Browsing Posts tagged conversation

The private conversation you have with yourself when it’s quiet, or you’re sitting in a meeting wondering if you should speak out, or when fear strikes in the dark hours of the night is the opportunity to be truly honest with yourself. For several years I have kept a journal. It is where I converse [...]

Yesterday the song Somewhere from Robbie William’s Reality Killed the Video Star started playing on my iPod. I asked my wife if she’d bought it and forgotten to tell me. She hadn’t. It was me and I’d completely forgotten. If that’s not a definition of “enough is enough”, then I don’t know what is. You [...]

On Saturday my family and I spoke via Skype video to our dear friends in the UK. They’re visiting next month and we thought it would be good for the children to all speak and see each other first as they have never met. I was shepherding the conversation with phrases such as, “Ask about X”, [...]

Ever since I was young I’ve been fascinated by the idea that people could learn from books or spend all their life as scholars studying. Now I find I’ve become the very same. My personal mission statement of ten years ago stated, “I am a scholar of life”. What was an inkling then has become [...]

On Monday night my wife and I were attending parent-teacher interviews. We had two appointments booked and we were both on time for the 5.00 pm appointment which left us plenty of time for the second at 5.20 pm. It transpired that we missed the 5.20 pm appointment. Who was to blame? Was it the [...]

Michael Carter and I were chatting this morning about conversations in the workplace and we came around to the topic of performance review as a series of conversations. This is how I prefer to conduct performance reviews. For managers and supervisors Pre-interview questionnaires? Bin them. Competency models? Bin them too. Forms to fill out during [...]

The Next Trillion Paul Zane Pilzer. VideoPlus 2001, Paperback, 197 pages, $4.49 There are some interesting ideas in The Next Trillion by Paul Zane Pilzer. I read the Australia and New Zealand Tour Edition which is an abridged version. Let me declare that I own a business which sells products in the wellness industry but [...]

Tom Morris – Modern day philosopher. Every time I’ve been successful Tom’s 7 C’s of Success have all been in play. John Maxwell – Leadership mentor. An amazing knack (though hard work no doubt) of distilling leadership lessons into understandable pieces. Alan Sieler – Ontological coach. My coaching mentor and author of two excellent books [...]

Following in the footsteps of Michael Bungay Stanier I have signed and affirmed the Charter for Compassion, a global effort to raise the awareness of compassion in the world. This simple act had me thinking about compassion over the weekend and how it comes about. There are people in the world who are naturally compassionate. [...]

The meaning we bring to our words in a conversation is important. Each of us has grown up learning what words mean so well that we often fail to recognise others may be using the same words but with different meanings. The result? Confusion and often a lack of respect. To illustrate, let’s imaging two sergeant’s of [...]