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Navigating Volatility: How to Maintain Productive Stress Levels in Yourself and Your Team

New Zealanders are currently facing a number of challenges in this volatile environment. Never mind the economy, the recent flooding and cyclone (and its ongoing structural, social, and psychological aftermath) has drained energy, time, attention, and resources from business as usual, and the shortage of talented people has made it more difficult for firms to meet their staffing needs. At the…

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Accelerating Team Collaboration: A Strategy for Effective Teamwork

(Sign up for this newsletter in future via LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/getting-better-buy-in-7018707415135117312/ ) Have you ever had a negative work experience or reduced productivity because of misunderstandings or conflicts between people’s working styles or personalities? Often after a year or more of stepping on toes and awkward conversations after avoiding them, a…

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Navigating Volatility: How to Maintain Productive Stress Levels in Yourself and Your Team

(Sign up for this newsletter in future via LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/getting-better-buy-in-7018707415135117312/ ) New Zealanders are currently facing a number of challenges in this volatile environment. Never mind the economy, the recent flooding and cyclone (and its ongoing structural, social, and psychological aftermath) has drained energy, time, attention, and…

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#Leadership #leadershipdevelopment #leadershiptraining #peopleskills #stressmanagement

The role of emotions in decision-making

Here’s a brief extract from my book ‘The Brain-Based Boss’: Thomas Gilovich, a leading psychologist looking into decision-making and behavioural economics, said, ‘One of the most important findings from my field of psychology is that the tiniest little change in circumstance can have big impacts on people’s behaviour’. Maybe you’re one of those managers who say things like, ‘They’re paid to…

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Sales Presentation Preparation

In my training workshops in recent months, I’ve seen an uptick in business-people who are not professional salespeople nor confident presenters wanting / needing / having to get better at delivering their own sales presentations.Maybe you’re one of them, or someone in your team is?Have you ever felt overwhelmed or underprepared when it comes to presenting your sales pitch? I’ve put together a…

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Let's Write Right: 5 Tips for Professional Business-Writing

If I wasn’t paranoid before, then nothing will generate anxiety quite like writing an article about writing. The apostrophe, colon, and hyphen in this article’s title are staring right back at me dauntingly, as is the Oxford comma in this sentence after the word ‘colon’. And, yes, those are a pair of inverted commas around ‘colon’, not quote marks. Makes you want to abandon writing altogether,…

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Become A 'Hub': How knowing who knows is more important than knowing

I was running a public workshop on sales skills. I wouldn’t say there was a real mix of folks. With one exception, the participants were pretty experienced salespeople. Some were up for a refresher. Some had hit a wall or ceiling, or had hit a rough patch or they’d had a particularly frustrating or negative sales experience. Some were taking on new people themselves and wanted help codifying what…

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Choice, Bro?

People value choice and try hard to get themselves into positions of choice but choices often undercut our happiness. When it comes to being a ‘chooser’, people fall into one of two categories. Maximizers seek out the best possible choice. They make social comparisons, eventually make better choices on average but are less happy afterwards. Indeed, maximizers are more prone to depression…

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Social Ability

Loneliness is a disease. Conversely, hanging with true friends can cure or, at least, prevent or mitigate actual diseases. Sociability is a double-edged sword – it depends who you socialise with. Good friends are good for you but not all friends are good friends.A study published in the journal Cancer followed women with Ovarian cancer. Those with high levels of social support had lower levels in…

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Persuade via Tangibility

When it comes to influence and persuasion, a visual approach can be more effective. Jeni Cross, a Sociologist at Colorado State University, speaks about a campaign in her State to encourage homeowners to insulate their houses. Education and publicity managed to get 20% of homeowners to insulate. The new campaign tripled that rate achieving a 60% insulation rate. What did they do?Their…

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Thinking About Thinking

The Anableps is a type of fish found in Central and South America. It is also a metaphor I use in my training and writing. Its local nickname is ‘the four-eyed fish.’ It doesn’t literally have four eyes but its two eyes each have two divisions that function, effectively, as separate eyes. It’s primarily a surface-dwelling floater and, as such, can be preyed upon from above by birds and from below…

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Improving culture and engagement

I’m onto the 2nd day of a 2-day workshop I’m running with some new leaders in an organisation in the sports ‘industry’.Had a quick ole brainstorm yesterday around some commonalities between sporting leadership and business leadership, especially when you are both. Here are a few off the list. Gotta say it’d be hard to argue that if you targeted one of these a week for a couple of months, you…

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The problem with challenges is that they’re challenging

Responsibility and being needed aren’t just things that society tries to convince us we should have because it’s morally virtuous. They’re things that keep us alive, purposefully active, and connected.An Ellen Langer study of nursing home residents created 2 groups. One group was encouraged to make decisions for themselves – where and when to receive visitors for example. They were given a…

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'Troika' - An internal Consultation Process

‘Troika’ – An internal Consultation Process

I am reading up on facilitation techniques so I can customise a workshop I am running for an upcoming client. I discovered something called the ‘Troika Liberating Structure.’ (I ‘discovered’ this in the same sense that Europeans ‘discovered’ America).Weirdly, the term ‘Troika’ means a political regime ruled effectively as a collective authority of three powerful but separate individuals. OK, is…

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No, thank YOU for getting touch

I’m not sure if this is a good news story or a bad news story. It is a story, and it was an adventure. Not for me, but for a parcel sent to me from Arkansas USA on May 5th. I received it Oct 27th. Hey, I get it. Plagues. Lockdowns. Political interference in the system. Supply chains. Most days, I’m not a moron and I’m not an insensitive monster. I figured it would take a while. It wasn’t…

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Shadowy Inflation

Creepy silhouette of a dangerous criminal wearing hoodie I read an article today about ‘shadow inflation’. (A new term to me. so, today I have already learned something. I’ll take the rest of the day off).As I read it, it means that rather than increasing prices, businesses choose instead to keep the price the same but give you less for it.As a consumer of chips and chocolate, I HAVE NOTICED…

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Your call is NOT important to us

When you’ve spoken to a bank or an ISP or whatever business, has anyone ever literally said to your face, “Your call, and you, are NOT important to us…”? You more often than not get acceptable customer service from owner-operated businesses but your experiences will vary wildly when you deal with larger organisations and I’ll tell you why. It’s not, as you might think, because they’re so big…

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