Am I allowed to post this?

A person will be called to account on Judgment Day for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed but did not. – The Talmud

It’s just gone 1pm on a Thursday afternoon in Central London and the IT staff in a large financial firm have just been told that they no longer need to ask the management when they want to do new things.

The instructions are simple, “If you want to do something to improve the way you work, to make things better for you, and to make things better for the company, get on with it”. This is all part of their new AGILE approach.

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Social Chameleon™

Photo by Matt Burrard-Lucas

“Draw the curtain, the fraud is over.” – Francois Rabelais

Whilst I was talking to one of my clients just the other day, who also happens to be a life coach, he was telling me some of the reasons he isn’t making the kind of money he really would like to be making. One of his ideas was that if more people knew about him and his services then at some point people would start to realise just how stupid he really was. I think he used the phrase “People will realise I’m a fraud”.

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Self Growth

This week I found out that the kind people over at SelfGrowth.com have listed me as being a “Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Expert”. I thought it was news worth writing about

http://www.selfgrowth.com/experts/jamie_dixon.html

Learning to KISS

Photo by July Cardiff

“Simplicity is nature’s first step, and the last of art.” – Philip James Bailey

One thing that strikes me as an amazing accomplishment of human beings is their ability to make the simplest things into the most complex things.

It was Albert Einstein who commented that:

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.”

To me, this statement answers one of the fundamental beliefs in our society that if something is too simple; it’s not being done right. Einstein in his quote is answering that belief by saying that things should be made as simple as possible, whilst still maintaining the outcome required, but not any simpler than that.

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Last Day on Earth™ – Until the Next One

Painting by Marketseq

“Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.” – C.S. Lewis

This is a little game I like to play when I’m feeling a bit down or nervous or any other thing I don’t really want to be feeling and for me, it helps me to do things in a new way.

The premise that this works from is, “What if today was my last day on earth, how would that affect how I do x”.

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Going Agile

Photo by Mas Luka

“The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humour. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.” – George Santayana

In the software development world, agile modelling or agile model-driven development is defined as the following:

“Agile is an iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams with “just enough” ceremony that produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders.”

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Moving Trances

Photo by Einar Ragnarsson

Those who have trained with Richard Bandler or done an SNLP licensed training course (and many who haven’t also) will be more than familiar with the concept of spinning feelings. That is, when a person has a feeling, there has to be some place that the feeling starts. Whether that’s in their stomach, solar plexus, chest or where ever, and the feeling also has to move in some direction because if it didn’t, like all feelings in the body including physical ones, it would habituate and disappear

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Outside Inside Out

While I was taking a walk one morning kicking the brown leaves as I went, I realised that it was recycling day and that all of the houses on the road I was strolling down had 2 or 3 boxes outside containing different materials.

There was a box for papers, a box for glass, one for cans and another for plastics and although each house had similar boxes, each one was filled in a different way with different types of things.

Being the kind of person I am who likes to have fun and play games I decided to make up a little game for myself that would not only be fun but also might develop something in me that could come in useful.

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The Life Photo

While I was sitting in the park today having lunch with some friends, we noticed a lot of people taking photographs of the things around them.

Some were taking pictures of the grass, others of the statues and some just taking pictures of their friends and family against historical buildings.
There was one girl who was taking pictures of her feet around different parts of the park.

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Re Organising the Management

One of my clients at the moment is a company that are one of the top Spread Betting and CFD trading companies in the world. They have a huge number of staff split over offices located in 6 countries, 2 of those offices being right here in central London.

Not only does this company help it’s own clients to make hundreds of millions of pounds per year, they also rely on their staff to make sure the company does what it does in the best way possible and that at every level, each department knows it’s direction and how to get to where it needs to be.

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