Happy New Year!
Here’s my first Friday Thought of 2025! Been doing these for a fair few years and hope you enjoy them. I really appreciate the kind comments I receive when a Friday Thought really hits home with you…
Today, it’s about those ‘glimmers’. Not a glimmer of hope, but turning triggers on it’s head!
Look out for those special moments… and you’ll see more of them.
Today’s thought is from an accomplished football manager. And it’s something I learnt recently with my Under 13’s football team.
You see, we’d won like 10 games in a row.. and won them well. Unfortunately, we got to a stage that the team walked onto the pitch thinking we’ve got this and we can win easily. However, that’s not always the case.
We lost. And heavily. They destroyed us.
But you know what. We learnt so much from that one defeat. We learnt about our positioning, we learnt that we shouldn’t take particular risks when the opposition have certain qualities. Every team is different however, we shouldn’t become complacent.
I suppose, this is a life lesson. When you make a mistake, or when something doesn’t work out… you learn so much! And that is what makes you better.
Carlo says it very well…
We are always faced with so many choices.
Do you be… or do you go and do?
It’s a continuous loop of being, learning and understanding before you can go and do, share and be understood.
The Yin & Yang of Creativity…
I’ll share more in an up and coming blog post, but last week I was in Atlanta at a Leadership meeting. And at the meeting the boss put up a slide, and at the bottom of the slide he shared the books he recommends.
Personally – I loved that. Because, I always want to read new books which are recommended by intelligent people.
Which got me thinking… about smart people I know.
There’s a fair few of them. And then I began to notice a trend. A pattern, amongst them. They read books was number one. But they had much more in common…
To become smart… here’s what I found;
We all make mistakes.
The important thing, as everyone says is, we should learn from them.
Once something has happened, don’t dwell on it. Understand why it happened and work on what could prevent it from happening again.
But most importantly, focus on the solution.
How can it be fixed. Then you won’t be as scared to make mistakes.
When was the last time you wanted to do something, but were scared?
We all are. To be honest, there are many time we just don’t do it due to a worry it may go wrong, it won’t be the correct way, etc…
We then either leave it, get someone else to do it or just keep thinking…
If you want to do something, should you? There could be factors that are preventing you, but once you know those factors….
We are often faced with difficult situations where we have to learn a new way of working, a new method or a new process.
We hear that AI is going to take over our jobs.
Who knows?! But what we do know is that we should continuously learn new skills. Might seem hard at first…
So recently, I was on holiday and took the opportunity to read a book.
The book I read this summer was called, Never split the difference.
It was a great ready! Thoroughly recommend it.
The reason why I like it so much was because Chris gave some wonderful examples, he shared stories of successes but also failures! (you don’t have many people do that.. and then finally, it really did teach me something about empathy!)
So today’s thought is… make sure you’re equipped with the skills needed to negotiate.
Yesterday, I was talking to my team member about some work we are doing and I made the comment.. ‘slowly but surely’.
Now, for those who know me, I love the old Brian Clough quote, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I wasn’t on that particular job”. That’s very much me… but then on the other hand, there’s only so much you can do with what you have control over. It’s all about control.
So today’s thought is centred around doing what you can do, little by little, with the control you do have.
