After 23 years of The Ripple Effect, I have to now more than ever define what it is that I do.

I am clear on what I have done in the past 23 years but what am I now and what can people expect of me going forward?

We live in interesting times for people involved in any form of human development:

• The global economy has broadened our business considerations substantially.
• A local economy under severe pressure.
• A human capital resource which continues to grapple with the right things to do to succeed.
• A youth which grapples with what to do to make their futures work for them.
• A political climate that seems to favour sowing divide as opposed to building unity.

I am clear on one thing

The results we achieve in our lives are directly proportional to how we behave.

It is handy to have knowledge but knowledge without action is empty. It is all about ‘right action’.
‘Right action’ leads to ‘right results’.

‘Right action’ requires a ‘right action’ checklist process. It is so simple! Several simple checks before starting reduce the chance of failure immensely. Steven Covey attempted to illustrate this and I feel he did it rather well. As an example, he suggested the following preventative checklist item – think win-win.

Imagine you tick this before doing anything! Then imagine ticking-off ‘working with the end in mind’. After ticking five more things off systematically the chances of behaving appropriately are what his book title suggested – the seven habits of highly successful people.

I am a developer of teams

I encourage and support team members to align their daily behaviour with best practices. We have tons of past lessons to learn from and we are thus in the powerful position of knowing, to a large degree, the difference between effective and ineffective approaches.

People’s default behaviour is unfortunately not often aligned with best practice.

Changing default behaviour is what I like to do

Hearing someone say how having changed something simple in their approach has led to better personal outcomes is what I love to hear.

So if you are one of those people who has changed something simple and never looked, back let me know. Let’s share these success stories. Let’s create an unstoppable wave of hope that by changing simple behavioural traits we can all achieve better results.

Some of the most powerful feedback I hear from people that have been on our programmes:

“I have started stopping when I feel things are not going as planned. I stop, I think, I make changes and I go back to work better prepared.”

“I concentrate on being more explicit in my communication and it is leading to way less frustration between me and the team members around me.”

“I am running better meetings and the team is way more effective as a result.”

“When new members join my team, I take them through a meaningful induction process for the first three months which is leading to greater engagement earlier on.”

“We have stopped blaming everyone and everything. Taking responsibility for our results is not easy but at least we have given ourselves the chance of altering our results.”

This type of feedback is not after the MBA, the BCom, the Advanced Excel training, the Time Management course.
This type of feedback is strangely only achieved after several hardcore sessions of team development.

It does not always make sense to me why people seem to be making life so difficult for themselves, but that is just how it is for most people.