Do something! – gifts from improv
9 May 2009I’ve been working my way through the set of six small cards I made to celebrate and share the gifts from improv theatre. One of the things I love about doing this is that I never know where inspiration will come from for my next post. Today I visited Patti Digh’s blog 37 days, attracted…
Colour-Advance
29 April 2009I’ve been reading Everything’s An Offer by Rob Poynton & Gary Hirsh. It’s the sort of book that I’ll come back to often, and will have to re-read because of the many insights relating to applying improv theatre principles in business, and life. Unlike many other books about improv which focus on the form itself,…
Secret of my (our) success
17 April 2009Half jokingly I often say that I hang out with talented people, and that’s the secret of my success. It’s only partly a joke because it happens to be true. In fact, Seth Godin (I think) said you want to be the least talented person in a room full of talented people. That way you…
New thinking
15 April 2009For many years now I’ve had this Arthur Schopenhauer quote as part of my email signature: “Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.” This TED video captures exactly that! This gives me faith that…
Book Review: ‘The Element’ by Sir Ken Robinson
24 February 2009Heather Davis and I got together and wrote this book review of The Element: how finding your passion changes everything by Sir Ken Robinson, with Lou Aronica, 2009. New York, Viking. USD $17. This book was mentioned in and follows on from Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED Talk “Do schools kill creativity?” which made a profoundly moving case for…
Torn by time
15 February 2009In improvisation, time has a different feel – it’s not that important, it seems. Improvisers work together to create without worrying too much if they have enough time. You rarely, if ever, here an improviser say ‘we could have done so much better if we’d had more time’. Accepting offers, doing something, being obvious, going…
On being inspired
6 February 2009It’s easy to feel quite isolated from world happenings – and even though that’s desirable from time to time, rural southern Australia does seem a long way away sometimes. And it’s also easy to be despondent, fearful even, with all the doom and gloom predictions abounding. My antidotes are many – lose myself in a…
Resources for Facilitators
2 February 2009Facilitators like me have traditionally drawn on processes, activities, and often the wisdom and experiences of other facilitators for inspiration when designing workshops. Today I had a completely different experience. I promised I’d develop a slide show for a group as a thought starter for a discussion. I identified the key messages, developed a rough…
Using word clouds to find the core
29 January 2009I’ve thought of another use for wordle. Geoff Brown and I have developed a training program called Insanely Great Slideshow Presentations. In this training we help people take all the information they want to present in a presentation and prune it to the core messages. For a lot of people this is very difficult. It’s…
Inspiration and motivation
24 January 2009Feeling a bit down in the dumps the other day and unable to get myself motivated, I started writing this post. I’ve always understood inspiration to be external and motivation to be internal. I’m finding lots to inspire me on the web, and in the world. What I’m struggling with is motivation. Any suggestions? And…