Hi Reader, What if today, you resolved to get 1% better at something? Maybe a core work skill, maybe learning a language, physical fitness... You choose. And then what if tomorrow you made that same resolution, to make a 1% improvement again? All of us have the opportunity to improve. We can learn new techniques, seek feedback and tweak our approaches, stick on a YouTube video, or go to a workshop that opens up more possibilities. It's easier to make small, continuous improvements than to go...
23 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Welcome to Rev Up for the Week, where every Sunday I send you a thought to kick-start Monday. Over the last week, I've been thinking a lot about values. I've been priviliged to be working with the team at Oliver Bonas over the last couple of months, delivering a couple of keynotes to help them relaunch their organisational values. Oliver Bonas's values are also a piece of wall-art that they sell in their stores, which makes it super-easy for the staff to remember them: Work Hard...
30 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Welcome to Rev Up for the Week, where each Sunday I send you a simple thought to supercharge the week ahead. I've been out doing client keynotes this week, sharing some of the ideas from 'KIND'. One thing that's started a lot of conversations is the idea of abundance, and more specifically, abundance vs scarcity. I want to share this with you. What I'm about to share, I believe with all of my soul, but I also know that part of our brain deeply rejects it. What can be objectively...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Welcome to Rev Up - one idea delivered every Sunday to supercharge your week ahead. There's been a lot of talk in recent years about the need to make work more human - to cast aside the unfeeling throws of the industrial age, to keep our humanity as we move to AI automation, to bring our whole selves to work, to recognise and feel the emotions involved in what we're doing. The problem that we often face in making work more human is not just about how to make work less robotic. It's...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, One of my first supervisory roles was working in a call centre. I'd landed the promotion by accident, but it was better than being on the phones, and a whole extra £1 an hour, so I went with it. Part of the job was admin - clocking everyone in, clocking everyone out - and the rest was keeping everyone motivated. There was a whiteboard to track sales, a budget to give out prizes... all the stuff you'd expect to see in a 90's outbound telesales centre. The admin records I'd inherited...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader, Great meetings can change the world. The problem is that most meetings... just aren't that great. In How to Fix Meetings, Hayley Watts and I talk about the 40-20-40 model that we learned from my friend and professional meeting-facilitator, Martin Farrell. The idea is simple: spend 40% of your time and attention on the preparation, 20% on the meeting itself, and save 40% for the follow-through. Sounds sensible, right? Yet when we think about the implications, it means that if you're...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, I've been in the middle of some very stressful house renovation work this last couple of weeks. There's been a dispute over some of the work, I've been threatened by the building company... It's been all kinds of high-stress. In a moment when I felt exhausted and 'done in' by it all earlier this week, my partner Meg texted me the simple line "this too shall pass". It's a line I've texted others in similar moments, but of course when you're in the middle of things like that, you...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader Welcome to Rev Up for the Week, where every Sunday I deliver you a simple idea to supercharge your week ahead. This week I did a couple of talks and podcasts where the question kept coming up, about whether taking time to build more kindness, empathy, trust and psychological safety in your team was worth the effort. It's an important question in a world where unkindness seems to be having a revival. But creating psychological safety - so that people feel able to take the small...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, Specificity improves almost everything. When we write down to-do list items, our brains are lazy. We write down single words that are akin to the nags in our heads - "report", or "garage", or "conference". What we really need to get momentum is to get clear. And what we need to get clear is always two specific things: the next phyical action we need to take (with verbs and extra words so that our brains can picture it happening); and the desired project outcome ("how will we know...
3 months ago • 1 min read