Very few things in life are for ever, nor are they guaranteed. Time passes by, and like a flower turning towards the sun or a tree bent double by a hurricane, you play whatever hand fate deals you at any given moment. You never quite know what is around the next corner, but experience tells…
A child walks wide-eyed into a sweet shop filled with sugary delights. There is a breathtakingly wide choice of treats, and initially, it is hard to focus attention on anything for more than a few seconds. Then, out of the blue, two realities hit them: firstly it would take a year and a good…
It is hot in the UK again this week. Us Brits aren’t so used to the sun, so you can always guarantee your fair share of pink faces on the train or in the office on the Monday morning after a particularly hot weekend. We are of course all well aware of the dangers of…
For fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this would be the end of the blog, enough said. However, for the rest of us seeking meaning outside the realms of a fictional world (no matter how compelling), I think that we would all have slightly different answers. I suspect that many of the answers…
The discussions that make me think the most are those with my kids. They ask the simplest questions, but when you delve a little deeper, they are not simple at all. I was having a conversation with my son about the importance of respect, and why it takes a special person to respect the…
When I am trusted with a search mandate, I put myself under considerable pressure to do the best job possible. This pressure doesn’t relent once the initial payment has hit my account – in some ways it ratchets up a few notches. Someone trusts me to do a job for them, and I need to…
Sometimes when you find yourself in a deep and muddy hole, the best thing that you can do is calmly look up at the sky. It might be blue, it might be grey, but that simple act of looking somewhere else will remind you that your life is not all about the “here and now,”…
If you are like me, I bet you have some pretty long-held beliefs. You view life in a certain way, and these beliefs dovetail with your overall understanding of things. Questioning a certain belief might throw your entire worldview into doubt, so many of us carry on in our little bubbles, regardless of whether our…
One of the hardest challenges for any professional is being able to maintain a consistent approach to their work and to other people, no matter what the circumstances. Laissez-faire managers in a benign economic period can turn into utter tyrants when things get tougher. This change of approach is often the cause of subsequent employee…
With so much contradictory advice out there, it is rare that candidates fail to ask me for my take on the ingredients for interview success. They are often perplexed a little by my simple answer, the sort of answer that you would give to a seven-year-old playing in their first competitive sports match: Enjoy it….
As we begin our slow-motion car crash into the next recession (whenever that may be), the cyclical nature of life and business cannot be ignored. Thinking back through our careers, many of us will have had times of feast and famine, but in a similar way to the fortunes of any economy, the times of…
The rise and fall of the human voice has more subtleties than the most dramatic piece of classical music. While language can be carefully selected and body language practiced, it is often the variations in the tone of your voice that will reveal your true feelings. On the other hand, if a tone is deliberately…