Practical tips. Prompts to get you thinking. The odd rant.

The most effective sales tools we have are our ears. Yes, those lovely, funny shaped flappy things on each side of our head. When you’re in a selling situation, do you do more talking than listening? We often think of salespeople being ‘smooth talkers’ – yet being full of the blarney isn’t a great selling… Read more

Whenever I run Zoomly’s ‘How to plan and prioritise’ workshop, as the group identifies their daily ‘time bandits’, meetings loom large. Typical comments are that they take too long and deliver too little. No wonder that people fiddle with their phones…Are they really an essential, valuable of getting things done? Or just a waste of… Read more

  When you’re working and collaborating with clients, suppliers, colleagues, team members, what questions do you hear? What questions do you ask? Most of us don’t give it too much thought – it’s just a conversation, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, I hope you have two-way conversations with these people. No, asking the right… Read more

  The idea generation, or ‘brainstorm’ (or ‘thought shower’ as someone suggested recently) is done. You’ve got heaps of wild and wonderful ideas, concepts, and suggestions. So now what? A point that’s made crystal clear in Zoomly’s ‘How to brainstorm ideas’ workshop is the need to separate idea generation from idea evaluation. These are two… Read more

So let’s get the shameless plug out of the way first: I’m often asked to train and support trainers who run in-house training sessions. Phew, that’s better. Now, having been doing this for several years there are 4 traps I frequently see in-house trainers fall into. Here they are, with my advice on what to… Read more

Whether you’re facilitating an idea generation session, a training workshop, an off-site or a meeting – you need tools and techniques to make the beginning and ending work well. Why? Too many such gatherings deliver too little – yet at a high cost, when the hourly rate for all the talent in the room is… Read more

Maybe it’s because I’ve been designing and leading learning workshops for a while now that people ask me to help their in-house trainers. Maybe it’s because the L&D budget has been cut and suddenly an in-house ‘faculty’ is needed. Or a bit of both. Whatever the reason, I think that sharing the expertise already on… Read more

Image by Ron Harvey/Deposit Photos Having been in my current line of work for over fifteen years, I often get asked to run ‘train the trainer’ workshops for clients’ internal trainers. What typically happens is that someone (usually senior, and/or in HR) decides that the expertise on the payroll needs to be shared much more… Read more

  1. Announce the end’s in sight At what point do you do this? I suggest allowing roughly 10% of the total time to draw proceedings to a close. So in Zoomly’s bite-sized workshops this can be as brief as 9 minutes. In a day-long bespoke event it could be 40 minutes. Whenever this is,… Read more

When we’re trying to generate lots of new ideas we often try too hard. What we really need to do is stop trying and simply brainstorm whatever comes to mind. However this can be really hard to do, because a) we look at the problem / issue / question from our own right-here-right-now perspective and… Read more