The Inner Life of the Leader
There is a persistent illusion in modern leadership thinking: that leadership is primarily a matter of technique. Learn the right models, acquire the right competencies, apply the right frameworks—and effective leadership will follow. It is an attractive idea, not least because it is teachable, measurable, and scalable. But it is also profoundly misleading. For beneath…
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Mapping Motivation for Students
Education is often described as the lighting of a fire rather than the filling of a bucket. Most teachers and parents recognise the truth of this instinctively. We have all seen the moment when a student leans forward, energy suddenly present, questions emerging without prompting, effort flowing rather than being dragged into place. Something aligns.…
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Caveat Emptor
The Hard Truth About Coaching, Competence, and the Power of Tools The first-rate coach, Katrin Charlton, made a post earlier this year which inspired me to think about quality in coaching. As with so many things in life and business, caveat emptor—buyer beware—applies with striking force to the world of coaching. While coaching has rightly gained…
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The Power of High Energy
Shaping the Quality of our Lives: Motivation and The Power of High Energy We all know what it feels like to be motivated. It’s that spark in the morning when you wake up ready to go, that lightness in the step when the day seems brighter, more manageable—even exciting. Motivation, in essence, is energy. And…
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Positive Psychology in the Workplace
Fuelling Engagement Through Well-Being There was a time when work was discussed almost entirely in terms of performance, output, and efficiency. The language was mechanical, and the focus transactional: you did your job, received your pay, and the system continued to turn. Yet over the past two decades, a quiet revolution has been taking place…
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Motivation, Mapped and Anchored
Motivation, Mapped and Anchored We have just switched our blog site from Typepad, which has closed down, to WordPress, which I have to say seems inordinately better – certainly, you will be able to search for motivation articles (on appraisal, teams, personal development et al) much more easily; the viewing too seems to me superior.…
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The Right People Need No Motivation?
Jim Collins, the world-famous management guru, has famously said, “If you have the right people on your bus, you don’t need to worry about motivating them.” A friend once asked me, “Does this mean that employee motivation programs are useless?” It might seem so—after all, if recruitment could ensure a team of self-starters, the need…
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The Four Dimensions of Mentoring
Sometimes I am asked, what is the single most powerful tool that facilitates personal development? This is a tricky question because any answer must be contextual; one factor might be speed. How fast do you want the personal development to occur? If speed is the issue, then clearly you may choose a process that is…
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The Mapping Motivation Series 