over my career I can see that there have been people who have held a ‘management’ post in various organisation I have worked for who have truly managed. Be that people, process or projects.
When I sit back today and reflect on those of us, myself included, who are managers I wonder how much of our time we actually spend managing. Continue reading
Outside of my working life I am on a long and continuing journey to better health and fitness. As part of this I have had a personal trainer. In one of our sessions he asked me why I was afraid to fail. This made me start to think about my working life as well as training and whether there were differences.
Firstly I wanted to describe my attitude to failure. Continue reading
I have been doing some thinking about my future, my career and my peers. A wise friend told me about unicorns and it made me think more around personality types. My mind settled on three types, there are of course many more, but these three were the ones that resonated with me. Continue reading
When I first started on this fitness journey, I made myself some promises, they included not repeating old mistakes and making sure I took this seriously.
One of the old mistakes was eating well for a period when trying to exercise and lose weight and then going back to eating what I wanted. For the record I have never been a bad eater, not eating bad food, just eating too much food. Continue reading
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a HUGE Batman fan, from the comic books, through Adam West and on through Christian Bale to Ben Affleck (we will forget Val Kilmer and George Clooney).
Why do we fall Sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up – Alfred Pennyworth
As such I have been aware of the above quote for a while, and have always liked it. But, as with so many things in life, I don’t think I have truly seen it or sought to understand it on more than a superficial level. Continue reading
Having had music as a constant companion to some rising and falling emotions over my lifetime I thought I would take some time to think over what music means to me and how it can make us feel.
I personally love it when I hear a song and it brings back floods of memories, be they happy or sad, people or places, or just events that stick in the mind.
Some songs, one or two notes of an opening can give me goosebumps and have the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck standing on end (Elbow – One day like this, does this to me every time). Continue reading
I had a conversation recently with one of my friends about hugs. One element of the conversation was about the value of hugs.
This made me think about the wider sense of value.
What is value, and what value is there in a currency? Continue reading
Motivation, when you have it life is great, when you don’t life is so much harder. But what is it that actually motivates people?
The real answer is lots of things which are all different for each individual. So what have I learned about motivating people over my career? Firstly that it is far easier to demotivate and switch people off from a goal/task/outcome than it is to get them on board. Continue reading
Success is a strange concept, we all seek it, we all have a unique definition of it. Most of us know and want to learn and emulate traits of successful people.
People like Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, Richard Branson and David M Kelley fascinate me, as does their success. They are/were all highly motivated people, they set goals and achieve, no matter how unlikely success may seem. Their self belief is high, but is not based upon arrogance, rather on vision and upon a track record of achievement.
So what does success mean to me? Continue reading
Strength is something that we all need, most of us have, but we never know how much we have until we need it. I’m not talking physical strength but the mental kind, the kind that pushes us forward at times when we want to just curl up in a ball and lie down.
Most people have a lot of strength but don’t realise it. Every day contains some sort of a challenge, and they rise up to it and move forward.
Pete Greensmith 