Link4Change - Chris Ogle

As a young child memories of Christmas were filled with the excitement of a pillow case full of presents left by Father Christmas at 5am or so. Grabbing the sack and then bouncing onto my parents bed as they 'bleary eyed' tried to conjure up as much enthusiasm for the same presents they had wrapped wearily late the night before. All the senses are stroked at Christmas, taste, smell, hearing, seeing, touch (feeling) and of course emotions... a veritable sensory bath along with heavy doses of kindness and love. I can still hear the soothing dulcet svelte tones of Jim Reeves in the background (thanks to YouTube listening to him this morning in Budapest too) no Christmas would quite be the same without Jim. As the Christmas's rolled by recollections were of spending almost some of every Christmas day visiting grandparents in hospital. Although at this moment it seemed these visits were just an interlude in the festive day at home, a chink of light began to dawn on my evol

Facebook groups are an incredibly powerful tool... I hear you thinking... he is going to say 'But' in a moment... and indeed there is a big 'But'. All the hard work can be undermined really quickly if you are not careful. I don't know if you have noticed but there is a real prevalence of Groups now for the communities that we live... and when they first started out because of the low numbers of people they may well have included multiple towns, so 2 or 3 adjacent suburbs etc. What happens in these groups is that the messaging is now pretty fast and furious and so things wizz by on the timeline fairly rapidly. So... what people then do is... yep... create another group... it might be because someone else wants control... it might be because they just want to manage it better... or just because, for a while, it is less busy; things remain visible on the timeline for longer... Roll the clock forward a year or two... we now have 4 or 5 groups for a collection of

Most networking that we do originates from the same idea formulated back in 1985. The premise being to enable business people to get together, to learn what each other does, and to refer each other. But the big question still rages on... does networking really work? There are those that swear by it and who would state without networking they would have no business whatsoever. On the other side of the fence, there are a great many who would tell you that it is a waste of time. The answer possibly as with all these things is that it depends. Most networking brings a collection of people together looking to see what they can get. Although we all know that 'givers gain', the main reason people go networking is to get business. Avid networkers will openly admit though they get much more besides. Other benefits include... increasing Contacts, raising energy levels, gaining knowledge, signposting to others who could help in some way, and, even removing the isolation of working a