David Thomas was born in 1932 to an unmarried mother that he never got to know – he was given up for adoption at 6 weeks old to Rex and Auleva Thomas. Auleva died when Dave was just 5 years old, and he moved with his father (a distant man) around the United States of…
“Real communication happens when we feel safe” (Ken Blanchard – The Heart of a Leader) Not making time to listen with your heart is a huge barrier to effective communication. To achieve understanding and ultimately oneness, time needs to be invested in any relationship to enable empathic listening. Empathic people learn to see things through…
There are numerous stories of those who had to overcome difficulty, were resilient and triumphed, even in the face of criticism or extreme hardship – Ignace Paderewski, the great Polish pianist, was told by his first piano teacher that his hands were too small to master the keyboard; Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper…
There’s a wonderful sign on one of the lengthy dirt roads in South Africa which reads: “Choose your rut carefully as you will be in it for the next one hundred kilometres”! “Ruts” are not particular to gravel roads, however, but seem to be part of the regular human experience as people get stuck in…
“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him” (Booker T Washington) Revenge is the predominate choice of response in our world today. We see this in the multitude of wars and discrepancies all over the planet. It’s characterised in today’s litigious societies and even experienced in religious…
I have travelled on but a few of the great and sometimes famous rivers of our world – the Zambezi (near the Victoria Falls) and the Orange Rivers in Africa, the Colorado and Mississippi in the USA and the Thames in the UK. I still need to get to the Amazon, Nile, Volga, Danube, Yangtze…
Emotional expression is part of being human – emotions need to be communicated, shared and debriefed whether they are positive or negative in their origin. All emotions need resolution – joyous news needs to be celebrated together with others; sadness needs empathy and closeness within meaningful relationships. The work environment is no exception as it,…
“Our world is not divided by race, colour, gender, or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, colour, gender, or religion” (Nelson Mandela) In mathematics, division is a process of splitting a specific amount into equal parts. The number being divided is called the dividend, which…
I love stories and especially mythology. Myths may be seen as a compilation of well-chosen, but contrived characters, weaved into a story to tell of a foundational and even an eternal truth. The phrase “mythic reality” sounds at first like a contradiction of terms – “mythic” meaning by popular belief “not true” and “reality” meaning…
A friend and client of mine, Malcolm Ferguson (owner of Strategy Activator), whilst preparing for a talk about failure, spoke to me about the approach he should take for the speech. He noted that he wanted to use a facilitation example for the talk where one of his previous delegates felt that he was picking…
If you have a dream, why wait? Passion follows a dream – not the other way round. There will always be sufficient energy and resources if the dream is big enough. If there is dream clarity, you will be able to start seeing how the various parts of your life intersect and develop a plan…
Children can teach us adults a lot if only we would listen to them, pick up on their simple (even simplistic) logic and the nature of the questions that they ask. When my granddaughter was three years’ old, she arrived at the stage where she asked a lot of “why” questions, had an opinion on…
