I was recently asked to put together a session to coach a group of senior executives to improve their communication skills. They are responsible for cascading important messages throughout their organisation and, it was felt, they could do with some support as often messages landed badly due to the way they were presented. The coac...
Don’t you love September? I’ve always found its arrival a time for contemplation. With over half the year gone, it’s now downhill all the way to Christmas and the next set of New Year’s resolutions. The days are getting shorter, the cricket whites are put away, and the rugby season kicks off. In other words, it always f...
In coaching, one of the most powerful tools is visualisation. Often people find it relatively easy to explain what’s wrong with their current predicament but they struggle to define what good looks like for them. Asking them to visualise their future state and look back at themselves from that viewpoint can help them to see tha...
The UK General Election in May 2015 produced a result that few had expected. One of the outcomes was the virtual disappearance of the LibDems. At the time I predicted that it could mark the re-emergence of a new political force based on the original Social Democratic Party of the mid 1980’s (the fact that there are no s...
In my mid-teens I was given as a present the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. I started to read at the beginning and worked my way up to letter C where I arrived at Churchill. I was hugely enjoying reading his famous motivational and inspirational quotes when I read: “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of qu...
Much of my business life is spent coaching and supporting people through change, both personal and professional. One of the many reasons people seek me out is because I’m viewed as being someone who is comfortable with change; somebody who is able to navigate complex, uncertain and ambiguous environments where events seem to be c...
The passing of well-loved celebrities is always marked not only by an outpouring of grief but also by an outpouring of newspaper copy. These panegyrics are often parodied in Private Eye with versions such as the “celebrity and me” and “how I taught the celebrity everything he knew” whereby the writer manages to place themselv...
As the country heads inexorably towards an EU referendum, the polls show that most people can barely contain their indifference. Despite this apathy, politicians and the media are running around talking loudly as if nothing else mattered. So why is it that on something of seemingly such importance most people simply switch off. ...
There are few aspects of life that don’t involve making compromises. Every part of our existence involves curtailing individual freedom or postponing desires in order to co-exist with others. We happily obey rules that limit our personal liberty, such as driving on the left or paying taxes, in order to benefit from the security...
