And then I was thinking about the courage of writing a blog, laying open to the risk of ridicule. It’s exactly what she is talking about. Living our life fully means being prepared to be vulnerable, to take risks. Putting myself out there everyday in one way or another and overcoming the inauthentic voice within, seeking deeper for the still small voice within which talks to who I truly am, and why I am in the world.

I have thought for a long time that the number three has a real magic for me. I won’t go into all the ideas about the Trinity and get all quasi-religious in this short piece, but three does seem to be a key number for the conscious mind. We are able to hold three things in our head without too much difficulty. I know for example that if I am going to the supermarket to get things, unless I use a written list or memory aid, I will almost certainly forget things if I have more than three things to remember. Ask me to list three work areas that I am focused on and it’s not a problem at all – ask me to list four or five and I will inevitably forget the last one by the time I get to it.

There is a lot to be found on the internet about the power of three as it manifests in marketing. In this post I want to focus on a couple of other applications which I use regularly.

Three things at the end of each day

I often suggest this technique to coaching clients. They may be struggling to see what they are achieving over a period of time, say the last 6 months. And they may also be feeling that they are stuck with tasks that are uninspiring and wondering how anything that they are doing is making a difference. I suggest a technique which I like to see as a form of Appreciative Inquiry. At the end of each day look back and identify three things that have made a difference. Write them down. Do this each day. It gets easier because the process itself means that the next day you will tend to select things to do that will make a difference as you look for your target of three things. It also acts as a prompt so that things that might not feel that significant can be seen in a new way; one is able to see the positives where they might not have been apparent before.

Try it for a couple of weeks and see if it turns things round. It can lift one’s whole perspective so that we are looking for positive things rather than dwelling in the negative.

And whilst we are playing with numbers, if we can find three things we do that make a difference each day that will be over 90 things each month, nearly a thousand things in a year. Just imagine what impact we will be having with a thousand small things that make a real impact.

Three key messages in a presentation / email / letter

Another use of the power of three is to ensure that presentations or important emails that are sent to people always have three key messages in them. This ensures that the message can be easily captured by the recipient and replayed at a later point. Complicated emails tend to be pushed to the bottom of the in-tray and never get attention anyway. By restricting the message to just three things we ensure that the message being conveyed can be held in the recipient’s conscious mind. It’s also then easy to give a verbal reminder of the three key issues raised the next time you meet that person.

Try these techniques and see what impact they have. Feel free to drop me a note and let me know if they are useful.

When I was a teenager I would regularly spend weekends with my Aunt and Uncle in a village about 5 miles from my home. My Aunt was my mother’s younger sister. She had a young son who I would babysit for when they went out.

One weekend, when my cousin was just a toddler, my uncle and I were busy doing jobs in the garden. He had a couple of old cars which he kept on the road by doing work on them himself. On this particular day we were doing various paint jobs. So, we were creosoting the garden fences, and whilst we were doing that he thought it would also be a good idea to apply some creosote to the undercarriage of the car to protect it from water.

We were also ‘keeping an eye’ on my cousin whilst my Aunt was out for the afternoon. He would have probably been 3 years old at the time.

After a while we took a break to have a cup of tea. And it was after the tea break that we found the catastrophe. Whilst we were sitting down eating biscuits my cousin had got hold of the brush and applied paint all over the body work down the sides of both of the cars.

Did we shout at him? Could we tell him off? Well, no we didn’t. He had, in his mind, been helping us get the job done.

Why am I telling you this story? Well, the term ‘creosote moment’ has become used regularly since I recited this anecdote where I work. We use it to describe the situation where someone has a job to do. To me, it’s a simple task. But they take the task away, and in the interests of being helpful they build on the task. They add what they perceive to be useful features to the task and do those too. But from where I am sitting they haven’t done the job. And in the nature of the anecdote, it takes a long time to undo a problem with creosote on the paintwork of a car. Creosote tends to strip off the paint and leave an unbelievable mess.

This strikes home the real need to be clear whether you are delegating a task to be done in exactly the way you are describing, or you are giving a project to be done with plenty of scope for interpretation. It’s also really helpful to know whether the person you are delegating to knows the difference between applying creosote to the bottom of a car rather than the pristine bodywork above the waterline!

Below is the opening section of the book, which has the working title “We Get the Work Done Together”.

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s weblog (www.sethgodin.com ) for a few years now, and as well as reading his free books which are on the internet, I have also bought a couple of his books to read. I really enjoy the free flow of provocative ideas that he puts together. It really gets you thinking about things in unconventional ways.

One of his recent books is called “Linchpin” and it has become one of the group of books which the team I lead is working through as part of the Creative Learning Academy which I have developed.

A free e-book by Seth Godin, “The Insubordinates”, is an add-on to the Linchpin book. It sets out the people who Seth feels have influenced his thinking, or helped him to achieve what he has. He gives a bit of a rant and storyline on each person. I read it the other day, and it inspired me to pull together my own summary of the key people who have really shaped my thinking over the last few years.

At the time of writing, I am in the midst of developing a new approach to learning as a team. The Creative Learning Academy takes a set of ideas around personal development, co-creation and creativity. Using an organic approach, a set of workshops and learning tools have been used to take the team through a shared experience.  The focus is on encouraging everyone to see learning as an essential part of work and the life that surrounds it.

I’m not sure, as I write this, who I am writing it for. I guess to some extent that I am doing it to clarify my own thinking, but it may also help to explain the broader context for the Creative Learning Academy and its ongoing development. Either way, here goes…

A while ago I read ‘Linchpin’ by Seth Godin – a brilliant book. I’ve read a few of his books now – I also liked ‘Poke the Box’ which was part of a new publishing project which he ran throughout last year in partnership with Amazon. He is always pushing the boundaries and getting his readers to think out beyond their comfort zones.

One of the concepts he explores which I find really interesting is the idea that we constantly need to overcome resistance. And we do this by shipping. Getting past the inner critic. Thus, with any type of project it is key that we push on and through the resistance until the project is ready to ship. In other words, complete it and share it. Don’t aim for perfection.

Well, with this concept very much in mind the last time I met with my coach, we looked at how I can get a lot of the ‘open loops’ sorted. I have a lot of manuscripts unfinished. They create a drag with my energy, incomplete projects looking for a final burst of energy. So, we developed the idea of the ‘Shipping List’ – and then it struck me that if I can clear my ‘Shipping List’ I could then create a ‘Shipping Forecast’ with ideas for new writing projects. This has been incredibly motivating. I pulled together a ‘Shipping List’ and it had 13 items on it. This includes a couple of poetry collections, the book of the PhD thesis, a book on change, collected works of my poetry from the last 25 years, coaching tips, a new novel and a booklet about Buddhism. A really eclectic mix of ideas – and one that I need to conclude and sign off without being too precious about some of the ideas.

I’ve been working on the list over the last week or so, and I already have one manuscript (made up of the two poetry collections) virtually finished, a short coaching tips booklet to edit. It’s really exciting to find that I can pull together and ship at a real pace to get through the Shipping List. I will keep you posted as I progress the lists.

The sign was wrong on so many levels. Firstly, it was in a hairdressers window – the colour didn’t exactly fill me with confidence about the quality of service inside. And more importantly, what does it say about the existing loyal customer if they are going to charge new customers 10% less? We need to think about the unintended consequences of our actions.

Too many companies (see banks, insurance companies etc) don’t value their existing customers. Instead, they give all of the incentives to the new customer.

It’s much harder to find a new customer or client than it is to keep an existing one.

The book we are working on at the moment is ‘Do More Great Work’ by Michael Bungay Stanier. I wrote to Michael a few weeks ago to see if he would be interested in working with us. He lives in Canada so there were some practical difficulties to overcome. However, thanks to the wonder of Skype we managed to plan and deliver a 1 hour workshop at the end of last week. The technology worked beautifully thanks to a team with plenty of bright ideas. In the end 12 of us worked with Michael and we had a small camera crew in the
space with us to capture the event. This will be online soon on the work website along with a few small clips on YouTube.

One of the interesting things about the workshop was that we invited in some of the freelancers who work with us on various projects. It was a great opportunity to recruit the wider team to work together – and the
feedback from the freelancers was incredibly positive. “The first time in years I have had the chance for any personal development” said one of them.

All in all, it was an incredibly positive experience. Michael’s input was really helpful and very focused, and as a team it was a really productive experience. One of the team commented that it was as though Michael was in the room with us.

The Development Academy will continue over the next few months.  I will post further feedback on its progress.

At the last team meeting before the summer break, I introduced 6 books which have had a particular impact on the way in which I work:

• Michael Bungay Stanier – Do more great work
• William Bridges – Managing Transitions
• Tom Peters – Re-imagining
• David Allen – Getting Things Done
• Robin Sharma – The monk who sold his ferrari
• Stephen Covey – The seven habits of highly effective people

In the meeting we discussed the best way to work with these as a group. We decided that a form of ‘book club’ would be the best idea. So, we will each read one of these books over the period of a month and then have a discussion about it at the next meeting, looking at implications for the way we work as a team.

I guess you could call it a learning academy. I intend to further develop this academy idea as the months go by. I am also keen to look at ways in which we can use videos and other materials to build the learning. Hopefully this will help us as a team to build in a strong value base to our work.

Watch this space….

I always hear new things when I listen to these mixes, and the choices are always achingly beautiful. Just the thing for focusing the brain waves to a bit of serious writing, or complete relaxation. Sign up and enjoy.

A walk in the Wirral, near Parkgate, on one of those days when the sky is as beautiful as the landscape.

And a captured memory, because those are the ones that open up the block and create a safe haven to unlock the ideas.

Cloud formations like moments in the head, like the sense of an imagined landscape, long before it all.

Butterflies in the long grass, and a scent of buttercups and daisies. Remember childhood, and the days that stretched like timeless and endless moments imprinted now like something we thought we had forgotten long ago…