The Guru trainer walked into the room and said..
“which one is the ENTP”

I raised my hand and said..
“that will be me”

He looked at me and said ” don’t worry, it will be alright” … and then left the room

Ever feel a little different to the world!!

The world is nuts (technical term!!) at the moment…. and it’s not likely to change.

If you find yourself going around the hamster wheel like a loon.. step off and do something different.

Sometimes we forget who we are and what we are trying to do… you need a little peace… to piece it back together!

Are we mad?….. possibly!

The environment (the world around us) is changing rapidly… it’s chaos.

The way we behave is strongly linked to the environment.
So…. if your behaviour is directly linked to your environment…. expect the way you think/feel to be in constant turmoil.

Controlling the way you think/ feel is the answer…. controlling the environment is a tad trickier.

We have a tremendous brain… we just didn’t get any instruction!!!

60,000 thoughts a day, 90% the same as the ones you had yesterday…. no wonder we get a little testy when asked…

“which way do you eat your banana?”

I’ve got a few random questions…

Said the candidate I was interviewing for a senior position in a client company.

Brilliant. I love random questions. I was hoping he’d ask things like “What’s the capital of Lithuania?” or “How many wasabi peas can you fit in a smarties tube?” but no.

This man was an ESTJ and ESTJs don’t really do random.

Corporate Governance. Culture. Headcount. Productivity. Profitability. His questions were carefully structured. Ordered. Specific. Relevant. Succinct.

ESTJ is one of the 16 personality types in the Myers-Briggs® Personality Profiling model. Those with a preference for ESTJ (Extraversion – Sensing – Thinking and Judgement) tend to deal in concrete facts.

They often make strong leaders; natural architects of efficient systems and processes. The ESTJ pays  great attention to detail.

He or she respects rules, law and order. (I bet if traffic wardens did a survey, they’d rarely find an ESTJ that had illegally parked).

Sometimes overly demanding and critical of those who under-perform to their standards or disagree with their ‘black and white’ view of the world, the ESTJ can appear aggressive or impatient with others if they are not careful.

The ESTJ prefers logic and objectivity to emotion. When under stress, the usually vocal ESTJ may feel isolated and find it hard to express his or her feelings.

ESTJs work hard, are reliable and pragmatic in their approach. They like to see results and they like to see them quickly.

They may not naturally think too far outside the box but they will put a huge amount of effort into making sure what’s in the box runs smoothly.

So, my candidate may not have learned  who I would most like to be stranded with on a dessert island or what colour my first car was but he did get all the answers to his questions about the company he was considering joining.

And I got an insight into his ESTJ world – logical, methodical, detail focused and standards driven.

A final word of caution however. Myers Briggs is a great tool for understanding how a person prefers to work, how they might interact within a team or what their personal development needs might be…but it cannot be used to determine their competence to do the job.  If you are recruiting, you need to test that some other way.

If you’d like to know more about Myers Briggs, listen to our podcasts, check out our special offer on  Myers-Briggs courses or give us a call.

And, in case you were wondering, you can get at least 42 wasabi peas into a smarties tube. I’ve tried.

Have you ever decided to buy a car and then noticed there are lots of the same car you are going to buy on the roads.

The Reticular Activating system…. never heard of it… well you should!!!

This little baby is the gateway to your dreams….. if you set the compass right!

You are what you think…. spend a little time on how you think…!

Please forgive me but this week, I am shamelessly promoting the fact that my brother-in-law, Sergeant Christopher Godwin, is running the Amsterdam Marathon on 17 October 2010 in memory of my step-dad.

We lost my step-dad, Valentine Flint, on 11 November last year following a long and harrowing illness triggered by a heart attack, sustained while out go-karting with colleagues from his beloved John Lewis, Oxford Street.

Chris is aiming to raise £1,000 for the British Heart Foundation.

If you are a fan of our website and you want to help, please go to:

http://original.justgiving.com/christophergodwin

for more information.

Thank you.

Wendie xxx

Leadership

Is it me or are the people that enter the Dragons’ Den more deluded than the contestants on X-Factor?

• My name is Brian. I’m looking for £100k for a 10% stake in my business. I have invented a cup, which you can fill with tea. And drink from.

• Hmmm. So you value your business at £1 million. How many of these cups have you sold?

• Four. One to my mum. One to my dad and 2 to my Uncle Harry who drinks a lot of tea and doesn’t have a dishwasher. And they all really love them.

• This is a tough market. What makes your cup so special when there are thousand out there already?

• Mine is blue. I expect to sell 2 million in the next 6 weeks and they retail at £1.99 each.

• Blue cups, eh? Novel. How much do they cost you to make?

• Err.. I don’t know. I think it’s about £3 per unit.

• Let me tell you where I am, Brian. I’m out.

Mad. The Dragons are often prone to quote the old adage “Turnover is vanity. Profit is sanity.”  And they’re right. Well, they would be. They are all multi-millionaires.

Many companies do not pay enough attention to the acquisition cost of their business. It’s easy to increase your top line when you chuck a load of money at it but it’s bottom line profit that counts.

There are only two ways to influence this; Reduce your costs and grow your income. Sometimes easier said than done.

If you want some help, give us a call. We are currently offering business strategy sessions that will help you redefine your customer proposition, routes to market and the skills required to get you there.

Monday 7 September

Skills development

Bounjourno!  La donna cucina!

This week, I have mostly been learning Italian. And trying to make cupcakes. Oh, and working 15 hours a day.

When you’re working flat out, doing the same thing day in, day out, it can be easy to fall into a rut.

I worked out long ago that when you’re in a rut, you start to fade. If you’re not learning, you’re not growing and if you’re not growing, you die.

If you’re feeling restless or bored, learn something new. It doesn’t have to be anything too taxing. You just have to enjoy it.

So what if my cupcakes could pass for tiny little biscuits and all I can say in Italian is ‘The car is yellow’? You never know. Maybe someday I will open a biscuit shop in a petrol station in Rome.

Learning opens up new possibilities.

If basket weaving isn’t your thing, take a look at the courses we offer. From leadership to team development, advanced presentation skills to influencing, there’s something for everyone.

New ideas, new ways of solving problems or new skills bring new energy. And with energy, anything is possible.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Arriverderci.

1st Impressions

My brother has just called to say that he has fallen in love with a farm that he has seen for sale.

After 2 minutes of being there, he has already mentally moved in, bought the wellies and worked out how he can raise the half million he’ll need to live The Good Life. And this from a man who took longer to choose which kind of pasty to have, on our recent trip to Cornwall.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly we decide to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on a home. You just know, don’t you? Except sometimes, you don’t.

First impressions aren’t always right but the brain is very good at deleting the things you don’t want to see; like the dry rot, the fact that none of your furniture will fit or the crack den next door.

The same applies when choosing people. For jobs, I mean.

Many managers I have spoken to recruit based on gut feeling or first impressions and then are later disappointed that the people they have chosen don’t meet their expectations.

One of the classic recruitment mistakes is to recruit in your own image. That is to say, to recruit someone like you. Your company doesn’t need another you. They’ve already got one.

To have the best chance of recruiting the right person, here are some tips:

• Write a ‘person specification’, listing the qualifications, skills, experience and personal attributes you are looking for.

• Review a number of CVs and select the ones that best match your person spec.

• Write a set of interview questions that will help you explore the areas you are interested in.

• Phrase your questions in the past tense. ‘How did you deal with XXX’ is better than ‘How would you deal with XXX’. This will help ensure the candidate relates how they actually dealt with a situation and not give a ‘textbook’ answer on how they might deal with a situation.

• Probe! If your intuition is telling you there is more to a story, there probably is. Ask further questions to clarify.

• Watch out for ‘We…’ answers. Who is ‘we’? Find out what part the candidate played in the scenario he or she is describing. ‘We achieved a 100% increase in sales’ might mean that a colleague achieved 150% in sales while the candidate’s went down by 50%…

• Pay attention to body language.

• Use a competency based assessment to test whether the person can demonstrate, in practice,  what you are looking for… or whether they are just blagging.

You won’t always get it right, but you’ll be much more likely to find your dream candidate if you stick to these rules, than if you simply rely on how you feel in the first 30 seconds of an interview.

If you’d like to know more, or want details of our competency based assessments, please give us a ring.

Motivation

It was going to be so beautiful.

I had lured my friends from London and Bath, with promises of the Bournemouth Air Festival, Red Arrows, poignant moments on the beach in silent salute of the Battle of Britain Memorial flight, wing-walkers, parachutists, sky lanterns, fireworks,  beach BBQ, cocktails and neon frisbees.

You’d think in mid August, you wouldn’t have to worry about the weather, but no. It poured down. No planes. No fireworks. No Air Festival.

I feel really sorry for the people that organise the festival. It is usually spectacular. Maybe next year.

In the meantime, what to do? Top tips for an impromptu indoor beach barbecue:

a)     Get the oven on. When one set of chicken kebabs is ready, throw in the next.

b)     Invite my friend Tony. He brings huge cupcakes. Aside from being delicious, these provide endless opportunities for 3 year olds to perfect their grouting techniques, especially if you have porcelain floor tiles.

c)     Ensure you have lots of clean towels to warm the mad guests who go paddling in the sea in the rain. In their pants.

d)     Crack open the glo-sticks and attach several to each small child. This will allow you to see where the little buggers are when they are posting burgers into your DVD player.

e)     Run competitions for the best cocktail. After a couple, no-one will notice the lack of aviation action.

Don’t let external influences ruin your day. It’s up to you how it turns out. You can let the weather or your work or your boss get you down. You can despair when you find pink frosted icing in your knicker drawer. Or you can laugh out loud and take it all in your stride.

Not sure how? Give us a call or check out our courses on self- motivation.

Monday 16 August

Leadership

If your business isn’t doing as well as you’d like, you might want to consider employing my niece, Emily.

The only problem is, you’ll have to wait a while because she’s only nine.

On a recent family holiday (30 of us invaded Cornwall for a week), Em decided that an open-air talent show was in order. And once Em decides something is going to happen, you’d better not get in her way.

First she drew up the accounts, listing the cost of everything she would need in order to determine how much to charge the punters and still make a profit. (When she grows up, she wants to be Sir Alan Sugar).

Then she auditioned to select her acts before producing the tickets which she sold to remaining family members; shrewdly negotiating with the less than enthusiastic by offering a ‘Forces Discount’ to her soldier dad and an ‘OAP discount’ to her great-granddad on the basis that he was, well…really old.

She then recruited and selected her staff; I was to be in charge of hair and make-up while others were given jobs as stage crew, judges, catering etc. (Salaries accounted for).

Next, she cornered me to take her to a supermarket, where she bought huge bags of popcorn, which she then decanted into paper cups to sell at 50p a go in the interval.

The next few hours passed in a flurry of promotional posters, stage plans, decorations, lighting and video consultations, with Em standing in the middle, clipboard in hand, encouraging and directing her ‘staff’ to ensure that the set was exactly as she had envisaged. Her Leadership Skills are phenomenal. Simon Cowell would have been so proud.

The rain began minutes before the show. Sensing that the grown-up rellies weren’t overly keen on getting drenched, I gently suggested that she consider postponing the event to which she shrugged her shoulders and said ‘It’s not my fault it’s raining. They’ve bought tickets but they don’t have to come.’ So mercenary for one so young…

To avert disaster, I took her on a little walk round the pond, to evaluate her options. Option 1 – go ahead and risk the wrath of the crowd, crew and contestants (which might mean they won’t come to your next event) or Option 2 – Have a dress rehearsal tonight in my caravan and do the show tomorrow? As she was intending to enter the competition herself, I think the lure of being covered in glitter twice swung it, so Option 2 it was.  (She is only nine, after all).

Next day the sun shone, the acts were delightful, especially 10 month old Riley who wowed the crowd with his waving and clapping routine, the audience was in high spirits and Emily was in her element.

Em’s brother Joe won the competition and though she graciously clapped and cheered as he received his prize, I could see in her eyes that she had badly wanted to win.

By next morning though, she had rationalised her defeat as she told me, ‘Joe might have won the chocolates, but I’m the one with £10 profit in my pocket…!’.

And there’s just no arguing with that.

Click here for details of our Leadership Skills courses, or get in touch. We promise you won’t have to audition.

Monday 2 August

Influencing Skills

Gavin and I have recently been recruiting for client companies, which has caused us to review a number of CVs.

I’m not a big fan of CVs as they rarely tell you anything about the true essence of a person but they can be very funny.

• Like the one where a guy listed his hobbies as rugby, lap dancing clubs and nights out with the lads and his only qualification as CSE Grade 2 Needlework…
• Or the one where a lady said in her profile that she was a ‘morning person’ and when asked about this at interview said that by the afternoon she was generally too tired to concentrate…
• Or the one where a woman stated that she did karate but had only needed to use this in the workplace once…
• Or the one where a guy included a photo of someone who clearly wasn’t him.

The problem with CVs is that you are expected to write about measurable achievements, when what we’d really like to know is the moments in life that have made you really proud.

So I have compiled my ‘alternative CV’, with some of my own best bits:

• Receiving word that one of our students in India had achieved his dream of becoming a manager, following successful completion of a management programme we ran there.
• Arriving in Beijing after a 400 mile charity bike ride, blistered and tired to the core, to be greeted by a sea of smiling children from a local school for the mentally handicapped.
• Losing a hugely talented staff member to a tea shop in Newquay, so she could achieve her aim of becoming a British surfing champion; and the smile she gave me for letting her go without a fight.
• Listening to a shy Russian gentleman toasting us in broken English, for bringing hope to the people of his country.
• Standing in a pub, watching as the team of disparate and under-performing individuals we had inherited two years before, celebrated another successful year together… and realising that they did not need us anymore.

If you have to recruit as part of your job, chances are, it’s not your primary role. If you’d like to know more about how to spot and secure the best candidates, give us a call or check out our Influencing Skills course.

Monday 26th July

Sales Skills

That’s enough about ME. Let’s talk about YOU…. What do YOU think of ME?

I’ve just sat through a sales pitch from a software company that wanted to sell me the latest thing in …errr… software.  Don’t get me wrong. I invited them in because I am interested in the type of software they offer.

Instead of finding out what I needed, the company in question spent almost the entire meeting telling me why I should use them, who they had worked for before and in what capacity.

Borrrr-inggg.

Hello..if a potential client has invited you in, they already know this stuff. That’s why you’re there. What you need to do is find out about them.

How many times have you been stuck with a terminal bore at a party? What made them boring? Yes, they talked about themselves all night.

And how many times have you met someone and just clicked? Why? Because the other person made an effort to find out about YOU. To listen to YOU.

This is such a simple concept that it still amazes me that salesmen choose to ignore it.

You know, I once had to throw a double glazing salesman out of a friend’s home. After an hour of trying to convince  her that she needed a £3,000 front door (to complement the new windows she was after) when she already had a perfectly functional one, he had resorted to making fake calls to his ‘manager’ and then declaring that she was in luck, the boss had agreed she could have 10% off if she bought in the next 10 minutes… No? Let me call again…Oh wow. This is amazing. He said you can have 20% off…

Errr, still £2,400 more than she wanted to pay… So I stepped in. Mr Double Glazing. You have been evicted. Please leave the Big Brother House. You have been evicted. Please leave the Big Brother House. Through the cheap front door, yes, that’s the one. See… it slams just as well as a three grand one. And while you’re outside, take a look at the shabby windows. The reason she asked you to come. You could have had that sale. If only you’d listened instead of banging on about mortice dreadlocks or whatever…

So… salesmen everywhere. Take note. If you want to increase your sales – Listen to your customer! Or get yourself on our Advanced Selling Skills course. Only £3,000 if you buy it in the next 10 minutes.

No? Hang on. £2,000. No? OMG! The Boss says you can have it for £750. Quick – book now – before he changes his mind.

Or call us and tell us what you need. We’ll listen.

Okay, so you’ve had a simply fabulous idea. It will revolutionise the way the company works, will cost next to nothing and will need hardly any resource to implement.

You’re an ‘extrovert’ in Myers-Briggs® terms so you’ve just got to tell someone. You excitedly share your idea with the people around you, get them to trial it and now they’re hooked too. You are a genius, if you say so yourself.

You bound off to see your ‘introvert’ boss. You’ve got to get this idea off the ground and you’ve gotta do it NOW!

Your boss is busy. You know he’s snowed under with work and you can see he looks stressed. You ignore this because, well, you have an idea that will revolutionise the way the company works and will cost next to nothing to implement and …yada yada.

You pounce on him; literally. He looks displeased but says you have 30 seconds. You pitch your idea in 15. Come on … come on …

And then he says … “No”.

You didn’t see that coming. Seeing you wince with pain at the finality of his decision he relents and suggests you speak to the specialist – his trusted IT guru.

Now, Mr ‘Specialist Trusted IT Guru’ (said in a sulky voice) is also an ‘introvert’. You know about Myers-Briggs® (you just forgot the rules in your earlier excitement) so this time, you do it differently…

You make an appointment to see the STIG when it is convenient for him. You send him an email to brief him in advance so that he has time to think.  Putting an Introvert ‘on the spot’ is never a good idea and they often prefer written communication.

• You sit down with the STIG at the appointed time and you take him through your idea in a clear and concise manner. (Introverts are not big on being pounced on and they’re not lovers of  ‘waffle’ either).
• You wait for him to question you. (Introverts think before they speak and extroverts often annoyingly dive into this silence and keep talking).
• You don’t interrupt when he speaks. (Introverts hate it when extroverts do this).
• You wait for him to answer when you ask him something. (Introverts often complain that extroverts ask a question and while waiting for the answer, ask another one).
• You give him time to consider what has been said.
• He comes back to you later that day and says “Yes”.

Understanding Myers-Briggs® means that even if you get it wrong sometimes, you can work out why and then get it right the next time.

Click here for details of our Myers Briggs® training courses or give us a call to discuss.

Do you have a team that does not always play to win? Do you feel more like a referee in a fighting ring, some days than a manager?

Don’t worry if you do, the good news is that people are not designed to work in team. Think ’survival of the fittest’ we have a natural instinct to be competitive in order to survive…so it is completely normal for things to kick off a little!!

At Think, we believe that, whilst rivalry and competitiveness is healthy, you should never excel at another persons loss or expense. To help you unite your team to work together to achieve common goals why not try our Team Skills course.

Unlike last week, however, where you’ll have noticed my mood was dark; this week I have decided to view the theft of my proverbial glass as a good thing because:

1.)  drinking too much is bad for you and;

2.)  it gives me an excuse to loiter in the Waterford Crystal department in John Lewis next weekend.

As Francois Lelord says in his wonderful book, ‘Hector and the Search for Happiness’, “Happiness is a way of looking at things”.

I have spent the week overseeing the implementation of a new computer based sales system for a client; with set-back after set-back as the system would not play ball (a bit like the England football team except that we eventually won).

Whilst I could look back at the week, exhausted, with a sense of utter frustration, I am choosing only to see the good in what happened.

My reason for this is that people came together from all parts of the organisation, to make sure that we succeeded in the end.

I loved the fact that everyone involved pooled their skills and expertise to get the system launched on time. And I loved that they did it with so much enthusiasm, energy and respect for one another’s contribution.

So I would like to thank the team (and especially Carol and Glenn) for a triumph of teamwork and team spirit over annoying and temperamental computer code.

Projects like these stand or fall, depending on the people involved.

It’s awesome to watch a team of people, all with a common goal in mind, come together to solve a problem. Several heads are definitely better than one.

All too often, however, project teams pull in different directions. Different departments come with their own agendas. Communication breaks down. Blame is bandied about.  Deadlines are missed.

If you are setting up a project that involves input from different parts of your business, you need to make sure that everyone is on the same page from the start.

If you’d like to know more about how to get everyone pulling in the same direction, take a look at our teamwork course or get in touch to see how we can help you

I have just finished reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, a colossal novel depicting the rise of the charismatic and omnicompetent Thomas Cromwell.

I’m sure I should have something profound and intellectual to say about this magnificent piece of literature but to be honest, my over-riding thought when I’d finished was:

“ Bloody hell, HR law was so much less complicated in the days of Henry VIII”.

Coaching? Informal Counselling? Disciplinary processes? Appeals? No, don’t bother with all that; just cut off their heads.

Granted, things are much fairer these days but I bet some people would have a lot more motivation to do their jobs well if the alternative was an appointment with a drunken executioner and a rusty old axe.

As you may gather, I am not in the best of moods.

I have been musing on why it is that some people, despite being paid well over the national average, have such a seemingly low appetite to excel at work. Why they seek more money, power and independence but are not prepared to be accountable for their actions. Why they wait to be ‘spoon-fed’ rather than seek out information for themselves. Is it lack of competence or is it lack of integrity? Possibly, but I think it has more to do with general laziness.

Whatever it is, it is something I have only ever encountered here in the UK and it makes me really angry (in case you hadn’t guessed); especially during a recession, with so many others out of work who would kill for the roles that these people take for granted.

My work has taken me all over the world and I’ve never met anyone in business in Africa, India, Kazakhstan or Trinidad who doesn’t make every effort to excel at what they do.

The people I have met in these countries have passion. To learn. To be the best they can be. They have strong values, vision and most of all hope for a better life; for themselves and their families. They stand accountable for their actions and are willing to work hard for the rewards they receive.

Is it because they have so little to start with, compared to us? I don’t know. But I do know we can learn a lot from them. We can make the most of the opportunities we have because we certainly have more opportunities than they do. We can learn, we can take pride in our work and do our jobs to the very best of our abilities.

Perhaps one day I’ll round up the people of the UK who think the world owes them and take them to Aksai, Kazakhstan; where the land is grey, the houses greyer still and the sky greyest of all. And where the people have so little, work so hard and, in stark contrast to their surroundings, are so very vibrant.

Maybe then, the lazy sods will see what I mean.

“I wish all your family were dead”.

So said a less than satisfied caller as she slammed the phone down on a lovely Helpline assistant that I worked with this week. The Helpline assistant had been politely and patiently trying to explain that the caller would not be entitled to receive a payout from her late ex-husband’s insurance policy.

It’s hard not to react when another person attacks. We’re hard-wired with a ‘fight or flight’ trigger when we come under fire.

There are, however some basic things to remember, when dealing with ‘difficult’ customers:

• There is no such thing as a ‘difficult customer’ – only a customer who is in a difficult situation.
• We have all been someone else’s difficult customer at some point – it doesn’t mean we’re not nice people the rest of the time – someone, somewhere loves us!
• People in difficult situations do not always behave in the way we’d prefer – they make the best choice they can at the time – which might not be the choice we’d make in the same situation.
• There is always an underlying reason for the way a person behaves. Even if we can’t accept their behaviour, we can usually empathise with the cause (in this case; shock, confusion, grief and mourning – the lady’s ex-husband had tragically been murdered abroad).

Dealing with difficult customer situations on the telephone requires skill and resilience and I greatly admire those who do this well.

The telephone is a ‘barrier’ that makes people braver and sometimes more tactless than if they were face to face.

It’s a bit like when you’re in the car. Someone cuts you up and you hurl abuse, whereas if you bump into them while you’re walking along the pavement, you’re more likely to say ‘sorry’ – even if it wasn’t your fault. Car or telephone – you’re one step removed from seeing the other party as another human being.

As a telephone operative, there are many things you can do to overcome this ‘barrier’ and influence the call to a successful outcome.

If you’d like to know how to do it, check out our Influencing Skills courses which are packed with tips on rapport building, communication skills and questioning and listening techniques.

I can’t see the sea. Which is disconcerting as it was there 20 minutes ago.

I am on my balcony, observing the smog that now hangs above the beach; the product of a thousand disposable barbecues that seem to have been lit in unison by the throng of holidaymakers below.

All day, snippets of arguments have drifted through my open window.

• “Darren, I asked you to put sun cream on me, not cover me in sand”…”We’re on the bloody beach Danielle, what do you expect?”

• “Joshua, I will not tell you again…GET-OUT-OF-THE-SEA!”…But, Muuuuuum, we’re at the seeeeeea-siiiiiiide, you are SUPPOSED to go in the seeeeeea.”

• “Brian, don’t put the windbreak there. I’m sure those young girls don’t want you ogling them all day!” .. “I wasn’t ogling them, Maureen” ..“Oh, so you have noticed them, then?”

But now…it’s all gone quiet.

It seems that the little parties on the beach that have been bickering all day have been reconciled, and all for the price of a packet of sausages.

As the smog begins to drift away, I can just make them out; Darren and Danielle are lying on the sand, looking at the sky. Joshua is sitting on his dad’s lap – eating a burger. Brian and Maureen are sharing a bottle of wine. Someone is playing guitar, while another performs a not too bad rendition of Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’.

So, there you have it. The way to get people to chill out and forget their differences is to gather around a little metal tray and cremate some bits of meat together. Who knew?

If your team is not getting on as well as you’d like them to, and you can’t afford to bring us in to sort the problem out, well…just grab a disposable barbecue and head to the beach. Conflict Management for under a tenner. Can’t be bad.

Click here for details of our Conflict Management Courses or get in touch to discuss what you need.

It’s okay. You’re not alone. The stress that many people feel when they have to speak in public is right up there with bereavement and divorce. Even the most accomplished managers and leaders can break out in a cold sweat when faced with a row of expectant faces.

Think Training & Development believe that to give a great presentation, you simply need to remember one thing the majority of communication is non-verbal.

There is much research to support the theory that what people take in when you’re speaking is 7% content, 38% how you say things and 55% body language. This means that a staggering 93% of your impact will be based on your voice and your demeanour.

Don’t get us wrong. You can’t just stand up and talk gibberish. But you’ll only sound confident and sincere if your voice and body language are in sync with your words.

Ever listened to someone telling a story that sounded plausible but… you just had a gut feeling that they weren’t telling the truth?

Ever watched a truly great comedian and wondered why people didn’t laugh when you repeated their jokes in the pub?

People can only pay attention to a small amount of information at any one time on a conscious level. Their sub-conscious, on the other hand, can take in millions of bits of information every second. It will be their sub-conscious that decides whether what you have to say is worth listening to. And they’ll unknowingly base their decision on your tone, pace, timing, gestures, eye contact and the way you carry yourself.

We appreciate that this news may have you reaching for the Prozac, but can we suggest an alternative and more productive way to calm your nerves?

Think Training & Development specialise in Advanced Presentation Skills training and Leadership Development.

Gavin Aubrey is a highly accomplished public speaker, brilliant showman, hugely entertaining, fast–paced, and pragmatic and 100% focused on getting you the results you want.

Think Eddie Izzard meets Derren Brown. Without the stilettos. Or the card tricks. Well, maybe a few over lunch…

If you want to deliver the best speaking performance of your life, you can find Gavin at www.thinktd.co.uk.

Book any session before 30^th June 2010 and qualify for 25% discount off Executive Coaching Programmes.

If you want better results, you can find them at www.thinktd.co.uk Tel: 01225 479756 Email: info@thinktd.co.uk

Executive Coaching

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” – L P Hartley

Executive Coaching is often used by people who are already on the up, but want to be the best they can be. Usually, however, we find that there is something holding them back. This was never more the case than when I conducted one of my first coaching sessions, twenty years ago.

A young girl had spotted a job opportunity that interested her. She approached me for advice.

“I’m too young”, she said as an opener. True, if she got the job, she’d be the youngest in the team by about ten years. I asked what experience she could bring to the role.

“None” she replied. “I’ve no qualifications”. It turned out she had not gone to university as it wasn’t affordable and neither could she afford to take the exams required to get this job. “I’ve no money” she shrugged. I asked why not.

A naïve and unsuccessful property venture in her teens had left her with debts of more than £50,000 at age 20, which she was gradually repaying. She had no home of her own, was working two jobs, one full time and one evening and weekend job; and was just about getting by.

I wondered out loud whether she could get a loan. She exclaimed that even if someone would lend her the money, she had no time to study and even if she did study, she had no experience, was too young and didn’t even know why I was pursuing this anyway as she didn’t even want the stupid job!

So that went well.

She may not have had the money, the time, the experience or the qualifications, but what she had in spades was passion and drive. I got her to focus on what she did have, rather than what she didn’t. Having thought about this, she got out the application form and applied for the job.

At the interview, she literally begged the manager to give her a chance. She told him she’d work harder than anyone he had ever taken on and that she’d get the exams in 3 months if he gave her the chance to prove herself. The interviewer must have seen something in her because he agreed. The company paid for her exams. She stayed up all night for months, studying in the lead up to the exams (think Will Smith in Pursuit of Happyness, without the cute son to worry about), and she breezed through them all on the same day…

Twenty years on, she owns two properties, lives in a beautiful beachside apartment and drives a fabulous soft-top BMW. She runs her own training and development company and fulfils the role of Commercial Director for an insurance company.

She still talks to herself. Oh, and she gets to write self-indulgent diary entries like this one for her blog while looking at the sea….

Your past does not have to equal your future. Be whatever you want to be with Executive Coaching from think. Give us a call. It could change your life too.

Motivation

5 things that could cause a girl’s motivation level to slip from marvellous to miserable when travelling around the country, running training courses:

• Waking in the early hours to discover an intruder at the end of your hotel bed…which, on closer inspection turns out to be life sized cardboard cut-out of Lenny Henry, which you hadn’t noticed when you’d wearily slumped into bed at midnight on arrival.
• Washing your hair in ‘soft’ water when you’re used to the hard water of the south – leaving you looking like Toyah in the 80s.
• Trying to tame said hair using a hairdryer attached to a desk with a cord which does not allow you to stand anywhere near a mirror.
• Discovering there is no iron or ironing board in the room and that ‘all the boards are out’ when you call reception.
• Realising that you’ve left your new boots at home and that the only footwear you have to accompany your smart black suit are gold FitFlops or your brown Uggs.

5 things you can do to ensure you stay on top of your game when this happens:

• Switch on the radio and do your best Cameron Diaz impression to Mr Brightside. Works every time.
• Cover Lenny’s eyes with a spare pair of knickers before you get in the shower. A girl must preserve her modesty.
• Be thankful you are in Liverpool, where big hair is the order of the day.
• Ask the reception clerk whether the ‘boards’ are out at a ‘board meeting’ and laugh at your own joke, even if he doesn’t.
• Rock your City Girl meets Glasto look with confidence when you arrive at the training room and pretend it’s a new London style trend.

We can let negative experiences affect the quality of our day / life / work or we can choose not to let them get to us. When things aren’t going well, it’s easy to blame external influences. The fact is, however, we always have a choice about how to react. Motivation and confidence come from within.

If your team is behaving as if they’re having a permanently bad hair day, let us help you get them thinking differently; to break the cycle of negativity. Take a look at our course in Staff Motivation, or give us a call.

Executive Coaching

Thought for the week: Everything that is achieved on earth is first conceived in the mind.

In March, my business partner Gavin sat down to watch TV, opened a beer and waited to be entertained by one of his all-time comedy heroes; Eddie Izzard. The programme, which was the first of 3 episodes which ran on BBC3, turned out to be a documentary, charting Eddie’s progress as he ran 43 marathons over 51 days. 5 weeks training and off he went. The programme reduced Gavin to tears. Bewildered, confused and utterly inspired. How could anyone achieve such an amazing feat? Especially a guy that is more at home in stilettos than running shoes?

So, it wasn’t exactly a surprise when Gavin announced a few weeks ago that he was going to train for his first ever triathlon, involving a 750m river swim, 20k bike ride and a 5k run to finish.

In true ENTP style (see Myers Briggs personality types) his preparation wasn’t exactly conventional.

• General fitness level? Average to poor. His words, not mine.
• Goggles? At home. Well done to Jake (Gavin’s son) for saving the day on that score.
• Bike? Purchased the day before the event.
• Pathological fear of being mistaken for a seal and eaten by a shark that had accidentally drifted into the river at Bradford on Avon? Unshakeable.
• Focus and determination on completing the event? 100%.

Gavin’s view was that if Eddie Izzard could do 43 marathons in 51 days, he could go for a little swim, jump on a bike and then jog for a bit. And on Sunday, he did just that. Spared by the errrrm… river sharks and the calf injury he sustained on the way, he had a blast. Loved every minute of it. And proved that you can do anything you set your mind to. It’s all in the head.

You are what you think.

Want to know how to be more than you ever thought possible? Check out our Executive Coaching courses or give us a call and we’ll help you make it happen.

I have an idea for a new reality TV show in which I would, of course, be prepared to feature. Take six very different, independent women from various walks of life and plonk them all on a foreign island somewhere for a week together and see what happens. So committed am I to this idea that I have just tried it out. The ‘team’ in question consisted of me and 5 other women, 3 of whom I did not know before my holiday. And we interacted exactly as one might expect.

How do I know what one might expect? Because team development usually follows a very similar pattern. Bruce Tuckman first described the four stages of team development in 1965 as;
Form, Storm, Norm, Perform.

Step 1 – Form: The team comes together. Initially, the team members are polite and interested in one another, asking questions to find out more about one another.

Step 2 – Storm: As the initial politeness wears off, differences of opinion begin to emerge which can lead to argument or conflict. This is usually worse when more than one of the group wishes to become the ‘leader’ or where people have conflicting objectives.

Step 3 – Norm: As roles and personal differences are resolved, the team begins to focus on the job at hand. They begin to identify themselves as a team and not a random set of individuals. They begin to help each other out more.

Step 4 – Perform: Consistency is reached. Personal differences are set aside or managed and the team works together in harmony.

On our holiday, I think Step 2 lasted all of 5 minutes so, on second thoughts, it probably wouldn’t have made scintillating TV viewing. There wasn’t a lot to argue about except what we might have for dinner.

In companies, however, teams can get stuck in the storming phase for months or even years. It requires skilled management to move a team on to Steps 3 and 4.

At think, we’ll guide you through what to do if you are setting up a new team or constantly refereeing an existing one. We’ll provide practical advice on how to get your team performing consistently. Check out our team skills courses or give us a call to discuss what you need.

Myers-Briggs® Personality Types

When holidaying abroad it is a really good idea not to fall asleep in the sun, get sunstroke and spend the next few days consigned to the villa bathroom.

That said, should you sustain said sunstroke, it’s wise to ensure that your fellow villa dwellers are marvellously compassionate beings who think nothing of cancelling evenings out to keep you company; hold your hair back while you throw up…(again) and lend you their sunglasses / head scarves / fake tan to a.) prevent a recurrence and b.) make you look like you’ve been lying on a beach for days rather than bent double over the loo.

You may have gathered that I am less than well, as I write from my holiday villa.

From my vantage point on the sofa, however, I have been able to watch my two friends, whose Myers-Briggs® personality types are ENFP and ESFP at close hand.

On the face of it, their profiles are quite similar.

Both prefer Extraversion (E) – i.e. they like to talk, get energy from being with other people and from experiencing new things. Conversation has not been in short supply as we’ve sat on the patio late into the night sharing a bottle of wine.

Both prefer Feeling (F) – i.e. they make decisions based on people, values and relationships. Hence, the extraordinary care they have taken of me this week.

Both prefer Perceiving (P) – i.e. they are ‘go with the flow’ girls, spontaneous and adaptable. Capable of changing plans at a moment’s notice and unfazed by the daily reports that filter through to us that the airport is shut / open / shut / open as a result of the volcanic ash cloud.

The difference between them is that one prefers Sensing (S) and the other Intuition (N).

Sensing types pay attention to detail. Friend A, for example, has brought about 47 different outfits with her, each with matching beach wear, shoes and accessories. Whatever the occasion or weather demands, she has the clothes to suit. Friend B on the other hand has brought one sweatshirt, some leggings, a swimsuit and a random selection of t-shirts.

Friend A has a lengthy beauty regime, involving more products than Boots could shake a stick at. Friend B is a ‘shower and go’ kind of girl, who is often ready hours before A.

Friend A likes to ensure she has every ingredient necessary, when entertaining others. Friend B, on the other hand, will magic an inventive feast for impromptu guests from the remnants of our fridge.

The great thing is that they understand, accept and respect each other’s differences.

When ‘S’ and ‘N’ types come together in the workplace, this is not always the case. Sensing types often describe Intuitives as ‘airy fairy’ and ‘vague’, while Intuitives are often heard referring to their Sensing counterparts as ‘anal’!

Pooling these resources, rather than having them work against each other, can be extremely rewarding. Intuitives like to come up with ideas and concepts. They are creative ‘future’ thinkers. Sensing types prefer to put the detail to the idea and implement the steps needed to bring the idea to fruition. Both contribute a valuable part of the process.

For more information on Myers-Briggs® personality types, and how they can help your team work more productively together, take a look at our Myers Briggs® courses or give us a call.

There, I’ve said it. And now I’ve said it, I guess I’m technically not a closet ISTJ at all. I am out of the closet and, frankly, quite chuffed with my new status.

Of course, I’ll always be an ENTP at heart. Having just spent 2 days holed up in an office on my own, no-one to talk to, poring over statistics; writing detailed reports; researching articles and completing a VAT reconciliation…I can’t deny that I’m now tempted to throw a party, learn to sky dive, invent something amazing and dismantle the radiator to see if I can put it back together again (all at the same time) …but hey; 48 hours as an ISTJ. Not bad.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, I am referring to 2 of the 16 Myers-Briggs® Personality Types.

Myers-Briggs® is a world-renowned personality profiling tool, used by people in forward thinking companies to better understand other people. This is because these people know that understanding other people is the cornerstone of great communication. And with great communication, you get better results.

So what’s with the ENTP / ISTJ stuff?

ENTP is the 4-letter acronym used to denote personality preferences for:

•    Extraversion (where energy is derived from external stimuli such as other people)
•    Intuition (where close attention is paid to ideas and information of a conceptual nature)
•    Thinking (where decisions are based on logic and objectivity)
•    Perceiving (where spontaneity and variety rule)

For ENTP, think: clever, creative, visionary, entrepreneur. Innovative and unconventional. Problem solvers.  Ideas and options. Opinions on pretty much everything. Debate is sport. Major set backs are challenges. Improvise, adapt and overcome!

ISTJ is used to denote preferences for:

•    Introversion (where energy is derived from one’s own inner world of thoughts and ideas)
•    Sensing (where close attention is paid to information of a factual and specific nature)
•    Thinking (where decisions are based on logic and objectivity)
•    Judgement (where planning and organisation is key).

For ISTJ, think: Quiet and reserved, meticulous and methodical. Facts and figures. Organised and structured.  Logical and sequential. Practical application. Strong sense of duty. Working alone. By the book!

Now….Imagine putting the 2 of them together to work on a project. They’d drive each other mad, wouldn’t they? Well, yes. Unless they understood the value of each other’s personality type. In which case, they’d be much more likely to work out how to pool their different resources to get the best result.

Want to know more about how knowing your personality type can help you or your team achieve more?
Take a look at our Myers-Briggs® courses or call us for a chat.

Driving home from an appointment late last Wednesday, I felt somewhat harassed as a young man in a souped up Ford Escort came up behind me on a dual carriageway at speed. He began swerving  from side to side and flashing his headlights.

As I surveyed him in the mirror, I could see that he was shouting and gesticulating for me to get out of his way. This continued for several minutes and I became increasingly agitated as the traffic in the inside lane was too heavy for me to safely pull in.

Eventually a gap appeared and I indicated to move over. He beat me to it, nearly taking my bumper off as he did so. He then cut in front of me, once he’d passed, causing me to brake hard. I was less than amused.

I caught up with Mr Road Rage at some traffic lights. Noticing my glare, he wound down his window and shouted ‘Sorry about that love. The wife’s in labour and I promised her I’d get there for the birth. It’s our first!’. It was only then that I saw that he’d been crying.

All thoughts of reporting him to the police (I had memorised his car registration) evaporated and I found myself yelling ‘Good Luck!’ as he pulled way.

We live in a stimulus / response world.

When people do things we don’t like, our natural response is not to try and understand why; but to react.

The same often applies when people say things we don’t like or agree with.

One person says what they think and then the other starts with ‘yes, but….’ and eventually one wins and one loses the argument; or they end up in deadlock. Neither is a particularly satisfactory outcome.

Too often, I have seen conflicts break out, sales opportunities lost or customer complaints arise because one (or both) of the parties did not take the time to understand the other’s viewpoint.

Our Communication Skills Courses explore the techniques used by skilled negotiators to achieve outcomes that meet both parties’ requirements.

Unless you live in a cave under the sea (in which case, well done for getting a wireless signal to read this) you are bound to encounter situations sometimes where you need to influence others that do not share your point of view.

Understanding the dynamics of effective communication can vastly improve all aspects of business performance; negotiating skills, sales skills, complaint handling, coaching skills, relationships at work – to name but a few.

If you’d like to know more about our Communication Skills training, please feel free to  contact us for an exploratory discussion.

Don’t worry. They don’t actually want to know what colour your underwear is. Especially if it’s grey. The point is, when you saw the question you probably answered it in your head.

The brain is a very powerful thing. It’s like Google. Ask it a question and it will give you an answer. The answer will be based on whatever your brain holds in its database about that subject.

If things aren’t going your way, you are probably asking yourself the wrong questions.

You: “Why can’t I be confident, like Jim?”

Your brain: “Well now, let’s see…..yep! GOT IT. It’s because you failed your 11+, your parents didn’t love you, you were always last to be picked for school sports teams, you messed up that presentation last week…oh…and you’re not that good looking.”

Questions are a very powerful thing. They do 2 things:

• They direct your thinking along a particular route;
• They affect your level of motivation.

Good, well phrased questions have the power to transform your thinking, re-order the way you see problems and challenges and propel you to act in a positive and productive way.

The bad news is that your brain didn’t come with an instruction manual. The good news is that it’s easy to learn how to ask yourself better questions. And when you do, you’ll unlock the potential to achieve more than you ever thought possible.

The even better news is that, once you have learned to do this – you can use the questions with your staff to help ‘them excel at what they do too.

Think Training and Development specialise in Executive Coaching and Leadership Development.

They might not be the most conventional of corporate coaches, but they’ll immerse themselves in your world so that they understand your particular challenges. Their Executive Coaching programme is fast–paced, pragmatic and 100% focused on getting you the results you want.

In short, they’re a bit like Starsky and Hutch. Except one of them is a girl. Oh, and they won’t park their car sideways in your car-park.

Book a session before 30th June 2010 and qualify for 25% discount off Executive Coaching Programmes.

If you want better results, you can find them at www.thinktd.co.uk
Tel: 01225 479756
Email: info@thinktd.co.uk

Ok, so it’s not quite The Matrix, but the answer to this question will help you get what you want… and it’s right here on this podcast.

Listen to this podcast for the four (yes, just four) steps to great Influencing Skills.

If you’d like to explore how Think Training & Development can help you with your own influencing skills or the general communication within your company, we’ll be waiting in the green box, to listen to what you need. Give us a call or drop us an email.

When discussing Team Performance Management the other day, I was reminded of a lovely story I heard when training as a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Once upon a time there was a huge steam ship that had run out of steam. It had come to a grinding halt, out at sea, and the engineers on board were unable to get it going again. They called on the finest specialists in the land, who came on board with their sophisticated equipment and computer technology and tried many different ways to get the ship started but to no avail.

Others, from further afield, hearing of the ship’s plight offered their services. And so it was that a succession of experts boarded the ship, each claiming to have the answer and all failing to restart the ship.

Eventually, a little old man approached the ship’s captain and asked if he could help. The old man carried with him a tiny hammer and no other tools. The captain was a little sceptical but he’d tried everything else and so he agreed to let the old man have a go.

The old man entered the engine room and without a word, proceeded to closely examine each of the pipes and  pistons. Every so often, he would stop and put his hands on the pipes for a moment or two or place his ear against the machinery  to listen.

After a while, he stopped, smiled, took out his little hammer and gave one of the pipes a small but firm tap.

The ship began to rumble into life and within a few minutes was firing on all cylinders again. The captain was delighted and invited the old man to send him an invoice for his work.

When the captain received the invoice, he couldn’t believe it. £10,000! He contacted the old man to express his outrage. After all, the old man had barely done anything at all. The captain asked for a breakdown of this cost.

And so the old man sent a further invoice, which read:

£1                      For tapping the ship into life
£9,999             For knowing where to tap

Team Performance Management is about knowing where to tap.

It’s the most valuable thing you can learn to do when coaching others. If you’d like to know  how we can help you with Team Performance Management, do get in touch.

We charge a fraction of the little old man’s rate and we’re just as effective.

I watched a man die on stage the other day. Not literally. Just in terms of audience reaction. At first I wondered if someone had played a hideous April Fool’s trick on him; told him the audience was illiterate or something. Why else would he have spent 20 minutes stoically reading PowerPoint slides to us, never once looking up to see if we were still there?

But then, a fleeting glance in our direction…and the fear in his eyes was unmistakable.

I wanted to jump up in the manner of Charlie from Casualty and shout “Quick. He’s tachycardiac. We’ll need a flipchart, pens, some audience participation, oh and 10 litres of confidence”.

Many people dread the thought of public speaking. In our experience this is partly because there seems to be a general acceptance in society that it’s scary and partly because people are rarely given much tuition in how to do it well.

We get what we focus on. If we think something is going to go badly, it probably will. Then, next time we do it, we know it went badly before and this reinforces the belief that it will go badly again. So it does. And the cycle continues…

Some of the areas we cover in our Advanced Presentation Skills courses and Executive Coaching programmes include:

• How to get into a peak state of mind before a presentation
• How to create and maintain rapport with the audience
• How to create impact through non-verbal behaviour
• How to ensure that your presentation engages all personality types (see Myers Briggs)
• How to ensure that your presentation appeals to those with visual, auditory or kinaesthetic preferences

Whether you’re presenting to colleagues or clients, if you’d like to find out how to get an audience engaged and keep them there, have a look at our Advanced Presentation Skills course (for groups) or Executive Coaching programme (for individual coaching).

Or contact us for a chat.

Special Offers available – see our Home Page.

If not you can listen to it here for the next 7 days: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rmst0

If you missed it, and your company hasn’t caught the Myers-Briggs® bug yet, here’s an overview of what it’s all about.

How did it all start?

The Myers-Briggs® Type Indicator (MBTI) was the brainchild of two American housewives, Isabel Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs, back in the 1950s; apparently based upon the theories of Carl Jung.

Years of development later, it’s now the most popular personality profiling tool, used in businesses across the world. More than 200,000 people took the MBTI last year in Europe alone.

What is it used for?

Myers-Briggs® is commonly used across all business sectors for:

• Individual personal development: Improving influencing skills, sales skills, public speaking or leadership skills as examples;
• Team building: To help colleagues understand how to pool their different resources for the common good of their company and get better results in the process;
• Conflict management – to provide a non-confrontational language to resolve issues and promote unity among co-workers.

What is involved?

• First you complete a questionnaire which takes about half an hour. This gives a first indication of what your personality type might be.
• Next you have a feedback session with a licensed Myers-Briggs® practitioner; this will usually include answering questions and completing some light-hearted exercises.
• You then find your ‘best-fit’ type from one of 16 possible personality types.
• You’ll be given some literature which explains what this means – including information on how you impact on others, how you deal with stress and how you can develop.

This can be done on an individual basis or in teams if everyone is willing to share their results and can be great fun.

Can you fake it?

As with all personality tools; of course you can. But what would be the point? Ethical practitioners of Myers Briggs®, such as those we employ at Think, will tell you that your Myers-Briggs® results are confidential and only shared with others with your consent. So, if you want to fake it, the only person you’re really kidding is yourself.

Is it any good?

While the Jungian purists would have us believe it’s a load of nonsense, my view is that anything that makes people feel good about themselves and promotes unity and understanding among co-workers can only be positive for company results.

Part of the Myers-Briggs® appeal is that it’s based on concepts that are easy to grasp and easy to identify with. We’ve used it extensively and with great success with people from the UK to India, Trinidad to Kazakhstan to improve all manner of staff performance.

Want to know more?

If you’d like to know more about how Myers-Briggs® could help your business become more effective, listen to our free podcasts on the subject, check out our special introductory offers via the Home Page or give us a call.

Santa Claus isn’t real. He’s a bloke called Keith.

I know. I was as surprised as you are. I would have mentioned it sooner but my sister has only just posted a picture of him on Facebook (she’s not that organised) so I’ve only just found out myself.

I must admit, I had been wondering for a while. Now I think back, I wasn’t that surprised when I opened my presents last year to find Christian Louboutin shoes and a lovely Tiffany ring because, well, I had sort of ordered them on the internet. And wrapped them up myself (with my eyes closed, obviously). And put them under the tree.

Still…it’s a bit of a shock to the system when you find out that something you believed in isn’t true.

But then, that’s the nature of beliefs. They are not reality. They are just our take on reality. Our beliefs are what underpin and drive our behaviour. And some are more useful to us than others.

In our Executive Coaching and Coaching Skills sessions, we often encounter negative beliefs at first. I’m too old; I’m too young; I’m not bright enough; I’m not skilled enough; I’m not confident enough; I can’t do it!

The important thing to remember is that beliefs can and do change. When did you stop believing in Father Christmas for example? (Sorry if it was about 2 minutes ago).

Our strongest beliefs are those to which we have attached lots of ‘evidence’. This is great if the belief is a positive one. But if your belief is holding you back, wouldn’t it be more useful to dump it and believe something better instead?

Uprooting a deeply embedded negative belief can be surprisingly easy. You just have to know how to shake it ….and what you’re going to plant there instead.

Our Executive Coaching sessions and Coaching Skills courses are great for people who are seeking to change or improve their own or others’ behaviour.

We’ll show you how to:

• Pinpoint the root cause of any performance related issue
• Identify the beliefs that underpin and drive the person’s current behaviour
• Alter the person’s thinking
• Change the person’s behaviour and get, sometimes, quite outstanding results

Do get in touch if you’d like to know more about how we can help you with your own development or that of your team.

As for me. Well, now there’s no incentive, I believe I’m going to be really naughty for the rest of the year.

Although, I might start the week after next because there is still the Easter Bunny to consider…Isn’t there?

BAN INTER-DEPARTMENT EMAIL NOW!!!

Without speaking to any of the people concerned last week, I learned that:

•    My brother had lost his last 35,000 bhats in an ill-judged midnight swim in Kho Samui
•    My cousin had eaten bran flakes for breakfast all week
•    My friend had given birth to a baby grill

This is all well and good.

•    I mean, I was delighted to know that Billy had chosen me to bail him out (or ‘Birry’ as he now refers to himself on Facebook, on account of being in Thailand);
•    I’m glad my cousin is getting some daily fibre, it’s important;
•    And although I suspect my friend’s husband might have meant girl, I’ll take her some steak when I visit, just on the off chance…

The age of email, texting and social media sites means that we no longer have to see or speak to anyone to know what’s going on in their lives.

Whilst keeping up with friends and relatives online undoubtedly has its plusses …in business, managing by email can often do more harm than good. And slow things down. Considerably.

Here’s why:

1.)    Written words can be misconstrued. Try this. Say ‘I didn’t say she stole the money’    7 times, each time putting emphasis on a different word in the sentence. It changes the meaning every time. Recipients of your emails cannot detect your intended intonation and may therefore misinterpret your meaning.
2.)    When you use red, bold, underlining, CAPITAL LETTERS or exclamation marks, in an attempt to convey importance, irreverence or urgency, recipients will invariably read this as ANGER!!! And will react accordingly.
3.)    People get so many emails these days that they can miss the fact that you want them to do something as a result of yours.   So you have to send them another one.
4.)    Unless you are very, very clear, people may take the wrong action as a result of your email request. This requires a series of additional email exchanges to put things right.

As a manager, effective communication skills are a must. If you want to improve yours, think before you email.

Would it not be quicker and more efficient to pick up the phone or go and talk to the person – especially if they are in the same building?

If you think this makes sense but need some help to prise your colleagues away from the keyboard and get them talking, have a look at our team skills or communication skills courses.

Or EMAIL US!!! We understand how you feel so we won’t be angry.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?

At Think, we have produced some seriously impressive results from each business we have been involved with. How?

Listen to the podcast for the 4 basic principles that have been the bedrock of our success.

If your particular department isn’t sales related, we think you will still be able to apply the principles to get the results you’re looking for.

If you’d like our help, take a look at our Sales Skills or Leadership courses. Or contact us to discuss what you need.

Have fun until next time.

Marks out of 10 for Rob Trainee at PC World: 11

Went shopping at the weekend, in preparation for a holiday I have just booked. Suncream? Shades? Sandals? No, what I wanted was ….a netbook.

It could be argued that I don’t need any more computers in my life but my iMac won’t fit in my suitcase (I’ve tried) and a girl needs to know what’s going on back home when she is away. Even if it is only for a week. Besides…they’re really dinky, they do them in all sorts of lovely colours these days and you can get cute little bags to put them in. I know. I am such a techie! Despite my enthusiasm for my prospective purchase, I wasn’t looking forward to actually having to buy it. Whenever I try to buy something with a plug, I always seem to attract the salesman most likely to win Mastermind with his specialist subject of…’the inner workings of 21st century electrical goods’. And with the fewest influencing skills or sales skills.

When I bought my beloved Mac for example…I was in the first shop for well over an hour and left without one. I still can’t believe I stayed there that long, but here’s how it went:

•    Ten minutes trying to find a salesman
•    Sales pitch about things I do not care about or understand
•    Smelling salts to revive me from resulting coma
•    Lengthy wait while salesman discovered that my address does not come up on Royal Mail address look-up facility (which I told him before we started)
•    Further sales pitch on merits of insurance which I’d already said (twice) I didn’t want
•    Left alone every few minutes while salesman answered phone
•    Ran for it when he wasn’t looking….

You’ll understand, then, why I braced myself as I stepped into PC World in Bournemouth. But, what a difference in sales skills!

•    Immediately approached by Rob Trainee (I think that was his job title, not his surname) who…
•    Asked questions about what I wanted to use netbook for (and what colour I wanted!)
•    Recommended a product, explaining in simple terms how it would meet my needs i.e. it was red and would match my swimsuit  (I think he guessed that I am no Bill Gates)
•    Found me a fabulous ‘sleeping bag’ to keep my new netbook safe
•    Whisked me to the business area, when I said I was short on time, to take my payment
•    Listened when I told him about my address and immediately input this manually
•    Gave me a leaflet to think about insurance
•    Escorted me to the door with a smile – less than 10 minutes after I came in!

He should be Rob Store Manager, not Rob Trainee.  Outstanding service!

Selling is about listening to what the customer wants and then delivering it. It’s not hard but it’s amazing how many sales people do not do this. If you want to improve your sales team’s performance, take a look at our sales skills training courses. If you’re not sure what you need, email us (and I’ll reply to you using my shiny new netbook).

Thought for the week: Moods are contagious.

If you don’t believe me, try locking yourself in a room with a load of miserable people for a few hours. See if this prompts a burning desire to skip, whoop with joy and / or turn cartwheels.  I’m guessing…no.

If you’re a manager, staff motivation is not hard to achieve, but it starts with you – not them.

Some people radiate natural positive energy; just standing next to them makes you feel warm and sunny. Others seem to exist solely to drain the life out of you (you know who they are).
The majority, however, just float around in the middle – pulled one way or the other, depending on who they’re most influenced by.

As a manager, your mood sets the tone for your team. It’s like a little invisible thermostat. When you’re up – they’re up. And when you’re down – they’re down. (I feel the need to sing the Grand Old Duke of York now but luckily for you, this is not an audio podcast). Now, where was I?

Oh yes…Most managers we meet have no idea how much their moods impact on those they manage. But, take it from me – you have so much POWER!

Still don’t believe me?  Try this:

Storm into your office tomorrow morning without speaking to anyone. (Don’t forget to slam your door).  Then peak out and you’ll see the worried glances passing between your staff, you’ll hear the chatter subside and an uneasy silence descend.

Warning – If this is your normal way of entering the office you may not notice any difference. The team will have already begun cowering, when you pulled into the car-park.

Why am I telling you this? Because you want to know how to increase your team’s output, right?

I guarantee that if you walk into any business, you’ll get a very good idea of how effective the manager is …by how happy the staff are.

Leadership is about getting people to do what you want them to do, because they want to do it. People will only consistently ‘go the extra mile’ for you if they want to – and who wants to do that for someone who will just moan that they didn’t do it in under 4 minutes?

So..if you want to improve your staff motivation – get happy. No, not fixed grin fake happy (they’ll see through that); genuinely happy.

Need some help? Then put the mirror down. You can practice your winning smile later. Instead, book a Staff Motivation session with us – and we’ll have you and your team doing cartwheels in no time. Metaphorically speaking of course.

If you feel more like a referee than a manager most days, the chances are that your team has not yet found a way to pool their resources and use their differences to best effect.
Myers-Briggs® Personality Type is a popular psychological profiling tool that can be used to help people understand how they impact on each other. It explores how different people are energised, how they take in information, make decisions and organise their lives. For example:

• Some people like to throw ideas around out loud while others prefer to figure things out quietly on their own.
• Some need to collect lots of information before they’ll act while others will just go with their hunches.
• Some base their decisions on feelings and values while others deal in logic and principles.
• And some like to plan and organise while others wait till the very last minute to deliver.

Myers Briggs® is based on the theory that there are 16 unique personality types. It doesn’t seek to put people in boxes or explain everything about a person’s behaviour. What it will do, though, is help your people understand and appreciate their differences, reduce conflict and get your team working together for the common good of your company.

Think Training & Development specialise in delivering Myers-Briggs® training to organisations to improve their teamwork, retention and most importantly, their productivity.

Using a series of light-hearted exercises to help people discover their own and their colleagues’ personality types, Think has brought unity to hundreds of teams across the world since they opened for business in 2003.

Gavin Aubrey and Wendie Michie, directors of Think and licensed Myers Briggs® practitioners, offer fast–paced, pragmatic and hugely energising sessions in this fascinating subject which are 100% focused on getting you the results you want.

If your team could use a little Think love, you can find them at http://www.thinktd.co.uk

Tel: 01225 479756
Email: info@thinktd.co.uk

This one looks at:

• How people prefer to make decisions –Logic and objectivity or values and relationships?
• How people live their lives – Planned and organised or spontaneous and adaptable?

It will give you some clues as to:

• Why some people want to be recognised for their achievements while others need to be appreciated for their efforts.
• Why some people love to start things off…while others love to finish them!

If you’d like to know more about your personality type or those of your team members, check out our Myers-Briggs® courses, run by qualified Myers-Briggs® practitioners. Special Offers apply.

Last week, I did some training with a group of schoolteachers… on the terminology used in financial services.

As well as knowing your subject, good Communication Skills are paramount when you are training, developing or coaching others. There are many aspects to this, but here is one simple example.

When I asked which terminology they particularly wanted to discuss, a lady put up her hand and said that she couldn’t quite see how ‘Market Value Reductions’ worked. (There is something strangely satisfying about having teachers put up their hands to ask you a question….but I digress.)

The point is, she said that she couldn’t SEE how this process worked. The reason she couldn’t see it was because no-one had ever SHOWN it to her. She is a highly intelligent lady and sure, it had been explained to her before, but hearing something is not the same as seeing it. And she needed to SEE it.

So I drew it for her, on a flipchart. And she understood it instantly.

The words people use to convey their thoughts, ideas, experiences and questions give massive clues as to how they are thinking.

If you don’t notice these clues, the responses you give will not always hit the mark. Sometimes, you might as well be speaking a different language. This can lead to confusion, frustration, errors and even  conflict.

Learning how to spot key words and then respond accordingly can vastly improve the quality of your communication with others. It’s not hard to do – we can teach you the basics and then it just takes a bit of practice.

Improving your Communication Skills will allow you to perform better as a manager, leader, coach, interviewer or public speaker.

Check out our Special Offers to book a free Communication Skills session , listen to our Effective Communication Skills Podcast for more information or Contact Us to see how we can help.

This one looks at how people prefer to take in information – high level or highly detailed?

It will give you some clues as to why some people see the wood first…while others see the trees.

If you’d like to know more about your personality type or those of your team members, check out our Myers-Briggs® courses, run by qualified Myers-Briggs® practitioners. Special Offers apply.

Last week, I  was on urban safari. In the manner of David Attenborough, I have been observing the behaviours of a fledgling ENFP in its natural habitat as it prepares to migrate to sunnier climes for the summer.

Ok… so I’ve just been to stay with my little brother in London for a few days, before he goes off travelling, but it got me thinking…

ENFP is one of sixteen personality types used in the renowned Myers-Briggs® personality type model. All 16 personality types have their own unique preferences and blind-spots. This explains, to some extent, why we get on so well with some people, while others infuriate or baffle us.

For example, if you were going to take 6 months off work to go travelling, do the following appear reasonable to you or do they have you reaching for the Prozac?

•    Decide at the last minute you are going to Thailand, having spent the previous 3 months talking about Australia.
•    Travel with as many friends as possible, aim to make as many more as you can when you get there and resolve to provide daily Facebook updates to the 500 friends at home that couldn’t come.
•    Do no research on the country you are visiting on the basis that you’ll just go with the flow when you get there.
•    Discover that you need a visa the week before you are going. Do nothing about this for a few days and then make a mad dash to the Thai Consulate the day before you fly.
•    Consider paying for the flight of a friend who could not otherwise afford to come with you.
•    Book no accommodation for when you arrive – hey, Bangkok is a big place and you arrive early in the day – how hard can it be to find a place to stay?
•    Pack on the day you are leaving (probably forgetting essentials like shorts or sun cream, which won’t matter as you can buy those things at the airport or when you arrive).

The above is a summary of how my ENFP brother has approached his trip.

ENFPs are immense fun to be around. Preferring to live their lives in a spontaneous, go with the flow way, they are outgoing, gregarious and creative individuals. Full of big plans for the future, they brush over the detail of how they’re going to get there and often change their minds before they do. Their decisions are often based on the people they care about most.

In the workplace, ENFPs bring infectious, creative energy to a team. They might not work in a methodical way but their relaxed, visionary approach coupled with their loyalty and adaptability can be a real asset.

Our Myers-Briggs® courses help you understand your own personality type and those of your team members. We’ll show you how to use this information to unify your team and get the best results from the people you manage.

Check out our Special Offers to book a free demonstration of this fascinating subject, listen to our series of Myers-Briggs® Podcasts for more information or Contact Us to see how we can help.

Oh, and if you want to go with my brother, meet him in the bar at Heathrow on Tuesday at 2.00pm.

This one looks at how people are energised – through internal or external stimuli.

It will give you some clues as to why some people dive in and act before they think things through while others think carefully before they act.

If you’d like to know more about your personality type or those of your team members, check out our Myers-Briggs® courses, run by qualified Myers-Briggs® practitioners. Special Offers apply.

A friend returned to work after a week’s holiday on Monday, to find some of her staff staging a mini rebellion. They gave her a list of demands. I gave her some tips on conflict management.

“Give and take”, I said.

“But they’re the conflict. And I’m the management!”, she wailed.

If she hadn’t been joking, I wouldn’t have bet on peace breaking out in her office, any time soon.  What these people wanted wasn’t hard to achieve. The interesting thing here was that the conflict had arisen as a result of one key personality difference. The different parties’ perception of what was ‘fair’.

For her – ‘fair’ meant dealing with people as individuals.  For them ‘fair’ meant dealing with everyone in the same way.

* Thus, when she agreed different working hours for one individual who needed flexibility for personal reasons – the rest of the team saw this as unfair, whereas she saw it as a reasonable adjustment, given the person’s circumstances.

* When she took some of her team to a coffee shop for a meeting – she felt this would provide a more relaxed environment to get to know them better. They thought it unfair that other staff got to meet in the office, where you didn’t have to worry about who else might be listening.

* When she allowed staff members to use the internet or their mobile phone on occasion, during the working day, she thought she giving them a bit of freedom. As long as the work got done (which it did) what did it matter? They thought it unfair that she did not police this and wanted rules to ensure no-one abused the privilege, even though no-one ever had.

As a manager, when you’re grappling with the big stuff, it’s easy to view these sorts of issues as a distraction; petty and unimportant.

They’re not. And if they’re not resolved, they become big issues in themselves; Attrition, absenteeism, reduced productivity.  None of which helps when you’re trying to run an efficient business.

There are many things you can do to prevent, head off or resolve conflicts at work.

Check out our Conflict Management Courses for more information. Or Contact Us for a chat and we’ll meet you for a coffee in Starbucks. Or your office. Whichever you prefer.

Your company is not doing as well as it could. Your people need some direction; some motivation. And you’re the person to deliver it. If only you knew how.

You need some help, so you book yourself on to an expensive Leadership Training Course.

You enter the second rate hotel where the event is being held and a name sticker is slapped on to your lapel. You check out who else is on the course but there is no-one from your particular industry. You’re given a big, shiny manual that is mostly full of blank pages for you to make notes, although, to be fair, it’s peppered periodically with mysterious acronyms to help you remember how to be a captain of industry.

Then, best of all, you get to learn how to lead from the front from a guy who has never been out of the classroom long enough to know where the front is. You spend the rest of the day pondering the potential risks of death by PowerPoint and the journey home removing bits of glue from your suit where your name sticker has been.

You return to work to find your sales figures are down, your marketing team has gone AWOL and Sally from accounts is in your office, crying because her husband has left her.

You hurriedly leaf through your new manual to help you, but all you can see are unfathomable graphs and the Christmas shopping list you wrote while one of the other delegates was asking an interminably long and irrelevant question…

It may not surprise you to learn that Think Training & Development Ltd does not run open, generic Leadership Training courses. Their trainers do not deal in ‘ideal world’ theory, nor do they issue glossy manuals that are destined to gather dust on your office shelf.

Think comes to you. You do not go to them. They might not be the most conventional of corporate trainers, but they’ll immerse themselves in your world to understand your particular company’s challenges. Their Leadership Training is practical, energising and tailored to your people. And they get results.

In short – they’re a bit like the A-Team… except they don’t carry guns and they do accept payment.

If you think you could use their help, you’ll find them at www.thinktd.co.uk.

Gavin Aubrey and Wendie Michie
Think Training & Development Ltd
Unit 8, Widbrook Marina
Bradford-on-Avon
Wiltshire
BA15 1UD

Tel: 01225 479756
Email: info@thinktd.co.uk

Nothing to do with magic…well not the circus kind anyway!

If you have something important to do such as a presentation or a big meeting, there are some really easy actions you can take to get yourself in the right frame of mind to succeed. Listen to this podcast to find out more… Or take a look at our page on advanced presentation skills.

• No. of reasons coachee gave for his recent poor sales performance when we met this week:      Lost count after 15
• No. of real reasons why his performance was suffering: 1

I found myself giving an impromptu coaching session this week, to a usually top performing salesman who had temporarily misplaced his mojo. (Hey, I ‘m down with the kids, what can I say).

A top performer for 3 years in a row, it seemed he hadn’t sold a thing since mid November. In a bid to talk him down from the metaphoric roof upon which he was teetering, I started by asking him what he thought was the cause. His initial response sounded reasonable enough – not enough leads, not enough customer appointments, economic climate, people not wanting to spend at the moment.

In digging deeper, it transpired that he’d never been in this position before and had no strategy for dealing with it. He’d been feeling increasingly stressed and not a little desperate. Not wanting to bother his line manager, he had battled on alone – losing confidence with every rejection he encountered. In line with his personality type (see Myers Briggs) he’d even begun worrying unnecessarily about his job security.

Through our discussion, he began to see that he was in a vicious circle of his own making. The more desperate he got, the more his customers picked up on this and the more they said ‘no’ to him. He realised that was so much more relaxed, when he was on a roll – and this is what had made him successful in the past.

In recognising this, he way already well on the way to breaking the cycle. A few more carefully worded questions had him thinking and feeling differently about the future.

He went on his way, energy renewed, confidence high. He gained 101 customer leads at a seminar later that day. (Unfortunately his beloved football team went out of the FA Cup that night but I couldn’t help that. I’m a coach – not a miracle worker.)

To have good coaching skills, you don’t need all the answers. You just need to know the types of questions to ask and the skill to really listen to the answers you get.

To find out how you can improve your coaching skills, contact us for a chat or take a look at our Communication Skills Programmes.

Have you ever asked yourself what drives human behaviour? Why people sometimes act in ways that you find difficult to understand?

Imagine an iceberg. The tip is above water – you can see this. The majority of the iceberg is under the water – hidden from view.

A person’s behaviour is like the tip of the iceberg – the part you can see. What drives that behaviour lies underneath the surface. Venture below surface level and you’ll discover the values, beliefs, experiences and thoughts that drive a person’s behaviour.

Listen to the podcast to find out more.

If you’d like to better understand and influence the behaviour of the people in your team, a good place to start is with some Myers Briggs or Influencing Skills training.

• No. of different personality types I have encountered this week:           16

• No. of different personality types I have got along well with this week:  16

This week, I have mostly been discussing Myers-Briggs®.

First, in a training session with 2 senior managers – to help them better understand the impact they have on their teams and how they can adjust their approaches for individual staff members, to get better results.

Next, in a discussion with an IT manager about how to improve his communication with the company’s executive team by making a few simple changes to the language he used.

Then, in redesigning the slides for a client’s seminar presentation to give it greater impact and thus increase the number of customers seeking their services.

And finally, in resolving a dispute between 2 staff members at logger-heads over one another’s attitude to a project.

Myers-Briggs® is an industry leading personality profiling tool that has a multitude of uses in business.
It can help you understand your own preferences in terms of maintaining energy, taking in information, making decisions and organising your time. It can also help you recognise signs of stress and give you a strategy for handling it. Once you know your own personality type, you can begin to recognise the preferences of the people around you. This, in turn, means you can better motivate and influence results and outcomes.

We know that some people are sceptical of what they perceive as ‘psycho-babble’. We’ve been on enough ‘touchy-feely’ courses ourselves to know that they’ve probably got a point. The difference with Myers-Briggs® is that stacks of workplace evidence back up the hypothesis. We’ve rejected a lot of so-called psychometrics over the years. With Myers-Briggs® however, we don’t just teach the stuff, we use it every day in the director roles we fulfill for some of our client firms*.

If you’re not sure how this will help your particular business, check out our special offers. We might be mad but we’re so sure that you’ll see the value of this type of staff development once you get to grips with it, (and of think training & development as a service provider) that we’re offering a limited number of new customers the chance to experience a Myers-Briggs® session for just £25 per delegate and the price of our train ticket.

To find out how you can use Myers-Briggs® to your advantage, contact us for a chat or take a look at our Myers Briggs® Programmes.

*Wendie Michie and Gavin Aubrey, Directors of think training & development provide Interim Executive Director services to some of Think’s client companies.

• No. of salespeople under-performing in the company I am working with (year to date); 6 (out of 46)

• No. of these salespeople who need help rather than a kick up the bum: 5

When something like the snow gets in the way, it’s easy to use this as an excuse to fall behind with targets. In Financial Services, for example, successful salesmen and women will use such situations to their advantage. They might not be able to get out to see prospective clients but they can phone them. They can even use the snow as a conversational ice breaker (see what I did there?) to build an instant rapport.

Not everyone has the same level of drive, initiative or know-how though. It’s not that they deliberately come to work, hoping to fail. Usually people fail to deliver when they don’t know what to do or they lack confidence. This is where good team performance management comes in.

Establishing and then communicating a simple set of standards for what you expect means that everyone knows what’s required. This shouldn’t be overcomplicated – people will start to suffer from ‘motion sickness’ if they have too many hoops to jump through (i.e. they’ll get sick of working for you and move off to work for your competitor).

Once the standards are in place – monitoring performance is crucial. First, to enable you to recognise and appreciate the work of those who have done well and second; to show you where you need to focus your support for those who have not.

Performance management is not just about carrots and sticks. (If you have a carrot and stick, however, I’m sure they’ll come in handy if you’re planning to build a snowman when you get home).

Performance management means having clearly defined standards. It means keeping in regular contact with what your people are doing, thinking, feeling and achieving. It’s about recognising when they need direction, development, encouragement or just straight talking. Effective Performance Management is the key to improving your results. If you’d like to know more, contact us for a chat or take a look at our Team Performance Management Programme.

• No. of centimetres of snow the weather men promised for Bournemouth:     21

• No. of centimetres of snow that actually arrived:      2

The Big Freeze is upon us. It fascinates me how different people react to situations like this. Some, like my brother in Kent, seized the opportunity to build a pink igloo (as you do) and convert various pieces of furniture into sledges. Others chose to add this turn of events to their list of post Christmas grumbles.

I am not talking about those people with good cause to feel aggrieved. My deepest sympathy goes out to the families of those who have lost loved ones to this weather. I’m talking about the rest of us, for whom the snow is just a temporary inconvenience. Most commonly heard moans this week: “Not enough grit”. “Not enough help from the emergency services”. “Nowhere to put your cup, now the coffee table is a sledge”…

A number of companies have reported high levels of absenteeism in the last couple of weeks. I witnessed this first hand last week in a local hotel, where 6 of the 7 bar staff had not shown up for work. Apparently they could not get there. The one girl who had turned up said she didn’t believe this. “No team loyalty”, she muttered as she struggled to serve 5 people at once.

I am working next door to this hotel at the moment. Only 2 of the 120 staff didn’t make it in that day; each with legitimate cause. When we’d arrived, we’d found that the heating had failed and it was freezing. The staff kept their coats on, the company dished out free hot chocolate and soup, someone dashed out to buy some electric heaters and everyone got on with their job. The team I am working with were proud that they’d all got in to work. Nobody had wanted to let the side down.

Positive staff attitude and good team morale are hugely beneficial to any business. Such a culture breeds loyalty, ownership and a sense of shared responsibility.  It reduces absenteeism, increases staff retention and ultimately improves the bottom line. If you’d like to know how to get there, contact us for a chat or take a look at our Leadership Programmes.

• Luke SkyWalkers
• Followers
• Dark Side

First, the ‘Luke Skywalkers’ of this world. These are the people who will never let you down and strive to achieve great things, whatever is thrown at them (You probably have a few of these in your organisation).

At the other end of the scale, you have those people who primarily like to moan a lot and drag everyone around them down in the process. We’ll call these people ‘The Dark Side’ (You probably have more of these).

The Lukes are immune to the Dark Side – they will not enter the Dark Side and will not be influenced by those on the Dark Side. However, the middle group, well, that’s a different story.

The middle group of people usually contains the majority. We’ll call them the ‘Followers’. The quality of their output will often depend on how much they are influenced by each of the other groups. If they’re with the Lukes, all will be well. But once the Dark-Siders get hold of them though, with their talk of the credit crunch, recession, cut-backs and redundancies….you have no hope of getting much work done.

The table below gives an example of how your company productivity can be affected by negativity:

Now for a little maths quiz. To work out the average productivity of your team, you first need to decide which category they each fall into. Let’s assume you have 100 people:

Divide the total by 100 to find the average percentage of time your team is productive. In this case, it’s 66.5%.

The Dark-Siders are the people who will tell you what you’re doing wrong so it’s not a bad thing to have a few of them, yet you don’t want too many. The trick is to motivate as many as possible to move up a category or, better still, two.

As they do, there will be less distraction for the Followers and you will find that their productivity improves too. Here’s an example:

The big question is…How do you achieve this?

The answer lies in training and development for your employees. It’s worth remembering that in staff surveys, employees often rate ‘learning and development’ and ‘culture’ higher than ‘money’ when asked why they stay with their employer.

Think Training & Development specialises in Team Skills, Leadership Programmes and Myers Briggs.
If you want to know how to improve your corporate culture, motivate your Dark-Siders and improve your productivity, visit the site here or give us a call on 01225 479756

About Think Training & Development

Think Training & Development was founded in 2003, by Wendie Michie and Gavin Aubrey. They have had the good fortune to coach and train thousands of people in more than 10 countries across 4 continents.

To book a course for your company or to find out more, please contact:

Wendie Michie and Gavin Aubrey
Think Training & Development,
Unit 8,
Widbrook Marina,
Bradford on Avon,
Wiltshire
BA15 1UD
Tel: 01225 479756
Email: info@thinktd.co.uk

• No. of friends merrily wishing me Happy New Year on 31 December:   14

• No. of formerly merry friends now deeply depressed at having to return to work today: 14

Why is it that people are generally so much happier as Christmas approaches? Supermarket cashiers smile and stop making you feel like an evil planet destroyer for forgetting to bring your own carrier bags. Motorists give way on roads with a friendly wave.

And more to the point, what happens to these people in January? Does an invisible mental fog descend, hurling them into a seemingly obligatory, collective depression?

Most commonly heard moans today: “It’s cold”. “It’s dark”. “I’m poor”. “Summer holidays are months away”.  “You evil planet destroyer”… (Actually, the last one’s not true but I knew what she was thinking.)

What is the point of being happy only one or two months of the year? What a waste.  And what effect is this having on the results of the companies in which these people work?

It’s true to say that most people do not have natural ‘self motivation’ skills. We live in a ‘cause and effect’ world.  People respond to the environment in which they find themselves. They do not actively choose to feel miserable but neither do they actively choose to feel motivated. Rather, they let other people and their surroundings determine the quality of their day / life / work.

This is:

1.) A shame, because self motivation is one of the key things that sets apart high achievers from the rest of population

2.) Fortunate, because we teach people self motivation techniques at think, so I still have a job. (See…There’s always a bright side).

Productivity is directly linked to motivation. The ability to motivate yourself and others allows you to improve your output and that of your staff at work. If you want to know how to cultivate this, contact us for a chat  or click here for information on our Staff Motivation courses.

There have been many studies on how non-verbal behaviour (body language such as facial expressions, gestures etc) impact communication.

Back in the 1950s, Dr Ray Birdwhistell was one of the first to suggest that no more than 30% to 35% of the social meaning of a conversation or an interaction is carried by words. (There were others before him but Dr B has by far the coolest name, so we like him best).

Today, there is a strong school of thought that, when we communicate, people pay attention to our words and actions as follows:

Is this true?

If this is true, it means that a staggering 93% of what people take from our communication is non-verbal.

If it’s important to you to give a good impression when you are addressing others, have a listen to the podcast for some tips.

If, having listened to the podcast, you’d like to know more about Visual, Auditory or Kinaesthetic words and phrases, Email Us and we’ll send you some information, including a questionnaire that will enable you to pinpoint your own preferences.

If you’d like to increase your personal impact– have a look at our Communication Skills or Advanced Presentation Skills courses or Contact Us to talk through how we can help.

This video demonstrates this through a simple ‘ice breaker’ training exercise on…sex!

Take a look and you’ll see what we mean. No giggling like school kids now. This is a serious and highly scientific lesson in Communication Skills. Oh, ok then, it’s just a bit of fun…

But seriously…if we cannot agree on the meaning of a universally acknowledged, simple little word like ‘sex’, what hope do we have of ever being properly understood?

If you want to improve the clarity and impact of your communication, take a look at our Communication Skills courses or Contact Us to talk through what you need.

P.S. We run this exercise a lot and ‘love’ doesn’t come up too much. Shame on everyone. And whoever said ‘Zygot’ in a recent session – well that’s just weird.

Using Gavin’s techniques, individuals can unleash their full potential and achieve personal success. He says “Mooing like a cow demonstrates how you can control your motivation and success.” He continues “What makes the successful, successful? Is it education, good looks, luck, length of service?  Look around at the people you class as successful (if you feel successful look in the mirror). Are they better looking, educated to a higher standard, had a lucky break or just been there forever? Probably not…what sets them apart is their attitude.”

For his next exercise, Gavin uses another technique. He explains “Close your eyes and imagine half a lemon in your hand, notice the texture and contour. Now bring the lemon to your mouth and take a bite.” He continues “If done correctly, everybody experiences some sensation of biting a real lemon – saliva in the back of the throat, pulling a funny face. But why? The lemon was never there. Your brain is a magnificent creation, unfortunately we were given limited instructions on how to use it, and therefore we usually live our lives on what has happened rather than what could happen. If your brain can taste a non-existent lemon you can develop attitude.”

To listen to Gavin’s motivation podcast, or to book a training or coaching programme for yourself or your staff, visit the Think website.

About Think Training & Development
Think Training & Development Ltd was founded in 2003, by Wendie Michie and Gavin Aubrey. They have had the good fortune to coach and train thousands of people in more than 10 countries, across four continents ranging from Kazakhstan to Tobago, Deli to Hong Kong, Stevenage to Mayfair. The company employs a fabulous team of like-minded associate coaches and trainers from a variety of walks of life. To book a course or find out more, please contact:

Wendie Michie and Gavin Aubrey
Think Training & Development,
Unit 8,
Widbrook Marina,
Bradford on Avon,
Wiltshire
BA15 1UD

Tel: 01225 479756
Email: info@thinktd.co.uk

Trainees from more than 10 countries are turning to Think for a breath of fresh air and pragmatic approach to communication and personal development training. Whilst the media scaremonger with news of job cuts, company closures, and reduced salaries, many forward thinking companies realise that at times like this, you need your staff to be firing on all cylinders. By investing in communication skills, leadership programmes and personal development training, companies can increase staff morale and reap the rewards through increased energy, motivation and productivity.

Gavin uses an approach that stimulates thought and debate amongst his trainees. That’s where the banana story comes from. Gavin says, “If what you’re doing is working really well, keep doing it. If it’s not working, try something different. Try turning your banana round and opening it the other way, it might be easier. Most people I meet aren’t quite getting the result they want, but they keep trying the same thing and are confused about why it’s not working.”

This is just one of the techniques Gavin and Wendie use in their training sessions. There are a range of courses on offer, including training in Myers Briggs personality types; the world renowned, psychological tool to help you understand yourself and others and bring about improved performance. There are also communication, leadership, team skills, advanced sales & presentation skills and executive coaching courses. The new website has free podcasts on coaching, motivation and…how do you open your banana? Over the coming months the audio section will be expanded to cover a full range of simple to use and easy to apply personal and management training sessions.

To book a training or coaching programme for yourself or your staff, visit the Think website or give us a call on 01225 479756.

About Think Training & Development

Think Training & Development Ltd was founded in 2003, by Wendie Michie and Gavin Aubrey. They have had the good fortune to coach and train thousands of people in more than 10 countries, across four continents ranging from Kazakhstan to Tobago, Deli to Hong Kong, Stevenage to Mayfair. The company employs a fabulous team of like-minded associate coaches and trainers from a variety of walks of life. To book a course or find out more, please contact:

Wendie Michie and Gavin Aubrey
Think Training & Development,
Unit 8,
Widbrook Marina,
Bradford on Avon,
Wiltshire
BA15 1UD

Tel: 01225 479756
Email: info@thinktd.co.uk

Listen to the podcast for tips on:

• Questioning & listening techniques
• Types of coaching question to ask

You cannot hope to influence a change in someone’s behaviour until they understand:

• Where they are now
• Where they want or need to get to
• What is holding them back
• What choices and options they have to move forward

If you’d like to know more about how to influence staff behaviour, check out our Influencing Skills courses, Executive Coaching or Contact Us and tell us what you need.

We tend to live out our lives ticking to an habitual beat. Sometimes you just need to ask yourself “which way do i eat my banana?”

Probably not. What makes the successful, successful is their attitude.

Most companies spend their training budgets on improving knowledge and skills when the one thing that will really make the difference is improving attitude – Staff motivation is a really good place to begin.

Listen to the podcast and if you think your team could do with a staff motivation make over, take a look at our courses or Contact Us and we’ll explain how we can help.