During my journey into coaching, first as a client and then as a coach, I’ve spent quite a bit of time navigating a landscape that can feel a little confusing. As coaching is still a relatively nascent area (particularly in certain countries, cultures and industries), a lot of people aren’t…
Date Archives January 2019
Workshop Slide Deck (guided): Lifecycles in products, companies, and careers
Introduction This is a workshop session I designed and facilitated in Summer 2018 (annotated and abbreviated version, with some classroom exercises and notes included for other educators to reference). Here’s the Slideshare version, although this annotated one is far better of course 😉 I created this as part of the growth…
On the guestlist: Making season 1 of the Tickets podcast
A few weeks ago I received an email from someone telling me they’d just finished the whole season of the Tickets podcast. There’s a mix of gratitude, pride, and slight trepidation in knowing someone has invested their time into something you’ve designed and created. In this case, it involved 10+…
Tickets Podcast: SXSW’s Todd Hansen on live event programming and spotting talent & trends
Listen now:Apple Podcasts | Castbox | Overcast | Spotify | Stitcher | Acast | Google Play In the Spring of 1987, a group of music fans and journalists organized a small live event in Austin, Texas. They were pleasantly surprised by its success – around 700 people showed up. That first edition of South by SouthWest has become a 10 day conference…
My Podcast Gear: recording, editing, and publishing
I’ve learned a lot from creating a podcast series: from asking good questions and improving my spoken delivery; to sales, marketing, and audio engineering. As much as podcasts are a hot trend right now and plenty of people are jumping on podcasting in part because of that, I do genuinely…
Why Penn & Teller ignored the audience
One of Penn Jillette’s least favourite terms in show business is ’this works’. It’s easy to let the audience (whether fans, critics, or business people) decide what works, and effectively write your act. This can be counter to the work of a creator. When Bruce Springsteen wrote Born to Run…
Navigating Uncertainty: Climbing the Ladder, Going out to Sea
When we are learning something new there are usually some guardrails in place. We’re learning how to DJ in the safety of our bedroom, not headlining Barclays Center. We’re committing our code into a test environment, not straight into the App Store. Our Spanish conversation practice is with a peer…
Location Arbitrage
Go back 15 years or so and this was only a serious day to day consideration if you were an international trader looking to take advantage of fluctuations in currencies and demand for particular goods. For the rest of us, it may have come up as something to think about…
It’s hard to tell other people’s stories
You’ve probably heard that person at the bar, telling a story that isn’t theirs. It’s still funny, or touching, or tense, but something doesn’t quite sit right. You can sense it. Telling other peoples’ stories isn’t easy. On the face of it this doesn’t seem especially important. But stories are…
Coaching: 15 things that make your heart sing
One of the key components of my coaching certification program is to undertake peer coaching with other members of the cohort. There’s a minimum requirement of peer coaching hours over the program, but most of us have gone above and beyond this already as it’s been very valuable time –…