Business Networking Evening with Padraic O’Maille
ICE Group and Pitman Training held a fantastic networking event at our offices in Galway on Thursday June 16th. We had attendees from various multinational and SME businesses around Galway. Padraic O’Maille was the speaker for the evening. He has been helping businesses get the most from their employees for over 25 years.He is the creator of Smacht – more information can be found on www.omaille.ie.
The networking event began with some great finger food, fine wine, and our speciality – the ICE Group and Pitman Training cupcakes!
After 30 minutes of networking it was time for the main event. Padraic O’Maille is a great speaker – extremely engaging, passionate, very easy to listen to and, without a doubt, fully charged. One of our invited guests mentioned to me afterwards that he could have said nothing and we would still have felt his energy!
Padraic opened with one of his favourite quotes by Jim Rohn – ‘You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with’, and he further explained this throughout the informative presentation.
There are 5 aspects that can affect your Attitude which can affect how you work or manage your team:
1. Physiology
Padraic spoke about how in recent years he had gone through some complications with his health which stemmed from a heart problem. It was only during this time that he realised how reliant we are as humans on our heart, how little we can do when the heart is not working properly. In his own words, the heart is a muscle and it is the ‘lever of your energy’. If we don’t use it, it gets lazy. We have control over this. Studies have shown that we should exercise for 20 minutes, 4 times a week, i.e. 1% of our total time per week. If we were to do this we would have a healthier heart!
2. People
We surround ourselves with people who can have both a positive and negative influence and impact on our daily lives. It is important that we identify the types of people we keep close to us and use three strategies:
Sever Association with those who are completely negative and a drain on our psyche
Limit Association with people who tend to be negative and not add value to our own goals
Expand Association with those who add complete value and assist us in achieving our goals
3. Psychology
During this part of the evening, Padraic brought us through a quick exercise. He asked each of us to close our eyes while seated and when we had done so, he asked us to imagine we were holding a lemon, feeling the course skin, then taking a knife and cutting the lemon, first in half, then into quarters, and finally putting one of the juicy lemon quarters in our mouths. There was a lot of wincing going on at this point as we imagined the sour taste of the lemon!
The point of this exercise was to prove the power of our imagination. If our mouths were watering just by imagining we were eating a piece of lemon, how powerful would our mind be if we were to keep telling ourselves that we can do something? For example, a tough task? Or conversely how impactful would it be if our mind was to keep telling ourselves that we are unable to do something?
One of the most impactful slides from the presentation was shown as follows:
Thoughts -> Feelings -> Actions = Results
Our thoughts become our feelings, our feelings impact our actions and our actions become our results.
A fantastic example used to show this – Mohammed Ali said he was the greatest long before he became the greatest. Ali used his mind to confirm with himself that he was in fact the greatest while also using it to scare the opposition. The point is simple here – training and managing your mind is one of the most important skills that can be developed for you to become more successful.
4. Problems
It is a guarantee that there will always be problems along the way towards success. It is how we deal with these problems that makes us successful. Padraic quoted the book ‘The Road Less Travelled’ by M. Scott Peck – the first three words in this book are ‘Life is difficult’. Padraic offered 5 simple tasks which, if followed, will help to deal with problems when they occur:
What are you worried about? Identify the problem! Write it down if possible – this will help you confirm what the problem is and begin the journey to solving it.
What are the facts? List or write down all the facts that are known about the problem. It can sometimes be a tendency to pad or exaggerate a problem – writing down the facts will completely outline the problem and make it easier to see possible solutions.
What is the worst case scenario? If everything was to go wrong with this problem, what is the worst that could happen? This is important because it outlines the absolute worst that would happen if the problem were to happen.
What can you do about it? List all the possible solutions to the problem.
What will you do about it? This is obviously different from the previous point – this is the ‘action’ part of the solution – what tasks are you going to take on to solve the problem?
Padraic offered a great quote to help with problem solution – ‘Run only as far as you can see’. Running a huge distance might seem difficult, but if we keep running just as far as we can see, then we will get there eventually!
5. Purpose
This is the ‘why’ of what we do. Why are we doing it? For whom? For what purpose? If we go through life without a purpose then we are just meandering through meaninglessly. Another great takeaway from this part of the talk was ‘there is no point in going faster, if you are going in the wrong direction’!
Overall, the evening was an enormous success for ICE Group and Pitman Training. Based on the feedback we have received, it was thoroughly enjoyed by our attendees.
If you are interested in getting fully charged about your career, learn about the above topics and more, why not contact Pitman Training (course.advisor@pitmangalway.com) to speak to our team regarding our Sales & Marketing Diploma.
Links:
