It’s finally Live!

I can’t begin to tell you how happy we are to see our new web site go live.  Anyone running a business will appreciate how difficult it can be to truly represent your business, your brand, your values on a few pages and I think we’ve managed to do that.

So here it is; we’ve tried to present it from the viewpoint of someone in an organisation with a problem/opportunity in mind who wants to partner with someone who has a track record in Learning & Development. Please tell us if that works for you or not.

I want to keep the Blog live and current, reflecting some of the things we are working on as well as observation and comment on all things relating to leadership, business, life …  and doing good things.

Enormous thanks to our partners at Engage Web for their enduring patience with us and being flexible to all our requests and suggestions.

We are now Live and raring to go!

John

 

Launch day

Posted by John Drysdale
9th April 2015
John's Blog

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Can I Coach the Team?

20 Questions to enhance Teams

‘Can you do something with my team?’

‘What seems to be the problem?’

‘Well morale is really terrible, nobody seems to care about working here and we have lots of conflict’

‘So can I ask, what have you done to them?’

A not untypical conversation whenever I get asked to facilitate a Team Day, sometimes called an ‘away day’ or ‘teambuilding’ event.  Whilst I may be a bit harsh on the leader in this scenario, I do think that this kind of ‘state’ within the team is not a natural one. Something must have happened (or not happened), to create it. (more…)

Do you have time to think?

One of my ILM coaching delegates recently recalled a coaching session they had with a client. ‘I didn’t seem to do much, in fact I felt a bit of a fraud’, they said.

When I asked them to expand on this, they explained that (more…)

Am I a Coach or a Mentor?

We’ve been training coaching and mentoring for quite a few years now and this question always pops up, ‘What’s the difference between coaching and mentoring?’  In fact it’s one of the questions you need to answer if you want to (more…)

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Why be a coach or mentor?

… your business community needs you

I am a little biased but I love both coaching and mentoring.  I used to enjoy being the ‘trainer’ which satisfied the performer in me but as I get older there is something that I find deeply satisfying in being a coach or mentor (we will touch on the difference between the two in a later blog).

More than that, I find it a privilege to work with people.  (more…)

Speaking Truth to Power

For those afraid of speaking …

(But) TED is a tough, pressured, hugely stressful gig, even for experienced public speakers, and I’m not that. Standing in the wings waiting to go on, I told the stage manager that my heart was racing uncontrollably and in an act of great kindness, she grasped both my hands and made me take breath after breath. And what you don’t see in the video – deftly edited out – is the awful, heart-stopping moment when I forgot a line, followed by another act of collective kindness, a spontaneous empathic cheer as I composed myself and found my cue. “That’s when the audience came onside,” an attendee told me. “You were human. That’s when you won them over.”  Guardian April 2019

 

This from Carole Cadwalladr, a journalist at the Guardian who has in this last year investigated the role of tech corporations and their platforms in influencing the workings of our democracy.  What makes her TED talk so compelling is because here she is facing those very same technology giants on their turf.  And speaking truth to power.

(more…)

Coaching: Deep Impact

This week I had the chance to attend a seminar at the Leeds Coaching Network featuring renowned coach, writer and speaker Julie Starr.  You may be familiar with some of Julie’s work including; ‘The Coaching Manual’, ‘The Mentoring Manual’ and ‘Brilliant Coaching’ and the session was everything you expected it to be. (more…)