Articles written by: Tim Higgs

Dec 16, 2020

Elton got it right

Elton John sang about how hard it is. Many organisations fear it. Some people give it away too freely and meaninglessly, whilst others appear to resolutely avoid it. It [...]

Oct 19, 2020

I'll have courtesy with my gelato, thanks.

Beautiful Sunday morning in Sydney and I just got myself a coffee at the café down the end of my street. Just before I was about to order a well-dressed lady in [...]

Oct 07, 2020

Beguile for a while with a smile

Is Charisma something that you are born with or something you can develop? Perhaps the dictionary definition of this word, rather than narrowing it down, adds to the [...]

Sep 29, 2020

The importance of acknowledgement

I had a lady in a seminar I was conducting on management ask me “Tim are you saying that we should give our people positive feedback even if they are just making the [...]

Sep 14, 2020

Have you got bubbles?

How can you get a team functioning well? We’re talking a long time ago here, but I had the fortune or misfortune – depending on your point of view – of going to an [...]

Aug 31, 2020

Is Emotional Intelligence B.S.*?

I received this question about our Emotional Intelligence (EI) Course from one of our Learning Solutions Advisors recently. I thought it was so good, I wrote a juicy [...]

Aug 26, 2020

Happy Anniversary

My Professional Development colleague, Fee Hosking, and I just celebrated our tenth anniversary at New Horizons. Let’s have a brief look at what has happened in [...]

Jul 01, 2020

Millennial Musings

The Canadian parent company of Think on Your Feet® ® – a course which teaches ten invisible structures in communication, that New Horizons trains here in Australia – has [...]

Jun 24, 2020

Diamond, Volcano or Pulp

This is a blog about pressure. Diamonds are forged under pressure, volcanos can blow under pressure and delicate and brittle things can also get crushed to pulp [...]

Jun 14, 2020

Beguile for a while with a smile

Is Charisma something that you are born with or something you can develop? Perhaps the dictionary definition of this word, rather than narrowing it down, adds to the [...]

Jun 01, 2021

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Mark Twain wrote: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In this day and age of blogging and social media they all seem to be blending [...]

May 25, 2021

4 TED Talks to help you overcome stress

Stress is “the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demands placed on them. It arises when they perceive that they are unable to cope [...]

May 18, 2021

Course Divorce

Separation and divorce can be difficult things to announce to friends and colleagues. There’s a little bit of a stigma; an embarrassment that you have failed. Not in [...]

May 06, 2021

A close shave

This is not a blog on risky behaviour, nor ageism. It’s about habit building. In the movie The Intern, Robert De Niro is a seventy year old who is bored with [...]

Mar 22, 2021

Corruption found in Professional Development training company

The word corruption can be a corruption itself. Usually it means an act of dishonesty but it can also mean a debasement or alteration of language or text. And that is [...]

Mar 16, 2021

Talking Tactics

Having run Communication skills programs over the last twenty-one years, I have found that very few participants at the start of a program can readily tell me what [...]

Feb 24, 2021

Rugby in the workplace

Writing one blog about a schoolboy reminiscence has triggered a few more but the lessons from this anecdote are ones I have been saying in my business life for over [...]

Feb 10, 2021

Remember Me? In one way I hope not!

I had to go looking for my degrees the other day to substantiate something for our RTO (Registered Training Organisation) space. Despite my search, I couldn’t find [...]

Feb 05, 2021

A big flop that broke the rules and broke the records

Working on my method of opening any book at any page and blindly putting your finger on a word, I thought I may as well do it in a book that is all about ideas. I [...]

Jan 18, 2021

Did you make a ritual?

How have you gone with your New Calendar Year’s resolutions? According to University of Scranton, Journal of Clinical Psychology, the statistics on resolution keeping [...]

Dec 17, 2020

Collaborative Hiring

For some, the idea of collaborative hiring might seem like a new concept but actually, it reminds me of when I was at school and we all belonged to different clubs; the [...]

Dec 10, 2020

Difference between ByVal and ByRef in VBA

When you design a procedure in VBA you may want to pass some data values to it for processing. You pass data through arguments; like a and h below on lines 6 to 8; [...]

Dec 09, 2020

My mate Stevo said it was good and Norm just couldn’t wait his turn!

This blog is about team formation and effectiveness but it starts off at a barbeque we had a few weeks ago for some mates (and spouses) I went to uni with for my [...]

Nov 11, 2020

Is your ‘Human Capital’ stock going up or down?

A Customer Service Manager from a medium sized business attending one of my seminars on Managing Multigenerational Teams recently stated: “My manager doesn’t want to [...]

Oct 14, 2020

Courage? …I’m feeling quietly confident

Anyone that knows me well enough is aware of my passion for rugby, and it was heartening to see the Wallabies demolish the English in a preliminary pool match for two [...]

Sep 23, 2020

“If you can’t measure it…”

Can you finish that sentence? In 17 years in corporate training, I have often heard the saying: “If you can’t measure it, it’s not worth doing.” Well I beg to [...]

Sep 09, 2020

Leadership, Management and Feedback

Whenever I ask participants in the various management and leadership courses I run, what is the difference between leadership and management, invariably people on the [...]

Aug 12, 2020

How do you honk?

For anyone in a team, especially those in a Team Leader position, this is an oldie but a goldie! If you already know it, it is Lesson Four that I want to talk about in [...]

Jul 22, 2020

Extroverts versus Introverts; does it matter?

I just saw an interesting TED talk on Introverts and Extroverts presented by Susan Cain who, originally a finance lawyer and as an introvert herself, has written a book [...]

Jun 17, 2020

How to give a killer presentation or…not let your presentation kill you!

In preparing for a recent training I gave on ‘Conducting Webinars,’ I came across a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article written by TED Talks’ Curator, Chris Anderson [...]

May 20, 2021

The art of thinking clearly

In one of my previous blog posts, I wrote about how in a recent training I was conducting on influence and persuasion, one of the participants asked me if I could [...]

May 01, 2021

Are You a Smarter Buyer?

In the book Smarter Selling by Keith Dugdale and David Lambert, they talk about the three types of buyer: Budget Buyers, Deal Hunters and Value Buyers. The first group [...]

Apr 22, 2021

The Moth: a bright idea that can help you influence better

In a recent training session I was conducting on Effective Influencing and Persuasion, one of the participants asked me if I could recommend a book on storytelling so [...]

Feb 18, 2021

What does Warren think about leadership?

If you were expecting Warren Buffet, I’m sorry to disappoint. Warren Bennis is a professor, author, management consultant and pioneer of modern leadership studies, and [...]

Jan 14, 2021

Rich dad’s antidote for distractions

Ever have a day when you did lots of ‘stuff’ and you are worn out but you didn’t get around to achieving the big tasks you intended to? In a previous blog post, I was [...]

Jan 01, 2021

Beguile for a while with a smile

Is Charisma something that you are born with or something you can develop? Perhaps the dictionary definition of this word, rather than narrowing it down, adds to the [...]

Dec 10, 2020

Fruitcakes and lines in the sand

I know I’m biased but my mum makes a fantastic Christmas cake; really moist, full of fruit and enough rum to sink a pirate-ship. Every year she makes eight, gives one to [...]

Nov 05, 2020

Killer Fillers

In the past three weeks, I have had two separate people in training who, on numerous occasions, said “to be honest” in front of what they were about to share. Both were [...]

Sep 08, 2020

I Know!

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had [...]

Sep 03, 2020

The Silver Rule of Negotiation

It may be a scam but tourists in Cairo are told that the scents that are used in Parisienne perfumes come from the rare flowers of the desert and are extracted in Egypt [...]

Aug 27, 2020

Communication Across Generations - Quiz

To recap from one of my blog posts many months ago, I briefly explained 4 key generations that we often find within the workplace: 1. The Silent Generation [...]

Aug 06, 2020

MH-17 and words

My brother is a journalist, working and living in Russia. He does proffer a different view on what is happening in the Ukraine than the stories we get over here. [...]

Jul 09, 2020

Ace your next presentation with lessons from these tennis pros

Nineteen year old Australian tennis player, Nick Kyrgios, has been lauded in recent times for his confident win at Wimbledon over world number one, Rafael Nadal. Kyrgios [...]

Jul 02, 2020

A truly botched presentation…but Samsung are happy!

If we strip back the word “presentations,” we get to the verb to present or to give, and of course, that is what we do in a presentation; we give [...]

Apr 16, 2021

They won’t take their shoes off!

My partner, who is a family lawyer, says, “Tim, you can’t teach people empathy! They either have it or they don’t.” My response to her is that unless they are a [...]

Apr 03, 2021

Anatomy of a coach

Depending on your point of view, I had the good fortune or misfortune of going to a boys’ boarding school, where sport was a big deal. Lucky for me, I was okay at it and [...]

Mar 26, 2021

And if you tell that to the young folks today…

"And if you tell that to the young folks today, they won't believe you." It's the sign off from one of the most quoted Monty Python sketches ever – The Four [...]

Mar 05, 2021

Leonardo, Steve and Basil

I was just reading an article in this month’s Fast Company which asked some very senior creative people from hundreds of companies around the world, big and small, “Who [...]

Feb 26, 2021

No wonder my sales were down; I thought AIDA was an Italian Opera!

Along time ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, before I retrained in psych, I used to be in commercial real estate sales. I failed dismally at my first attempt, which [...]

Feb 19, 2021

I’ve got a hang up; I can’t communicate

“I've got a hang up. I can’t communicate. I've got a hang up, but I’m a happy man.” I remember singing and bopping along to those words in my last year of high school. [...]

Feb 12, 2021

Footprints in the sand

There is an old but wonderful visual analogy of a man who goes up to heaven and finally meets God. The pair sits down to review the man’s life, but rather than having [...]

Jan 22, 2021

The Guru is never a Guru in his hometown

Last year I wrote a couple of blogs around the area of influence (Influence – after nineteen years I finally get to blend my two great loves! & Influence - Baring it [...]

Dec 06, 2020

A Knotty Issue

Many times at New Horizons in the last seven and a half years of training people new to the role of a manager, I have received comments to the effect of “I wish my [...]

Oct 29, 2020

Influence – Baring it all!

There I was aged 19, dressed in a loin cloth at the Jungle Party at the University Bar, working the crowd; singing the Eagle Rock on a bar table out in front of my band. [...]

Oct 16, 2020

Influence – after nineteen years I finally get to blend my two great loves!

I don’t share this much in corporate circles but I am a closet muso and in my younger days I used to play professionally as a solo guitarist, pianist and singer. [...]

Sep 30, 2020

What would your business be like if all your staff members were optimistic?

Would it be easier to manage? Would it be more productive? Or would you have a bunch of idiots blissfully ignorant of the fact that your organisation is not as [...]

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