Podcast : Talking about optimism

March 6, 2018 Mark Gilroy

I was thrilled to be invited to contribute to The 3 Good Podcast, hosted by Sukh Pabial. Sukh's podcast covers the themes of positive psychology, wellbeing, resilience, mental health and emotional intelligence.

In this episode, Sukh and I talked about optimism.

How is virtual learning like running an airline?

February 26, 2018 Mark Gilroy

The practice of facilitating in a virtual environment is unique in so many ways. When planning a piece of virtual learning, one of the key challenges is that it can appear incredibly abstract. If you’ve never designed a piece of e-learning, webinar content or other virtual learning solutions, it can be helpful to pick a meaningful analogy to make things more concrete.

In this post we’ll be using the analogy of an airline when considering the planning, design and delivery of virtual learning.

So, if you’d like to take your seats and place your luggage into the overhead compartment, we’ll get started…

Emotional literacy - how important are emojis?

December 20, 2017 Mark Gilroy

What's your favourite emoji, and what does that say about you? Stastically, it's likely to be the 'tear's of laughter' emoji, but perhaps yours tells a different story...

Talent : time for a rebrand? (#DISRUPTHRMCR session)

November 19, 2017 Mark Gilroy

Last month I was invited to speak at the inaugural #DISRUPTHR Manchester event. DISRUPT is an information exchange designed to energise, inform and empower executives, business leaders and people in the HR field. DisruptHR is built on the belief that how we’ve approached people and talent in the past won’t be the best way to approach it in the future.

The evening was full of short, focussed talks from professionals who shared their ideas on how we can move our talent thinking forward. Borrowing from the genius of Ignite, each speaker had to follow the rules: 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, 5 minutes.

My presentation took the theme of talent, and posed the question: is it time for us to examine how we talk about, measure, and develop talent for the workplace of the future?

Oh, and it rhymed.

Book review: Coaching for Innovation: Tools and Techniques for Encouraging New Ideas in the Workplace

November 7, 2017 Mark Gilroy

Coaching for Innovation demonstrates the integral role that coaching can play in providing a competitive edge, by fostering the bigger thinking that leads to idea generation and innovation.

As I picked up this book, I found myself wondering whether there is a need to differentiate coaching focussed on innovation from any other kind of coaching. After all, isn’t any coaching initiative designed to foster new thinking, shift perspectives, and consider alternative approaches? Do coaches ever brand themselves as ‘creativity coaches’ in the same way some do as career or life coaches?

One hundred percent solitude

October 6, 2017 Mark Gilroy

How would you feel about being enclosed inside a pod filled with water for 90 minutes, entirely alone, with nearly all your senses switched-off?

I have a noisy mind. I practice mindfulness when I can, I try and cut down on caffeine, and attempt to externalise excess 'load' using journalling. Nonetheless, there's a lot of mental chatter up there, and I'm always keen to experiment with ways of becoming more comfortable with solitude. Letting the mind 'be', without feeding it with more input.

12 recommended podcasts for learning & development practitioners and coaches

September 2, 2017 Mark Gilroy

For years I discounted podcasts, considering myself a non-auditory learner, until I gave it a try. To my surprise, I discovered that there are rich rewards to be found in the world of podcasting.

Yet with over 250,000 unique podcasts to choose from, with more than 8 million episodes available, getting started in building your subscriptions can be overwhelming!

Here are 12 of my favourite podcasts that cover the learning & development arena.

Creating virtual learning environments - four classic mistakes and how to avoid them

August 3, 2017 Mark Gilroy

In volatile and uncertain economic climates, it’s essential for businesses to leverage the latest technologies to adapt to client demands. For our business, key component in staying VUCA-proof has been the introduction of webinars and virtual classrooms to cater for train-the-trainer accreditation sessions. Although our traditional “on the ground” workshops have remained popular, in recent years we have found a strong demand for learning in a virtual classroom. Whether it’s for dispersed teams, clients who have limited travel budgets, or the time-poor learner, webinars have helped our business stay agile.

That’s not to say that we haven’t made any mistakes. Here are some that we’ve encountered, and some ideas for how to avoid them:

Robots, emotions and kung fu

June 14, 2017 Mark Gilroy

Last week I attended the CIPD Northern Area Partnership (NAP) conference. A strong theme throughout the event was how we, as professional developers, can adjust to a world that is becoming increasingly led by technology. How can we put the ‘human' back into human resources, when the focus is on using machine learning to automate so much of our work?

How to read 10 books in a day

May 9, 2017 Mark Gilroy

No, seriously. To be accurate, this is a post about how I managed to read 10 books in about 3 hours.

Here's the thing- I love reading. I also love TV box sets. And movies. And podcasts. And magazines. All this before we even get to the worlds of twitter, blogging and other social media feeds. I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling a sense of 'content anxiety' in a world of near-abundant input. There is so much fantastic content out there…but making the time to consume it all can feel like a real challenge.

Enter Blinkist: an app-based service, which offers access to professionally curated insights from over 2000 best selling books, chunking them down into a 15-min read, known as a 'blink'.

The Healthy Learning Platter

April 6, 2017 Mark Gilroy

I recently encountered Dan Siegel and David Rock's concept of the Healthy Mind Platter : a set of daily mental activities which make up the full set of psychological minerals that your brain needs to function at its best. A balanced diet of ingredients that help build wellness.

It left me wondering whether there could be a similar concept for learning - a Healthy Learning Platter. A set of universal learning activities which, if fulfilled to a level appropriate for the individual, allow for unstoppable learning to flourish, every day.

Creating alternate realities

March 31, 2017 Mark Gilroy

Disclaimer: this is not a post about science fiction and infinite universes with overlapping timelines.

Although on second thought, maybe it is. I'll leave you to make up your mind.

Is personality a myth?

February 17, 2017 Mark Gilroy

Personality: a helpful word that lets me talk about my 'me-ness' and your 'you-ness'.

It's usually understood as a set of consistent characteristics that are fundamental to an individual and those that they have contact with.

Walter Mischel transformed this idea. In 1968 he wrote a book which challenged the way we looked at personality and our lives. He's also the man behind one of the most well-known psychological experiments: the marshmallow test.

But our futures are not to be found in a marshmallow (or two).

5 things I love about journaling with the Day One app

February 10, 2017 Mark Gilroy

I'm not a natural reflector.

I used to kid myself that I reflected 'enough', casting a moment or two or of hurried pondering before moving on to the next big thing. I certainly never thought I'd be the sort of person to habitually keep a journal. My opinion of journaling was that it was the purview of unnecessary introspection and nostalgia-seekers.

In the past few years, however, I've come to enjoy - even love - journaling as one of my most valuable personal development resources.

My journal of choice isn't a physical book, but an app (available for iOS and Mac) called Day One (www.dayoneapp.com)

Let it go

January 17, 2017 Mark Gilroy

I lost some of my stuff last week.

It caused me to wonder what happens to us when we lose something. It is sometimes helpful to allow ourselves to let it go?

Big Questions (part 1)

January 3, 2017 Mark Gilroy

I consider myself very lucky to have been on the receiving end of some fantastic questions. Questions that help you clarify your thoughts, there in the moment. And then continue adding value as you reflect back on them.

This series of blogs is intended to curate and showcase some of those questions, which I hope we can add-to together, to compile some shared experiences and stories.

Emotion, authenticity, deception and credibility

December 2, 2016 Mark Gilroy

2016. It’s been emotional.

Every day we wrestle with our emotions - which of them are OK to show and how can we be comfortable with them? We are told that being authentic and vulnerable are things to aspire to be, yet they are such incredibly difficult things to get right. And how do they overlap with deception and credibility? Phil Willcox joined the CIPD North Yorkshire branch to help us uncover the truth.

A deception epidemic - why do we lie?

November 29, 2016 Mark Gilroy

The Oxford Dictionary recently named 'post-truth' as their word of the year. A reference back to Ralph Keyes' 2004 book The Post-Truth Era and a clear reflection of the current socio-political climate - where the ability to succeed by telling lies has become a part of our reality. But is deception a harmful or helpful ingredient in our lives?

Reclaiming email

October 31, 2016 Mark Gilroy

"Email is familiar. It's comfortable. It's easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today." - Ryan Holiday

About a year or so ago I wrote a blog about email, inspired by a string of conversations I'd had with clients and colleagues, who described the tool as 'overloading their time'. In mainstream publications like the New York Times, email is likened to a zombie apocalypse "you keep killing them, but they keep on coming". Despite a world of work which is full of devices/apps/tools/models that are designed to help manage our time better - something clearly isn't working.