Following the Royal Commission into banking in Australia, one of my booking agents remarked that there is a demand now for corporate keynote presentations on the topic “Building Trust”. I wonder how many of those corporations are actually prepared to commit to the one key ingredient trust requires. And that is: Be Trustworthy I’m sure there are some who are really looking for a means to convince their customers to trust them while continuing their own shady dealings and setting up to betray that trust when it looks to be most profitable. On the other hand - if you’re genuine about building actual trust, and not merely cultivating cult like gullibility, hit me up - I do after dinner events and corporate keynotes on this and other topics.

Researchers showed that we can acquire the vocabulary of a new language during distinct phases of slow-wave sleep and that the sleep-learned vocabulary could be retrieved unconsciously following waking. Article: Reddit r/psychology

Being ‘good enough’ is a trap if it stops you wanting to get better,

Not all laughter is good laughter. Sometimes people laugh so that they don’t cringe. I work to only have the good kind of laughs.

Obesity, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Heart Disease are all correlated to lack of sleep.

How To Hire A Hypnotist for Your Football / Netball Club Having a comedy hypnotist at your club function or awards night is a popular choice. But if you’ve never booked an act like that before, you might be wondering how to go about it. It is not very hard to do. Make Contact and Request a Price and Availability. The main thing is to contact the act you are interested in and check that they re available and what they would charge. For that to work you need to tell them: A) Where you are - city / town so that they can figure out the travel costs.

Why are so many comedians rude, mean or offensive? I’m not talking about touching on mildly uncomfortable topics, but rather the all too common practise of being rude or demeaning to one group or another. The reason is simple and is has to do with two things, skill and fear. To write a lot of good clean material that is super funny is hard work. It takes genuine skill and considerable effort. Whereas the cheap shots and offensive words are comparatively easy. And a comic faced with the fear of failure - has two options. The first is to go down in flames, and the second is to do whatever it takes to get a laugh.

So you’ve got a conference or meeting coming up, and you’re planning a dinner for afterwards. What will happen after that dinner? Will your guests stay and mingle? Will they get bored and go home? Afterwards, how will they describe your event? Will it have been memorable? Or just another meeting and corporate dinner? Here’s the real question. Can you remember any corporate dinner you went to over a year ago? If you can remember any at all, why was it memorable? No one remembers the food or the wine. Entertainment can make an event stand out in people’s minds for years to come.

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It Helps With Employee Retention Recruitment, training and staff retention are all key performance areas for any company. It is far better to keep staff than to hire new staff and train them. But what can you do to keep the good staff you have? You’ll find thousands of articles online on this topic. Because it is critical to so many business and can be a headache for many as well. Here’s one from Forbes Magazine I’ve lived the corporate life for decades, and was a senior IT manager before quitting to become a full-time entertainer. There’s one thing I noticed then and I still notice now that companies often don’t do but which can make a real difference.

There’s this thought that somewhere we will “find” a passion, a purpose to our lives, something so inspiring and exciting that we never feel like we are working. Something that we are endlessly motivated to do. The belief that such passions exist causes many of us to feel dissatisfied with what we are doing, and to look for something that meets our idea of what a true passion is. Well meaning people tell us to “find our passion”. And to keep looking until we do. That can be bad advice. This article and associated research really reminded me of this: A major new study questions the common wisdom about how we should choose our careers.

You’ve got a space to use, a large room or open area. It might not be posh, but it works and you can gather the whole team. Perhaps you have a lot of tradies and store staff. You need an idea that everyone can have fun with. What can you do there besides drink and eat? 1 Transform the space. Decorations are great, but lighting can really change things up. Ditch the fluorescents and use table lamps and lamp stands. You can get Lighting gels cheaply which can turn a white work light into an amazing coloured effect. (Get proper gels that won’t mind warming up).

This is one of those new age truthy sayings that is best ignored. No matter which path you choose there’ll be many times it is not exciting. And the excitement in the moment of any choice will fade over time. You cannot be excited 100% of the time. Even during war and surrounded by absolute fear and terror, people eventually adapted to it and found moments of calm and other feelings. I personally do not believe that there is only one right path for anyone. But the paths worth following will be ones that inspire you enough to keep going.

This saying is attributed to Henry Ford. It gets used to “motivate” people and to tell them that the way that they think affects how they can achieve their goals. While there is truth in it, it is not always true. There are many over-confident (and annoying) people in the world who think that they can do things that they are hopeless at. Just watch a reality TV contest. Politicians of any ideology often cling to policies and practises that have never worked and never will but somehow they seem certain that they can make them work “this time”. When I gave up my day job to focus on doing shows it was just going to be for a short while.

It is good to be busy. You can say that and no-one challenges you. But think about it. Don’t most people also crave a holiday? Isn’t it also okay to look forward to the weekend? Aren’t holidays and breaks also good? Being busy and productive go together only in short bursts. People who never take breaks are often less effective than those who work hard and take breaks when they need to. The sign of a person who has their act together is that they are well organised enough not to be busy all the time. And they can afford to take holidays.

Not everything you attempt can work. If you cannot work out when a plan is doomed to failure and just keep going, that is not the attitude of a winner, that is a symptom of mental illness. While it can take persistence to succeed, that must be balanced by re-evaluation of your approach and your goals. You need to keep learning. 20 years ago when selling services for my consulting practise, a client, Gerard Fitzgibbon was his name, told me of his three Ps of success. They were Persist, Persist, P-off. I have always valued that advice. Persistence is great, and one can even keep going when it gets hard.

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We’re coming to the time of year when companies book their end-of-year staff parties and customer parties. Since the last financial crisis many organisations have gotten into the habit of not doing much. The excuse of not having the budget has begun to wear thin. The per head cost of a good event isn’t much in the overall scheme of things. And no-one needs another evening of food and drink and nothing else. Do everyone a favour and book some entertainment. Make it fun. Make it special. Make it memorable.