It is Friday afternoon and my inbox is again featuring our children’s school weekly newsletters. (I’m sure I just read the last one yesterday!) Today, however I was struck with the sheer volume of congratulations and achievements of students over the past weeks – the newsletters are always filled with this, however suddenly I saw this […]
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A few weeks ago I was privileged to hear Travis Bell speak at a dinner in Auckland. Travis is known as the Bucket List Guy http://www.thebucketlistguy.com/ . He inspired me to take his message home and share it with my family – little did I know that it would be a wonderful heart filled activity that lasted two […]
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I was honoured last month by my speaker colleagues – National Speakers Association- as NZ’s Educator of the Year. Last year I won NZ Speaker of the Year. It is always wonderful to have your work acknowledged by your colleagues and the hundreds of congratulations emails, posts and messages are always lovely to receive. However, […]
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A message for all senior secondary students … There are five weeks to go before national school exams and if you are starting to get stressed about exam time – this is great news. Why stress is good… Experiencing stress before exams is a good thing! Stress causes your adrenaline to pump and allows you to work […]
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Choosing a new phone for many may be an exciting task, however when I took my Dad to get a new phone recently he said “I don’t want a smart phone, I just want one like the one I have – so I don’t have to learn anything new.” This is not the first time I […]
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This week I heard the news of the apparent suicide of Robin Williams – this has totally rocked my world – I feel numb… (note I am still in denial with the word apparent.) Robin William’s outer persona reflected (to me anyway) a confident, intelligent, successful person who had his whole life together. I guess […]
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What has happened to personal responsibility? I again wondered this while on an aeroplane recently. As always the crew showed the safety demonstration. I have heard this literally hundreds of times, (as of writing this post I have been fortunate to travel on 1752 planes in the last 35 years – yes I keep a record) […]
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In his book, Give and Take, Adam Grant discusses recent neuroscience which shows that giving actually activates the reward and meaning centres in our brains, which send us pleasure and purpose signals when we act for the benefit of others. “One study of more than 2,800 Americans over age twenty-four showed that volunteering predicted increases in […]
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“To get to easy you have to go through hard.” This was a recent Mountain Dew advert on the back of a bus and on billboards in Wellington. This parallels a message I have been teaching students about learning – “Everything is hard before it is easy.” When students are studying for an exam, the best […]
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I come from a long line of great chefs, caterers and foodies – in fact my Nana, Mother, sister and daughter are real foodies, and I’m just not one of them. I make food to sustain, comfort and for sharing with others. Now I can cook and indeed do and really enjoy it – not just at […]
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