Thinking Skills mindmap testimonial videos

Posted on 11/01/2011 by admin
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Thinking skills teaches mind mapping as a core business skill. A mind map is a great way to keep meetings tight and a great way to maximise creativity in a brainstorming session.

Mind maps are also useful for accelerated learning. Workshop delegates typically study 10-30 times faster after the thinking skills workshop.

Doctor Grace Saw is information services director at Bond University in Australia. She recently attended a session I ran in Brisbane. Grace is an enthusiast and like all of us is operating in the thick of information overload, too little time, too much to do and unbelievable changes in the work and even our home environment.

And we bring to our lives a genetic inheritance which is judging by recent estimates somewhere between 50,000 and 2.4 million years old.

What I’m trying to say is that we’re all human. And anything we can do to cope with our circumstances we’re going to take on board. See what Grace had to say about her workshop here (in only 90 seconds). Grace describes her Thinking Skills workshop

Here is a second video clip running just three minutes. Three delegates discuss a thinking skills workshop at the Australian Institute of Management in Perth, WA. Julian, Lisa and Ian say how they plan to use mind maps in their businesses. Lisa runs a rapidly expanding hire firm with an inventory of over 700 vehicles. Ian has responsibilities covering hundreds of staff. All three are concerned by the need to maximise creativity at work.

Here is another short (80 seconds) clip of a Perth group discussing the workshop on the last day, last October. They had fun!

Thinking Skills workshop

Thinking Skills group

For more information on upcoming workshops, and lots more short videos, visit our Thinking Skills brochure page

Posted in Creative Thinking, Management Development, Mind Mapping® | Leave a comment

Creativity, abstract thinking and routine work.

Posted on 31/12/2010 by admin
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Creativity, abstract thinking and routine work. Are these things opposed to one another? My friend Brian just sent me a story about the Blackbird SR 71 jet.

SR 71 jet

I once sat next to a Blackbird pilot on the bus coming home from Oshkosh Airventure – the world’s greatest airshow. So when I opened my email I could relate to what Brian Shul, another Blackbird pilot, had to say. Here it is:

One moonless night, while flying a routine training mission over the Pacific, I wondered what the sky would look like from 84,000 feet if the cockpit lighting were dark. While heading home on a straight course, I slowly turned down all of the lighting, reducing the glare and revealing the night sky. Within seconds, I turned the lights back up, fearful that the jet would know and somehow punish me. But my desire to see the sky overruled my caution, I dimmed the lighting again.
To my amazement, I saw a bright light outside my window. As my eyes adjusted to the view, I realized that the brilliance was the broad expanse of the Milky Way, now a gleaming stripe across the sky. Where dark spaces in the sky had usually existed, there were now dense clusters of sparkling stars. stars flashed across the canvas every few seconds. It was like a fireworks display with no sound.
I knew I had to get my eyes back on the instruments, and reluctantly I brought my attention back inside. To my surprise, with the cockpit lighting still off, I could see every gauge, lit by starlight. In the plane’s mirrors, I could see the eerie shine of my gold spacesuit incandescently illuminated in a celestial glow. I stole one last glance out the window. Despite our speed, we seemed still before the heavens, humbled in the radiance of a much greater power. For those few moments, I felt a part of something far more significant than anything we were doing in the plane. The sharp sound of Walt’s voice on the radio brought me back to the tasks at hand as I prepared for our descent.

I had a very similar experience in the cockpit of a B707 many years ago over Africa in the middle of the night. I was in the First Officer’s seat and the captain was doing crossword puzzles. I looked outside and saw the glory of creation before me. There was St Elmo’s fire twinkling on the windscreen wipers and radiating out from the bulbous nose of the plane. Cumulus clouds of the inter-tropic convergence zone were towering above us – right up to about 45 00 feet, and they were illuminated like flickering fluorescent lamps with almost continuous lightning discharges. The sky was like black velvet with millions of laser pointed stars spiking through it. I was awestruck in that timeless moment. I beckoned to the Captain. He looked up but he didn’t see it at all. There was a kind of skin on his eyes – like the nictitating membrane that protects some birds’ eyes. And that was the moment I decided that airline flying was not for me. If that was where I was going – to be so dulled by routine that I would no longer see ..

A wise man once warned me about the dangers of routine work. Its efficient but it extracts a price. That price is the dulling of creativity. Fortunately we have ways of avoiding this fate. We need to take our awareness daily to the field of the transcendent – to stop time and experience pure abstraction. This blesses, refreshes and glorifies the boundaries of time and space we choose to live in.

And improves our health.

Would you like to find out more about how to improve your thinking skills?

Posted in Creative Thinking, Problem Solving, Thinking Skills®, Transcendental Meditation® | Leave a comment

Do Business Writing like a pro

Posted on 30/12/2010 by admin
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HERE’S A GREAT TOOL TO HELP YOUR WRITING

Which paragraph is easier to read?

1. The ability to write clearly and effectively is a critical professional skill. This program will assist participants to plan, organise and structure their writing to achieve better results with written communications. Through the practical application of writing and editing skills, participants will learn to write documents that are reader-oriented and communicate clearly and effectively.

Now try this one:

2. Clear and effective writing is a top professional skill. This program will help you to plan and structure your writing to get better results. You will learn the skills needed to write and edit papers that are oriented to the reader and get your message across clearly.

Para 1 is from a popular two-day course: Business Writing Skills. Gunning Fog index 18.7. 18 years of education needed to figure out the meaning on first pass.

The second says the same in about half the words – Fog Index is 8.8. Much easier!

I would not sign up for that course!!!

In the Thinking Skills workshop I try to practice what I preach. For instance, go here for a superb tool to calculate the fog index of your latest masterpiece.
Improve your business writing. Join us here!

Posted in business writing, training and skills training | Leave a comment

Thinking and Learning with Google search

Posted on 03/12/2010 by admin
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No learning tool has greater potential to change the world than Google search.

I’d love to know how often you use Google or any other search engine to look up information.

Google is the nuclear fuel of the internet explosion. An answer to almost any question is reachable within about 60 seconds via Google search. So I’m reading “What would Google do” by Jeff Jarvis. I heard about it from Pete Carruthers who is my Internet marketing guru. So when Pete plugged Jeff’s book, sitting in an easy chair one Sunday afternoon, I ordered it from Amazon—Kindle books actually—and one minute later it sat on the screen of my MacBook.

What a story. So readable. Who could have imagined that a free advertising service (Google Adwords) would profoundly alter the newspaper industry, that learners with keyboards would bring down politicians, and “dropouts could build companies worth billions.”

Google is the fastest growing company in the history of the world, so its fascinating to read how Google does things.

Jarvis cites an unbelievable case history of Dell computers–how a website and a blog became a movement which almost brought the company down. Dell responded to the challenge by sorting out its customer relations big-time and climbed right back out of the pit.

I reckon there is not a company, NGO or organisation on earth that does not need to look at the implications of the Internet explosion in this information age.
Jeff says “start by having your executives make the same Internet searches you did.” He advises assigning your best people, the nicest, most knowledgeable and open to solve every problem they can find: repair, replace, or refund whatever the customer wants. Start a blog where you can share the problems. He goes on to say that your worst customer is your best friend. Having sorted his problems, he becomes your partner.

Really amazing stuff. As Jeff puts it: “when you hand over control, you start winning.”

“The single greatest transformative power of the Internet and Google has little to do with technology or media or even business. It’s about people and making new connections among them. It all comes back to relationships.

And that’s why I’m writing to you. Hope you’ve enjoyed.

Very best wishes

Richard

PS This morning I received the following email which you may consider forwarding to anyone you feel could benefit from Thinking Skills’ next workshop:

Dr Broome
I attended your course in 2008 and of all the courses that I have attended in my life nothing comes close to the impact that your course had in my life. This includes all the certificates and diplomas I have done. The biggest impact was speed reading, memorising and recalling and mind maps.

I am in the process of writing a career guidance book and in it I have included a chapter on studying techniques which inevitably mention some of the methods that I have learned from your course. I write this e-mail to request that you kindly grant us permission to go ahead with this in our book. I have referenced your website well which hopefully will attract people to your course and also raise your profile in the public as I hope the book is going to be distributed throughout the schools in KZN. The book is in isiZulu because there is huge gap for books in this market.

Thanks for this Dr Broome, your course should be compulsory at school level and you can quote me on that!

Warmest Regards

X.S.

Posted in google, learning, thinking skills, thinkings skills workshops, training and skills training | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment