How can I improve my confidence?

Confidence is an integral part of our own personal success.  With it we make bolder decisions, try and little harder and frame difficulties as obstacles, without it we become more cautious and only see barriers.  Not having confidence, in ourselves, the people around us or the situations we find ourselves in is one of the most common ways we get in our own way.

In this podcast, Rob and Paul explore what confidence is, and how we get it.  Do we need confidence to do the things we do, or do we get confidence from doing them?  This is the classic psychological chicken and egg…   

Reflection: The secret to personal growth

Reflection: the secret to personal growth challenges the fact that too few of us take stock of what we’ve done or explore what happened. So, we get stuck and repeat mistakes. This video provides you with a simple yet powerful model from Terry Borton (1970), enabling you to learn and grow using three powerful questions.

Try it, you’ll be amazed by your results.

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it!
George Santayana

Why do I procrastinate when I need to get stuff done?

Ever wondered why you can find so many things to do when you have something important to get done or why social media seems more interesting than the piece of work in front of you?   

Most of us procrastinate from time to time, some of us more than others.  In this podcast, Paul and Ricky explore why we do and how it is often misunderstood (especially by those that don’t do it as much). Importantly, they explore the different strategies for tackling procrastination when it gets in the way.  

If you know someone who might find this or any of our other podcasts useful, can you do us a favour and share this with them?    You will be helping them and helping us.  Thanks

How to avoid biases in your decision making: A guide for individuals and teams.

Biases can be like Jedi mind tricks; they can work for and against us. These cognitive shortcuts can cause us to make flawed decisions, so how can you make better decisions by minimising bias?

Cognitive biases affect various aspects of our thinking, including perception, memory, attention, and decision-making. Our brains use them to process information quickly, but they can lead to errors and distortions in our understanding of the world.

At Thinking Focus, we believe that metacognition (or, as we prefer to say, thinking about thinking) influences everything we do. We aim to help you understand how you think so you can recognise thought patterns and develop strategies to change or mitigate unhelpful thought patterns. Biases are heuristics (cognitive shortcuts) that our brains create to lighten the cognitive load, enabling us to cope with the demands we face in today’s high-paced, complex world.

More Biases

How can I improve my self-esteem?

When asked, ‘what gets in your way?’, most of us have the same answer.  Me!

However hard we try, we cannot get out of our own way.  We spend our life erecting barriers for us to them climb over, acting like a critic and sometimes even being a bully to ourselves.

This is the first of several podcasts exploring the different ways we get in our own way and looking at some simple things that any of us can do to reduce self-inflicted barriers.  Getting in your own way is perfectly normal, but you don’t have to accept it as being inevitable.

In this first podcast, Rob and Rich explore self-esteem.  How do we understand that we have self-worth in a hyperconnected world where we are asked to compare to highly edited versions of everyone else, yet we have a warts and all version of ourselves?

How to Clarify Who Owns What in Your Projects and Goals

Clarify Roles and Responsibilities with the RACI Matrix

It’s high time to Say Goodbye to Confusion: Clarify Roles and Responsibilities with the RACI Matrix.

Your free downloadable RACI Template

This video is your ultimate solution if you’ve ever experienced organizational chaos, overlapping responsibilities, or unclear accountabilities. We dive into the powerful RACI Matrix, a widely used framework designed to bring clarity and structure to any team or project.

Whether you’re a business professional, project manager, or part of a collaborative group, mastering the RACI Matrix will revolutionize how you define, communicate, and execute roles and responsibilities within your organisation.

Join us as we demystify the RACI Matrix key concepts and provide practical tips on implementing it effectively. We’ll guide you through each element of the framework:

  • Responsible
  • Accountable
  • Consulted
  • Informed

You’ll learn how to assign clear ownership, establish decision-making authority, involve stakeholders at the right moments, and keep everyone in the loop without overwhelming them.

Through an interactive example, we’ll illustrate the immense benefits of adopting the RACI Model. Say goodbye to confusion, duplication of efforts, and conflicting expectations. Say hello to streamlined processes, improved teamwork, and enhanced productivity.

Don’t miss out on this transformative opportunity to optimise your team’s efficiency and effectiveness. Clarify roles, empower your team, and boost your organization’s success with the RACI Chart. Watch now and embrace a future of seamless collaboration and clear accountability.

How to Deliver Purposeful Feedback at Work.

Do you want to know how to deliver feedback effectively at work?

In this video, we will share with you five tips on how to deliver effective feedback that will be respectful and helpful to you and your employees.

Learning how to deliver feedback effectively is essential if you want to be a successful manager of people! We’ll show you how to deliver feedback to help your employees grow and learn. We’ll also discuss the importance of feedback in the workplace and give you some helpful tips on how to give feedback effectively!

How to make your performance chats easy every time!

Do you know how to make your performance chats easy every time?

All managers love it when they have to give great feedback; that’s easy, providing it’s purposeful that is! However, many managers struggle to hold people accountable during routine feedback or performance meetings. Managers ruminate ahead of giving feedback, catastrophising the team member’s reactions. So they sugarcoat the message, which has no impact and, guess what, leads to no uplift in performance or change in behaviour.

There is a way to make it easier: developing a psychological contract, or as we call it, the expectations chat. This chat aims to establish how the line manager and team members can get the best out of each other, which means giving feedback. So why not agree upfront on how you do that and get the two-way permission agreed upon while there are no issues in the relationship?

In this video, we share a simple four-step process that will make every performance chat easy and straightforward every time.

Related Content

STOP Trying to Manage Time: Do This Instead

You can’t manage time, so STOP trying to manage time and do this instead…what we mean is start managing yourself against the time and make better choices rather than trying to do everything.

Warren Buffet, among many others, argues that we self-sabotage when we allow ourselves to be consumed by things we care less about – they actually drag us down and distract us from achieving what we really care about.

Why You Need to Involve Others

You Can’t Do it Alone

Do you know why failing to involve others is a huge problem?

Well, as they say, the answer is on the inside; in this video, we share how a major client project suffered a huge delay and was almost catastrophic due to failing to involve others, neither the right people nor at the right time.

We share four essential questions and offer more than 50 reasons for how you could involve stakeholders in your project/goals.

Access your 50+ reasons to involve others here:

Copy of 50+ Reasons to Involve Others (Presentation (16:9)) by Ricky Muddimer