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During my years as a psychiatric nurse, I witnessed something that profoundly shaped my approach to business and leadership development: the artificial separation between personal well-being and professional performance is not just unhelpful - it's fundamentally flawed. You cannot separate the person from the professional. Mental health and well-being aren't separate from leadership effectiveness - they're fundamental to it. Yet walk into most corporate training programmes, and you'll find this truth conspicuously absent. Leadership development focuses on strategy and communication. Sales training emphasises techniques and processes. Management programmes cover delegation and performance management. Meanwhile, the human being experiencing stress, anxiety, burnout, or personal challenges is expected to somehow compartmentalise these experiences and perform optimally regardless.

Mistake: to blunder in choice; misinterpret; to make a wrong judgment of character or ability Do you see your mistakes as a gift or a burden? Show me someone who says he or she has rarely made a mistake, and I’ll suspect that person is not telling the truth or he or she is living in a pool of mediocrity. There are varying degrees of mistakes, but the way we respond to our mistakes and learn from them is more critical than making them in the first place.

The training room falls silent as Sarah, the only woman on the senior leadership team, shares her perspective on the company's new strategy. Around the table, her male colleagues nod politely, but their body language suggests they're already moving on to the next agenda item. Meanwhile, Ahmed, whose thoughtful insights have consistently impressed in smaller settings, remains quiet throughout the session, his valuable contributions lost to a facilitation style that favours the loudest voices. This scenario plays out in training rooms across the UK every day. Despite good intentions and significant investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, many organisations struggle to create learning environments where all participants can contribute their best thinking and achieve their full potential.

In this final blog of 4 I’m going to cover how the design of the online assessments and the workshop has developed over the years, together with some of the key Beliefs, Behaviours and Building Blocks that we all need to manage ourselves through the maze that is workplace politics. We have been using what we call the Universal Assessment for several years which was designed for the general population. It works well, as measured by feedback from users and clients. I’ve always been intrigued however, as to the need for a specific assessment for different genders.

In this third blog I'm going to cover some of the interesting findings from the delivery of the one day workshop and also some fascinating insights into the marketing once we had what we thought was a market ready product. Workshop Findings: I'm going to restrict myself to covering off the top 2 findings because in reality there were many! Number 1….

You may recall from the previous blog that I had promised a new client an influencing skills workshop which was to include a session on the subject of ‘Workplace politics’. After the trip south on the train where my business partner has accused me of lying (remember the ‘intention’ response – more later) I set about finding out what materials were out there and what we could usefully buy (or borrow) to include into the workshop. In a nutshell, there was very little. Most if not all materials that appeared were related to Politics with a BIG P – the politics within a Country/Party/Council but very little on the topic of politics in the workplace – politics with a small ‘p’.

The challenge……. Twenty years ago I started my own training business and the dream was to deliver Leadership Development that made a difference. By that I mean practical stuff, based on real people and what they did and how they did it and what actually worked in the workplace. I was younger then, enthusiastic and having spent 20 years in 2 enormous organisations in Banking and Insurance, was relatively wise to how organisations got things done...

Have you ever felt like there’s more to life than what you’re currently experiencing? Do you sense untapped potential within you waiting to be unleashed? If so, you’re not alone. Many of us go through life with a lingering feeling that we could be doing more, achieving more, and ultimately, living more fulfilling lives. Today, we’re diving deep into the concept of unlocking your potential—the power within you that, once harnessed, can transform your life in remarkable ways.

Who is this exercise for? This exercise is designed to pro-actively engage clients in the coaching process. With six different ways to use the cubes it brings a tactile, pro-active, soothing and self-directed element to the coaching conversation. It’s particularly suitable for young adults, neuro- diverse clients and shy or anxious clients.

As someone who's spent decades in the trenches of leadership development and training delivery, I've witnessed firsthand the evolution of our profession. From my early days as a psychiatric nurse to founding seven businesses and now leading Be More Effective Ltd and Management Learning Resource as part of it, one truth has remained constant: the best learning resources emerge from the collective wisdom of practitioners who understand what truly works in the field.