Every week I answer questions about leadership and management in my Facebook Live broadcasts. My community of Effortless Leaders (1000 and growing) has great questions and my aim is to give practical, concise answers and ideas that help them move forward.

If you’d like to be part of this community, you can join us here. 

I look forward to seeing you there!

Being kind, helpful and supportive is A GOOD THING.

Being at the beck and call of everyone else so that you don’t have a life is NOT a good thing. You’ll forever feel overwhelmed.

In this video we look at how to protect your time AND be available for other people.

You CAN do both.

Do you spend ages in pointless meetings?

Back-to- back talking shops that serve no purpose and waste our time are a BIG contributor to overwhelm.

You need tactics – for ‘meeting mastery.’

AND - an elegant way to say ‘no’ to those time-wasting talking shops that ruin your day. 

This video will show you how.

No more mind-numbing collective procrastination where nothing gets done. 

The Energy Effortless Connection - watch this short video all about how to maximise your high energy time AND create some doable routines.

As always, the steps are bite-sized, practical and actionable.

As always I’m taking a break from writing new blogs in August to recharge my batteries (I try to practise what I preach) so over this month I will be sharing four of this year’s most popular blog posts with you. If you haven’t read them yet….here’s your chance!

This week it’s about being fired.
​
​I’ve been fired twice. 

Once from a seasonal job in Switzerland - for insubordination. (If you know me, that won’t surprise you at all – and in my defence, I was very young). And a year or so later for not ‘looking the part’ (my ‘just out of student life’ gear didn’t work in the hallowed world of posh interior design). 

That taught me I wanted to work in a ‘less traditional’ environment – over the next ten years my travel industry job took me to Spain, France, Australia, Thailand, Israel, Greece, Egypt, Cyprus, Hawaii (someone had to do it). My bosses were a plane journey away and I worked with some great people who became lifelong friends. (That taught me the value of true friendship – and freedo...

As always I’m taking a break from writing new blogs in August to recharge my batteries (I try to practise what I preach) so over this month I will be sharing four of this year’s most popular blog posts with you. If you haven’t read them yet….here’s your chance!

This week it’s Corporate Values.

I have to say I am sometimes a bit cynical about corporate values (there, I said it!). Not because they are not good things to have – in theory they are - but because so often they are words created to sound good, written by the senior team, a ‘project group’ or a bunch of consultants who then think ‘job done’. But everyone else thinks they are being ‘done to’. 

No-one in the business really understands them or remembers them and even if they do, they don’t necessarily see those values being lived or breathed on a daily basis. 

And we all know that actions speak louder than words.

There’s also the belief that some values can be seen as unhelpful to organisational performance or a way of avoiding d...

As always I’m taking a break from writing new blogs in August to recharge my batteries (I try to practise what I preach) so over this month I will be sharing four of this year’s most popular blog posts with you. If you haven’t read them yet….here’s your chance!

This week:

I recommended this book just before Christmas last year. It’s a must read.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

So if you’re off on your holidays, put it on your reading list.

Compelling, frightening, illuminating and completely mind boggling.

A couple of years ago, I gave one of my clients an experiment to practise ‘small talk’ with a variety of people in and outside work. In the supermarket, on the many flights he took for work, with colleagues and so on.

There was a solid business case and reason for this as well as a deeply personal one which was about building trust, being genuinely interested in others and getting to know people as ‘human beings’ not just roles and titles. In essence it was about helping him to CONNECT with his work colleagues. He’d struggled to do this using the belief that ‘private stuff has no place at work’ and it was having a detrimental effect on his work relationships – people described him as ‘secretive’ and ‘closed’ when of course he simply saw the world in a different way from his peers .

He really wanted to change this (whilst remaining true to what he described as ‘my inner introvert’!) and so he started those experiments. He found it hard at first. He thought that talking about the weath...