Patrick Mayfield
Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash In my post last week, I went down memory lane and confessed to one of my worst recruitment blunders. This week, I’m still stuck in the past or, as I’d like to think, I’m still learning from my early career experiences. This week, I want to share how captivated I became with […]
In the 1980s, the Irish management consultant, Charles Handy, began to explore idea of portfolio workers. In works like The Empty Raincoat, he saw an emergent reality where more and more of us would have a series of jobs, sometimes simultaneously.
My work seems far from farming. I’m a self-employed coach and writer. Yet, my aunt was right: there are more similarities my work to being a farmer, as I lead myself through the myriad of daily choices in my work, than perhaps first meets the eye.
We do not need to wait for life to change our circumstances. We can change our story. Now.
The creative heart has a rhythm of expanding and contracting. When it expands, it creates possibilities, generating ideas, divergent in its thinking, exploring, and pursuing some even further. When it contracts, it is evaluating, assessing, honing, editing, eliminating, critiquing. Divergence and convergence. In any given moment, we do one or the other. The mistake that […]
A few years ago, I was called in to consult for a large IT transformation programme in healthcare. It concerned a large teaching hospital over a number of sites across a major city. The change would be so radical to current working practices that the systems provider had even built a simulated ward where the […]
My friend Mike is an inventor, but he is not motivated by the conventional rewards of making it big time. What makes him tick?
Image by Christopher Windus on Unsplash Recently I wrote some thoughts stimulated by my reading of Matthew Kelly’s The Dream Manager. I wrote about the importance of reconnecting with our dreams: Most of us are foolish with our future, saying things like, I have too… or I must…, or this won’t work, it never does. This is the language […]
Have you heard someone say that to you recently? Maybe not. Maybe they are thinking it. It requires someone to trust you, feel safe around you, confident enough to speak their mind, to be brave enough to say that they don’t get it. Maybe they are just faking it, and nod in agreement. Maybe you […]
Credit: Photo by Will Myers on Unsplash A few years ago I read Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard by the Heath brothers. It remains one of my favourite books on the whole subject of change. One particular section has stayed with me: the idea of the bright spots, the positive deviants, as academics call them, who can […]