About support, spotlight and what Toastmasters can learn from road cycling. — “A team sport? But there are no balls nor goals!” Okay. There’s no comparison between speech contests and basketball or ice hockey. Even if we go to Wikipedia for a definition, we might have a tough time fitting speech contests into the traditional Team Sport category. They are characterized as…

Keeping your backpack on will make you sweaty. — Walking through the jungle is hard. You have to hack your way through the thick brush with machetes. That’s really tough to do with your backpack on. Even the pros leave their backpacks behind when they’re chopping their way through. They come back and pick them up later. Thinking is…

Having someone telling you about a problem is not the problem. — “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” was the sentence said by Jack Swigert, the Command Module Pilot of the Apollo 13 mission. …

Sometimes, less is more. And sometimes, more. — When it comes to options, do you prefer having more or less? When it comes to ideas — is it easier for you to produce more or less? Let’s find out. If you like, you can play along and actually do the tasks! Task one: “Tell a made-up story on…

How to influence today what we’ll remember tomorrow. — Fished out of my Jar of Awesome (or, in my case rather a tin box): August 5th, 2020 Climbing Petrin on a bike without stopping after 5 years (or so). …and finishing Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers” in a day. August 6th 2020 Walking in Prague with the book “111 Places in Prague You Should not MIss”…

An empty room can be worse than a tough room. Does it have any advantages? — It’s Tuesday 3:15 pm. I’m delivering a virtual session titled “Even You Can Be a Facilitator”. It’s about running meetings using Mural and how much easier it is to facilitate workshops this way than face-to-face in a meeting room. The audience is my colleagues from our Austin IT office. It’s…