Perhaps someone has suggested I can help you with your business problems.
I coach, train and consult to businesses across the world, and I live in Sydney, Australia.
You can read my bio here.
The big event in my working life right now is Presentation Mastery, a 2 day event in Sydney, Australia which will turbo charge your presentations. 7-8 May 2013.
And I'm looking forward to inspiring people in an inspiring venue: Chateau 2013, self-management at a Chateau in France. September 7 - 21, 2013.
Thanks for visiting!
Please get a copy of my latest e-book the Quick and Easy Guide to Documenting What you Do by signing up to my Consultants' Consultant newsletter here. Quick and Easy is 7,143 words on 45 pages. Dedicated to working out how to spend more time on the important things!
Get the best our of your technical people. Make sure your specialist teams satisfy customers and get their expertise heard.
Cindy has worked with analysts, researchers, organisational development, finance and human resources professionals. She has also recruited and trained internal task forces to make organisational change happen.
Use improvisation techniques to make your team hum! Ludic Creative events are proven, organised and smart, grounded in corporate experience.
Our work bonds teams, leads them to think differently and have fun.
We use techniques borrowed from the arts, especially Improvisation.
All of our trainers are qualified educators as well as improvisers.
For more information, call Cindy on 0412 135 426, or email her.
Cindy Tonkin coaches a select band of brilliant business women.
Many of them run Marketing, Human Resources or Corporate Services environments. Some of them run their own businesses. They have problems at work like these:
a need to talk through your problems, so you can sort them out, but cannot always trust your colleagues or your boss to not use it against you
talented staff who sometimes leave you flummoxed about what to do next
high potential staff you'd like to encourage
some challenges with managing upwards
issues with colleagues or clients you'd like to clear so you can behave normally with them.
Want to be calmer, make better decisions, get clearer on what happens next, define what's acceptable behaviour from your peers and staff?
Productivity. Reliability. Relationship.
Aragon Gray specialises in identifying productivity savings and process improvement in public sector agencies, especially in operations, administration and corporate services.
Mixed media art works, artist's books and altered books are some of my current obsessions.
Here's one of my sites from 2006 and before.
And here is my current art blog.
I've just completed a new e-book: The Quick and Easy Guide to Documenting What you Do.
It's part of my personal quest to spend more time and energy on what's important.
You get a free copy by subscribing to my Consultants' Consultant Newsletter below.
Of course I respect your privacy, and you can unsubscribe at any point.
Mortgage Professional Australia will publish my article Practical Tips for Problem Solving in October 2012.
Here is the article with links to the Research.
Practical tips for problem solving
Problems. We all have them. How to make cash flow this month. When to hire that new person. Whether to upgrade the web site or not. Fortunately researchers are working hard to discover what helps us solve problems more easily. Here are 6 practical tips for problem solving based on recent neurological and psychological research.
1.Find a thinking place
Samantha does her best problem solving while washing up. I think better at my table than I do at my desk. My mum used to think in the car while waiting to pick up kids from music practice. Where you problem-solve matters. Establish a place for thinking, and do it there. Obviously it is more effective if there is not too much noise and few interruptions. This is an example of what Neuro-Linguistic Programming calls Anchors: when we do the same thing in the same place we tend to evoke the same emotions. Think Pavlov's dog when the bell rang: it salivated. If you concentrate and do it in the same place it becomes a place for concentration. Think of how you automatically quieten down when you enter a church or a library: because you've always been quiet in there before, you are continually quiet there.
2.Stop trying
Andrew’s shower time is when he has his greatest ahah! moments. Perhaps you’ve experienced the same thing. MRI research shows the answer to a tricky problem comes when you think about it, and then stop thinking about it. It’s when you stop thinking, when the analytical left brain takes a holiday and the associative right brain takes over that you have insight. So give yourself time to think about it, and then don’t think. Stay in bed (awake!) for a moment or two longer. Spend a minute longer in the shower. Take a lunch time stroll. You’ll solve more problems with less effort.
Click here to read a New Yorker article about this
Click here to watch Jonah Lehrer, author of the New Yorker article talk about it.
3.Try the Brain(less) Trust
When Bilyana, a mortgage broker, gets really stuck on a problem, she talk to her sister, who works in child care. Explaining the problem often solves it – her sister asks questions no one else does. This is the magic of the Outsider perspective, well-documented by creativity researchers.
Jonah Lehrer's recent book Imagine outlines this in some detail. Read this short article and listen to him talk about it by clicking here.
4.Smile
Freaky experiments show that people holding a pen between their teeth solve more problems. This activates the smile muscle which stimulates feel-good chemicals in your brain. If you can’t muster or maintain a smile, try holding a pen cross-ways in your teeth (not your lips). When you feel good you solve more problems.
What’s good for the heart is good for the brain. Consider exercising (cardio-vascular exercise creates new brain cells, and may combat Alzheimer’s); napping (if you get REM sleep, you solve 40% more puzzles than if you don’t); drinking more water; taking fish oil or B vitamins and eating breakfast regularly.
Finally it’s important to know that multi-tasking is a myth. You cannot work on a problem while watching TV, helping kids with homework or talking on the phone. And no, gender makes no difference. Doing two things simultaneously drops your IQ by 10 points. Work on one thing at a time: you’ll be smarter, happier and solve more problems more quickly.
Read this Forbes article on why multi-tasking doesn't work.
Cindy Tonkin is the Consultants’ Consultant.
I blog regularly about things like this: Subscribe to my regular newsletter below:
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