Mid-August, it was my pleasure (along with the two managers of Eastwork Employment and Training pictured here with me) to accept an award for outstanding program design and delivery from the Victorian Minister for Education, Jacinta Allan.

The Succeeding at Work pre-accredited program was one I designed for Eastwork Employment a year ago to support jobseekers with disabilities. I’ve run it several times now and currently a good friend of mine John Wall has taken it over while I move on to other projects. Quite a number of former students have both gone on to further education and secured suitable employment.

From the ACFE site:

The ten day Succeeding at Work program was developed in line with the ACFE Board’s A-Frame quality framework. The delivery of the program has also been supported by the survey of 500 people with disabilities. This has allowed Eastwork staff to identify their client’s skill and include them in the design of the program. These skills include communication, team work, problem solving, planning and self management and technology familiarity.

A key feature of the program is its multiple teaching delivery methods, a deliberate strategy to ensure all learning styles are catered for. Art activities, games, video, interactive discussion, simulations and self-directed learning are all included as part of the program. Eastwork’s teachers are also mindful to adapt their program to cater for specific needs and interests of their CALD clients.

There’s more about it at the official Adult, Community and Further Education website.

• Best Thing I Came Across Off-line: The twister-like phenomenon near my house. By the time I got the camera and snapped off the photo below, it had begun to dissipate. But this is something you don’t see in suburban Melbourne Australia.

• The Week’s Best Quote: “The trick isn’t to live forever. It’s to live with yourself, forever.” (Keith Richards in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 – probably the best thing in the entire 2 & 3/4 hours of the film!)
• The Week’s Most Embarrassing Typo: A friend emailed me and asked me what I thought about this season of the TV show LOST. I thought I’d written in reply “Actually I prefer Heroes”. What I actually typed was, “Actually I prefer Herpes” (sigh)
• The Week’s Heroes: Sal, Mark, Tanz, Steve, Matt and all the other volunteer leaders of Nexus Youth Keysborough where my eldest son is enjoying fun, community and values development. You guys rock!
• The Week’s Arch-Nemesis: It’s a toss-up between two arrogant and greedy Corporate Giants: the oil companies with their soaring petrol prices and my Bank (for so many reasons) 
•  The Week’s Toughest Challenge: Back pain.
• The Week’s Biggest Win: A young lady in one of our training programs making the statement “I’ve remembered who I am” (this young lady has now relaunched a  career plan that suits who she is, rather than mere convenience).

80% of Companies Won’t Fail in 5 Years – Do you own a start-up business and hear the horror stories and statistics that tell you you’re probably doomed? Think again…

Operation Order – a terrific lesson from the US Army on effective event planning for the frazzled leader.

The Benefit of Mistakes – a B&B owner takes a blogging-detour from the normal recipes and weather reports to reflect on how mistakes often move us forward. Excerpt: “Each mistake also has the potential to take us on a tangent that we never would’ve taken had we not made that mistake, and more often that not, it’s those exact tangents that take us closer to the achievement of our dreams.”

And lastly, if you really just need a laugh or change of pace, try these sites.

1) To read wierd but true facts & stories, try This Is True for items like these:

• A man sued his doctor because he survived his cancer longer than the doctor predicted.
• Two robbers were in the process of their crime when one changed his mind and arrested the other.
• A woman had her husband’s ashes made into an egg timer when he died so he could still “help” in the kitchen.
• Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens.

2) A completely juvenile flash animation game.

3) If you have a strong stomach and enjoy calling outher people “wierd” or “stupid”, visit this Belly Button Fluff collector in Perth Western Australia. [Personally, I'd be really embarrassed to flaunt my fetish so!]

See? Something for everyone out there in cyberspace….

You be the judge…

Gotta admire their kahunas! (or Photoshop skills!)

So often

• … we rush on to the next thing without enjoying what already is
• … we reach a milestone but see it as a measure of how far we still have to go
• … we tell our coaches and mentors and supervisors and spouses and friends what we have achieved, and they respond “Great. What’s next?”

If 2006 had a theme for me, it was this: “Live in the present.” A valued coachee kindly sent me a short book about it for Christmas, without knowing this had been a constant challenge all year; the challenge to stop striving for what I didn’t have at the expense of enjoying what I already have. It was a nice (not-so-subtle, God!) punctuation mark at the end of my year.

Enjoying what we have; living in the present; savouring the moment; consolidating our victories. There is so much good in my life, so much already there to explore and extend. Yet I (like many of us) seem addicted to “next“.

Rosa, thank you. I was going to write that I’ll make a commitment to practise the present for 6 weeks … but then again, I think I’ll just enjoy tonight.

A great friend of mine has added an oh-so-helpful resource to his blog: the 5-word Coffee Shop Review. If you are visiting Melbourne Australia or live in this wonderful city, this is a must. My favourite review was for Starbux: “The Antichrist of coffee. Resist“)

Go to My Opinions are Important

This is the unfortunate motto of many an unfulfilled person, a person whose potential is far from realised.

Procrastination has been called an “energy leak of the soul.” It’s the “Path MOST Traveled”! The circumstances we live in today are partly due to choices we have made before. How much of yours are due to you putting off acting, putting off taking a risk, putting off even making a decision?

I have certainly procrastinated enough in my life but I am thankful for several times when I didn’t - I live with the good consequences today. 

Thank God I decided to propose to my wife when I first became sure; her sister died two months later. If I had waited, then the two sisters would not have been able to spend their last weeks together happily planning a wedding.

I usually ignore my mobile phone on the weekend when I don’t recognise the number calling me. (I’ll ring em back on Monday – I tell myself). I’m glad I could be bothered to answer my mobile phone on that Sunday when a training manager (I had never met) rang me out of the blue to offer me an interview for a contract that gave me meaningful work for nearly two years!

So what have you been putting off? And what might happen if you were to sieze the day?

I was talking about the way water looks different on clear days and cloudy days. I told my six year old son  (above) that water looked better on nice blue-sky days. He replied that all days are nice days – “the blue days and the silver days.”

“Silver days? What’s a silver day?” I asked.

“A silver day. You know, when it’s raining.”

Isn’t that an interesting perspective? I’ve long known that children are smarter than adults. (And I’m not the first to realise that). The days that we adults commonly label as grey days, gloomy days, cloudy days – a child sees these as silver.

Silver has value. Silver is attractive. We talk about clouds having a silver lining.

So are you having a gray day? Why is it so gray? What’s the flip side? What’s the benefit of the rain that’s falling? Where’s the opportunity in your struggle? What are the things that you can be thankful for?

Here’s hoping that all your days are either blue or silver…

1. Watching children at play.
2. Counting my blessings.
3. Going out for a long walk.
4. Conversation with my wife over a glass of port.
5. Journalling – writing my way out of a slump.
6. Forgiveness and its cousin: assertiveness.
7. Reading the Psalms as if they were written with me in mind.
8. Talking stuff through with a chosen few friends who both support and shake me up.
9. Comedy. Lots and lots of comedy.
10. Seeking to understand when my first reaction is to judge…

These are the things that most commonly snap me out of it. (I was going to say “These are a few of my favourite things” but I think that line’s been used). So what works for you?

 It showed me that even the weakest of men have strength within them if only they have opportunity to discover it and cause to use it.

Above all it made me supremely grateful to these men and to that generation.

Lest we forget…