OK, folks – quick quiz time: complete this saying: “Pride goeth before….” If you said “a fall”, you’d be wrong. And yet almost everyone would say that. The actual quote is “Pride goes before DESTRUCTION, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18) – but we almost always shorten the verse. It’s a…
Money may seem like the main motivator for many people – but what if it’s not? What if there are other ‘first-order’ motivators that we ignore at our peril? I’ve just come from a meeting where a speaker pointed out that extrinsic motivators like money, fame, and praise are all important – but beyond a certain point,…
I had reason, during the week, to use a famous line of Ralph Waldo Emerson – the one about a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds. It was from his essay, ‘On Self-Reliance’ – but as I looked it up, it struck me that I hadn’t read Emerson, or Thoreau, or their ilk since high school…
One of the first ‘Train the Trainer’ sessions I ever undertook started with us being asked to make a hot drink for a fellow participant. However, we were told we could only ask what what was required once – and after that, we could not ask for any further information. The idea, of course, was to show…
It’s a cliche that we’ve all heard – PRIOR PREPARATION PREVENTS POOR PERFORMANCE – but just because it’s a cliche doesn’t mean it is untrue. Over the years, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of successful presentations that resulted from the presenter ‘winging it.’ Oh, we have all seen cases…
Shirley and I were laying in the pre-dawn darkness of a hotel room this morning … whoops, this sounds like it’s going somewhere it isn’t! Anyway, we were both wide awake, and discussing the fact that we have been a ‘couple’ for 40 years in just a few short months (we met at a party…
This week’s training tip is on how to get your ideas to sink in … If you wish to get an idea across to an audience, you can do worse than adopt the ‘Tell Them, Tell Them, Tell Them’ mantra. Lewis Carroll, in ‘Hunting For The Snark’, wrote “What I tell you three times is…
It was about 40 years ago, as a 15 year old teenager, that I first got involved in politics. I was in the youth group of a now-defunct political party, at around the same time as the then-brand-new southeast freeway was being opened. As part of a protest, a colleague and I snuck onto the…
Cairns Communications 