Richard Maun

Author: admin

  • Simplify Something

    I’m on my travels shortly as I have a Keynote conference speech to deliver in Australia. This will be huge fun and I’m racing to pack and prep and sort out tickets, visas, slides, invoices, expenses, clients, meetings…the list is endless. I’m also flying on to Canada to do book PR work, so in reality have a world tour to organise. In order to avoid drowning in a sea of to-do lists I’ve been asking people for help and trying to simplify things.

    And I thought I’d experiment with simplifying this blog and avoiding adding photographs for a while, to speed things up.

    Pictures are great because they help to ‘sell’ a story and they also add an hour to the time it takes to post the blog each week. I don’t have a spare an hour at the moment so have decided that for the time being a blog without a picture is better than no blog with a picture.

    And as I’m talking about ‘Change’ to my Australian audience it seems a appropriate to make a change as part of my Change talk!

    It’s good practice to ask ourselves why we do things and if they add value or just soak up time. If we find ways to simplify what we do we make life easier for ourselves and nobody really wants unnecessary complexity …do they?

    So, what can you simplify this week?

    What do you do that looks ‘pretty,’ but doesn’t add any value and just steals an hour of your time?

  • Celebrate Yourself!

    Pop your cork this week!

    At last I finished my fifth book! I was about to hit the deadline a week ago and found that Microsoft Vista had frozen and lost the last 18 hours of edits. This was not a happy experience, as you might imagine – my elation at almost beating the deadline was replaced with quiet despair that I would now have to find the time and the focus to re-edit the final 60 pages.

    The irony was that my book is called Bouncing Back …and at the end of the writing process I now needed to bounce back myself!

    I’d like to say it was plain sailing to keep going, but it wasn’t. I’ve written 52,000 words in 6 weeks and was exhausted at the pace and the late nights. My writing time had ended so I needed to juggle editing with clients and a busy diary.

    The central theme of the book is simply – keep going.

    There’s often no magic to being successful, just the diligent plodding that slowly takes us forwards. To complete my editing I had to keep going.

    And I did.

    So now I’m happy that the book has been completed and has been sent to the publisher for proofing. I’ll get to edit it again in a few weeks, but at least I’ll be able to catch up on my sleep before then.

    Another theme in the book is to celebrate ourselves when we have bounced back. Effort without reward becomes grinding and we all need to give ourselves a pat on the back, dance around the house, or take time out to acknowledge a job well done.

    We need to celebrate ourselves!

    I’m going to buy a Kindle …and then I’m going to buy my own books first! (And wouldn’t you?) Amazing to think that this technology didn’t exist when the first one was written.

    So, well done me!

    And well done you too! I’m sure you worked hard over the last six weeks as well. How are you going to celebrate yourself?