Election 2007

Have been a bit absorbed by this the last few days, and have a ticket to the count in Sligo on Friday, so am looking forward to that. It's been a brilliant last few days of the campaign, here's what i think so far.

FF. Great rally at the end, Cowen definate future leader, Bertie super on live debate, murdered Enda, looking at a solid performance, as you were or slighty down in seat terms.

FG. Exposed over the last few days, Kenny has done a great job as the party leader, but won't be trusted to deliver as country leader. Overall vote up (not hard)

Lab. Murdered in the run in... hanging onto FG's coat tails for dear life, fairly sure there won't be enough without a huge green performance.

Green. Have lost out in the great leadership race, will fall between the stools, should have thrown in thier lot with the alliance for change, will find themselves out in the cold.

PD's Getting a wee bounce from strong FF performance, would have written them off a week ago, will be donw from 8 seats but may still (although i doubt it) retain the disproportionate power they have wielded for the last ten years.

Sinn Fein. Terribly uninspiring and insipid campaign, have missed a great opportunity to move forwards towards 11 or 12 seats. Still it will come down to FF either forming a Govt with the greens and the independents, going to bed with Mary Lou, or heading back to the country....... or we can see Pat Rabbitte doing the country some service by saving them from the terrible shinners.

In Sligo it's Devins (FF) and Perry (FG) as certs, and after that it's going to be fought out by Comiskey (FG) who has the Leitrim advantage, Scanlon (FF) and McManus (SF) I have a sneaking suspicion that Comiskey might sneak it off Leitrim geographical voting with Lab and FG transfers.. cos McGarry and Henry are unlikely to get a quota between them and FF will suffer from not running a third candidate with a Leitrim base.

Still interesting times ahead.

What i love about sport.

So Sligo beat Roscommon at the weekend, as i'm from Roscommon and live in Sligo I've had nothing but notice and slagging since, most of it good natured, with a few spiteful and caustic assholes thrown in for good measure, like the cavemen behind me on Sunday who derived great pleasure at the final whistle from calling me "an ugly Roscommon cnut"and telling me i could "F**K off back to Roscommon", but a lot of the Sligo lads and management are mates of mine and i'm delighted for them.

What i love about it is that it reflects life, we could stay away from all the matches and experience no pain at all, but then how would we enjoy the pleasure when this useless pack of knucks finally surprise us all and win something, so it's simple for me... either participate and take the belts on the chin or give up...and i'm not giving up cos i remember being there in 1974, 1977, 1978, 1980, 90, 91, 2001 and in ennis last year,,,, and on those good days it was made all the sweeter because of the terrible days..... so fair play to Sligo, and roll on the qualifiers..i'll be there.

The inconvenient truth.

I'm no different, I find myself drawn towards the reassuring lie more often.

Right now the inconvenient truth is,

I have made some fairly serious business mistakes over the last year or so.
I have to begin to rebuild with the same energy and enthusiasm that I began the business with.
This is going to take a combination of money, energy and time.

The reassuring lies are

It wasn't my fault.
Everything will be grand if I just keep plodding along.
Something will show up.

Of all the things i've heard, read and coached over the years, the stuff that hits home best with me is the stuff about "getting started" So today is the day for me to get started again, to move away from reassuring lies, to face up to the inconvenient truth that this business which is less than 4 years old will wither unless I get stuck into it with renewed passion.

I've taken a few knocks over the last few months, but now is the time to dust myself off and get stuck in up to my elbows again.

Smoke and Mirrors!

If you look at it for a few seconds, you may discover that things are not always what they seem.
You may further discover that your eyes cannot always be trusted!

Strange.

Let's frighten the bejaysus out of them!

As part of my work I run management programmes and this always involves a module on motivation, which runs through Maslow and Herzberg and shows how in the past the major motivator was fear as in Roman Galleys and Soldiers in WW1 and how we've moved on.

But we haven't moved far have we?

The big bad bogey man is the major player in the election so far, with FF flagging the portents of doom if anyone else is in charge, FG and Lab trying to terrify us with law and order stories, and promising leglislation which will soon lead to mandatory sentences for looking sideways or slightly shifty at anyone in "charge" and the greens promising us that our childrens children will be bushmen of the Kalahari if we vote for anyone but them.

The Eircom Phonewatch guy is trawling the depths looking for reasons why burglars will visit our houses regularly at any time of year, and Rupert is running 24/7 coverage of the Madeline McCann kidnapp case.

Am i being cynical here, or would it suit the Eircoms and Ruperts of this world if we all stayed in our houses behind out high walls and our phonewatch system and watched Sky all day while ordering from Tesco online and growing fat on Ben and Gerry's which of course would cause us to buy weightwatchers special range and eventually lots of prozac and zytloft which would make us feel better about the fact that we've been caught in a trap from which it's almost impossible to escape and worst of all is the realisation that we walked into it voluntarily.....

I'm going to resist for another while, and try to live in the real world. without a phonewatch system, without a skybox, but with a bloody life.

A tenner in 1991?

You know all the lads who bought a house for 40'000 in 1991 and if they sold it today it would be worth half a million?

Well if you'd put a tenner on this in 1991, you deserve to be richer than Bill Gates, anyone would have laughed you out the door for even suggesting it, so fair play to Ian and Jeffery and Peter and even romping Sammy, it's unbelievable for this Island of ours to be able to look forward to intergration, equality, and freedom.

Now most of them won't know what to do with it all for a while, but in time i've no doubt it will be safe for Muslims to walk around Belfast, Ballymena and Portadown without worrying about whether they will be targetted as protestant muslims or catholic muslims.

"it's a fact"

Did you ever wonder about some of the stuff we are asked to believe, or some of the stuff we are told by others who insist that it's a fact.

One of the things I've really developed is the ability to question things, to challenge beliefs especially my own, but some beliefs are really strong, these are often the things that our parents tell us when we are young, and unless we conciously seek out the antidotes to these beliefs we may end up believing some strange things

for example

all fine gaelers are a bit touched.
all priests are great fellas.
all teachers are right.
Guards are never wrong.
the most important thing in life is a good pensionable job in any of the above 3 professions.

Now that i'm a bit older, i've discovered that there are fairly ok people in Fine Gael, that there are also dangerous and nasty priests, even teachers can be wrong... and although there are guards who refuse to believe it, even they sometimes make mistakes.

It just puts me wondering what else in the common belief system is wrong? what else that is trotted out as "a fact" is in fact not a fact at all.

ah i'll keep wondering.

PS. If you could move €10'000'000 from some mega plc bank account to your own, and never get discovered or caught, would ya?

Now i've figured it out.....

Bloody hell, it's taken me two years to figure out how to link stuff to the blog.... now that I can do it... I'll be a right pain in the arse linking stuff just cos i feel like it... starting with this

All we can see is 100 yards ahead.

This living in the past or living in the future stuff is a bit bonkers, i'm only saying this because I slip into it at times, and I'm trying to remind myself of how stupid it is... ok there's a time for planning, for deciding where I want to go and how i'm going to get there, but after that... it's about concentrating on the 100 yards in front.

If i decide to head for Galway tonight, and i figure out the route to take me there, then it's all about just getting on with it and concentrating on the 100 yards in front of me... if i decide to make some money and build a good business through training and coaching, then my job is to concentrate on the job in hand all the time, whether that job is delivering, coaching, selling, creating, whatever it is... what's important is that i focus and concentrate on the task rather than the plan.

i've heard Al Pacino's peace with inches a hundred times, but i never got the meaning of "the six inches in front of your face" until today... aren't I the silly boy?

It's a sense of perspective.

This may all have been prompted by the death on sunday night of a guy i knew who was the same age as me, or maybe not, I'm not sure.

Somedays the voice is there, Monday was one, especially the morning bit, I was useless, no good, life was pointless, and then for some reason i can never put my finger on it brightened up, I felt a lot better and then yesterday morning (Tuesday) I decided to write out all the things in my life that i was grateful for. I found it difficult to get started, family, house, friends, the normal stuff. But then after a minute or two the pen started flying, and i was unstoppable, i'm grateful for my brain, my legs, my ability to sell and keep customers, fun, where i live, the rossies, people who half understand me, long daft chats about life, the gnawing feeling that often keeps me on my toes, writing this daft blog, music, my ipod, my famous right knee, my childhood family, and more and more stuff just kept flying out until i had pages filled with things i'm greatful.

Here's the thing, I often feel down and envious of people who have it solved, those who are so relaxed that nothing is bothering them, but i'm pretty sure nobody has it solved all the time, everybody has doubt, it's part of life, but at the same time life is pretty good, whether we can see that or not.... here's a video that kind of sums it up for me


Somedays i know it's a wonderful world but I can't really see it.

The human footprint

I chanced across the most amazing programme on Channel 4 last night, it was called the human footprint and i believe (although they don't support macs) that you can watch it again for the next week on

http://www.channel4.com/watch_online/?hpos=Watch-Online

The programme which is beautifully shot and narrated, calculates the footprint or experience of an average British person (we'd be similar except maybe more drink) over their lifetime of 78.5 years.

Some facts amazed me and i was wondering watching the programme how I'd fit into their statistics

I've used up 1,325,721,609 seconds of my allotted 2,475,576,000 so on average i should have got through the following, however not being average i shall give my own observations.

40,000 cups of tea (definately less i love coffee)
2.4 cows (definately more, i love steak)
Shed 64 pints of tears (not sure)
Spent over a million pounds sterling (well i haven't saved much)
Smoked 53,341 cigarettes (about right i was a late starter)
Drank 4,113 pints of beer (someone's avin a laff)
Used 63 million words (unquestionably more, i never shut up)
Had sex 1,606 times (is that a year?)
and produced 515kg's of poo (lovely)

The most interesting part for me was the human aspect, the programme reckons we will "get to know" about 1,700 hundred people over our lifetimes, and they visually represented this beautifully, of these 1,700. 305 will die of heart disease, 179 of stroke, 99 of lung cancer (one is being buried today). There will be 10 suicides, 9 will be killed in car accidents and 1 will die in a fire.

Only 1 in 3 of us will know someone who is murdered (not yet thank whatever)

Now i'm heading outside to make it 53,342.

Agendas.

This wexford thing has me a bit would up today.

There's a mass of publicity and finger pointing now... i wonder how much of it is about preventing such a thing happening as easily in the future (it's not so much will such things happen, of course they will, it's more about can we console ourselves that we did all we could and it's not our fault)

Instead of the finger pointing to prevent it happening

Newspapers are finger pointing to get more readers
Radio Stations are finger pointing to get more listeners.
and Politicians are finger pointing to get more votes (or keep the ones they have).

To be honest i don't think many people give a flying hoot about the Dunne family, as long as i'm all right Jack.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

That silent scream!

Like the rest of the country i'm appalled at the tragedy that unfolded in Wexford over the weekend.

It's really got me thinking about life and society and I have to say it does not inspire me that we are travelling in the right direction. My thoughts on this are not exactly conventional and I speak as someone who has very little experience of suicide, but I am disturbed by the prevelence of it in society today and have my own opinion on how we have gotten to this point.

There's a device on the market currently which apparently gives out a sound on a frequency that only under 25's can hear, there's a silent scream that people who are in terrible pain give out too, but there are very few people who are attuned to hear it, maybe if we faced up to some recent cases we might try a bit harder.


1. Everybody hurts.
The REM song, like many pieces of art, works because people can silently identify with how it reflects thier own lives. How come as a society we regard hurting as a weakness rather than as a normal part of life? How come we invent millions of things to medicate the pain as the cure to something "wrong" with people?

2. Everybody denies it.
How have we evolved into a society where it's not ok to say we hurt? How have we gone down a road where depression is seen as a fault, where feeling pain is regarded as softness, where feeling fear has to be covered up in case it reflects negatively on us? For men particularly, how come we use sport or politics or property prices as our core conversations to cover up how we really feel about the challenges we face in a rapidly changing society?

3. We avoid rather than listen
Must everything be either judged or deflected? How come our listening skills are so bad? How come no-one can pick up on the pain until it's too late? How have people become so oblivious to the pain in others? Is it because if we never understand the pain in others that we then don't have to acknowledge our own?
Is it so we can convince ourselves that we're ok? Are we attempting to create the illusion that life is constantly great? If it's true then why the hell do thing like this happen? It's not great all the time, but it's definately not ok to say that?

4. How can we change our outlook?
Why is the pursuit of happiness such an important concept? I can understand the pursuit of pleasure, or the pursuit of a better life.. but the pursuit of happiness? All of literature, all of philosophy, all of psychology tell us that constant happiness is not a real or sustainable state, but we are constantly told, get this book and you'll be happy, gain that degree and you'll be happy, get that boyfriend and you'll be happy, take this drug and you'll be happy, buy that dress/car/apartment and you'll be happy. We know it's not true, but still we irrationally believe it.

5. Can we hear the scream and help?
Yes i believe we can if we choose to, I feel we have lost the art of listening, the skills of listening to understand. We have no time to listen, and sometimes by listening to others we may have to confront the pain in ourselves. There is just not enough emphasis on listening, it's not a panacea to solve all ills, but so many people wade through life feeling that nobody understands who they really are. I'm not talking about therapy here, although increased access to therapy would be a wonderful thing, i'm talking about friendship, and how we as friends can help to cut through the BS position of "everything's wonderful" and "sure I'm as happy as Larry".

6. Can we drop the illusion?
I'm not sure, i think it may be too powerfully ingrained, the connection that "if i'm not wonderfully happy, then i'm inadaquate and there's something wrong with me and i better hide it" is very deeply entrenched.
There are too many guru's, too many vested interests. I think the best we can do is develop the ability to listen to and support people and let them know just because they feel unhappy does not make them unique, does not make them inadaquate, does not make them failures...... IT JUST MAKES THEM HUMAN!

The "thrills" of becoming a new manager.

There’s one thing a bit more scary than your first day as a sales manager, it’s your first day as sales manager with the team you were a part of last Friday.

I spent some time at the weekend with a friend who has just been promoted to sales manager within the company he has been selling with for the last 7 years. We spoke about the challenges, the fears, the aspirations and what might be the tricky bits over the next few weeks and months.

His biggest concern was having to carve it all out himself, if you’ve spent the last 7 years on a pre-defined route where people could set thier watch by you, it’s not that easy to be suddenly faced with a huge blank sheet of paper and the freedom to decide how to best do the job.

Apart from the fact that this is one of the very reasons coaching exists, it’s not in his company’s vision to hire people to help with this, therefore all we could have was that friendly chat and see what emerges.

I think the hardest thing for new managers to accept is that cloning is not a refined enough science yet, most managers who have been successful salespeople simply want to reproduce themselves, thier style, thier traits, thier approach. In this style thier salespeople pick up points for everything they do that is like the managers style, eg always be closing, and they lose points for whatever differs eg, spending a long time with a customer.
After a while the manager has a long list of “faults” with some salespeople, faults in this instance meaning ” things they don’t do like me” and what do you do with a fault…. you try to fix it, so the salesperson finds themselves being moulded into something they’re not.. and frustration begins to fester.

And what’s the best piece of advice i could give my friend having been in this exact position all of 8 years ago… well establish the groundrules… the things that are non arbitary, things like customer calls, how they present themselves at work, reporting structures et al…. establish them hard and early and stick to them, and outside of those basic fundamentals help the salepeople to grow in thier own style.

The basis of sales has always been getting what you want by helping others to get what they want, this holds true for sales managers as well, you succeed by by helping your salespeople to succeed, establish the ground quickly and then help them to prosper and develop between those ditches

And enjoy it... you actually can make a difference.

Don't let "some idiot" write it

We forget that each new day is a blank page, we think that because we’ve lived 30 or 40 or 50 years that we can’t change, we tell ourselves that the blackboard of our lives is already well cluttered with stuff, habits, experiences, achievements, fears etc and that we can never find space to write anything new or valuable into our futures.
But we can, the book is only half finished, someday it will snap shut forever and that will be the legacy, the story of our lives.

We have the ability to write this story ourselves, but we often don’t, we’ll often let “some gobshite” write it for us.

I had a bad day today because “some idiot” cut me off in traffic!
I’m really angry because “some idiot” at work gave out to me!
We lost the game because “some idiot” of a referee…. ah you know what i mean.

We write the book ourselves when we realise that a life is made of of two things, the first one is the millions of tiny choices, right or left, do or don’t, call or ignore, that we make every hour, every day of our lives.

The other thing is pure randomness, the element of pure chance that is built into life, a lion looks at two wilderbeest and just picks one, nothing to do with the wilderbeest, just bloody pure random chance.

Trying to live our lives purely by the choice angle makes us control freaks, and makes us angry at everything when thing’s don’t work out. The opposite is to live like nothing matters, that it’s all pure random chance, and that whatever we do counts for nothing anyway.

Philisophers have been arguing aver these two approaches to life for thousands of years, and they still are.

Take responsibility, but for your efforts, your actions, doing your best, making the right choices and always remember shit happens so understand that luck plays a part.

Write your own story, do what you really want to do, create what you really want to create, there will always be “some gobshite” just don’t let him / her be the authors of the rest of your lifestory.

Welcome to Navan!

Really interesting Prime Time special during the week about the declining “quality of life” people are experiencing in Ireland over the last number of years, the common thread was that we have far more money than we used to but far less time. I have no idea what people are complaining about, that’s just the trade off…. you can’t have it every way.. if you want more time..then take it.. if you want more money.. then make it.. we’ve produced a strange society where people feel thier choices are totally restricted and they are forced by society to live in Navan.
Here’s the thing right… if the commute is to hard from Navan. and the property prices to high… MOVE!
There was a guy on who get’s up at 6, get’s home at 9 and actually said that he does not see his children awake from Monday to Friday.. and apparently this would all be solved if the Government hurried up and built a trainline.
Sorry Buddy… by the time the train arrives, the children will have grown up and moved out.. and hopefully they won’t be such selfish silly parents as to deny thier children a parent all week because Bertie won’t play Thomas the tank engine.
To paraphrase my favourite scene from Fr Ted (where they always seemed to have loads of time)
I hear your a victim now father? what’s the official church line on victimology father? have we all to be victims now father?

Beginning the business blog!

Ok.... the new website is currently under construction, the design is not nearly finished, we have a heap of work to do to make it look better, but right now what's important is to get the right material up on the site, you can have a look at the 10% finished article over at http://81.17.252.85/~paulnewton/

Please let me know if you have any suggestions/advice on how we can make this better and more effective, and don't mention the design ~ we're not even really started on that.

I'll probably be blogging a bit less on this, but the emphasis will change to even more ranting i'd guess.

Doing the groundwork...

In my business it's becoming so much rarer that anyone pays full rate for anything anymore. All training in the ROI seems to be subsidised now.... between FAS, Skillnets, Accel programmes and several other layers, there is no such thing as a company paying a rate for a job anymore.

The problem with this is that everything has now become homogenised, it's difficult to stand apart, a sales programme is a sales programme. The key business priority has switched from providing quality training and coaching to companies, towards developing good relationships with the funding agencies.

I can either complain or adapt.... and think i should focus on the latter.

Later.

Listening to the Cricket....

Just drove down from Dublin listening to Test Match Special all the way, it's one of those strange acquired pleasures that would drive most of my mates round the twist, but i love it.

That Shakespeare fella had it right when he said "one mans bulmers is another man's poison" or whatever it was.

Staying real!

A most interesting conversation today about happiness, brainwashing, how life works and several other things.

I have to say that my most important value is personal freedom, the capacity to do what I like when I like. I'm not claiming this is for everyone, but it seems to be incredibly important to me. I am not sure about the term happiness, it seems to have got mixed up somewhere along the line with "pleasure" if i had to use one word to describe what happiness means to me it would be "real"

So when it's real, sometimes it's pleasureable, sometimes it's painful, somtimes it's a bit mad, sometimes it's really quiet and reflective. I simply can't wrap my head around being happy all the time, it makes no sense to me.

There are many sources of bliss out there, the frontal lobotomy, heroin, religion, alcohol, hypnosis, 12 step recovery programmes, but feck it to me they all seem to be artificial, they all seem to be a cheating way of getting your highs by avoiding any lows life has to chuck at us.

In my life i am lucky to get lots of highs, but i know the other side has to exist too, that if there are highs there has to be lows, if we get the freedom to make choices, we will always know doubt, if we hand over the choices to someone else, we will have lost our freedom.

The reality for me is that life is about choices and chance, that we have the freedom to make our own choices, that life cannot be a straight happy line (and christ do we try to medicate it to make it so, with prozac and lithium and god knows what else)

It won't always be happy, but it will always be real, and that's happiness enough for me.