There is a lot of talk around what our individual 'end goals' are, more and more we are being asked to quantify our happiness levels in order to make sure we are on track towards our idea of the perfect life.

In this revealing and educational interview with Wired Magazine, globally respected banking innovator Brett King talks banking trends and how he came to create the worlds first downloadable bank.

It’s okay…we all are.  It’s about influence!

In a word association exercise, the term “sales” would receive responses such as “Sleazy” & “Untrustworthy”. We hear the term “salesperson” and think of car yards & door to door nuisance callers. And yet, selling remains one of our oldest and most common vocations. There are elements of sales in our work and everyday life. If you’re in the dating game, then essentially you are selling yourself. If you’re mingling with friends at a pub, then you are selling yourself.

My business partner Kieran Flanagan and I have recently finished writing a book about human behaviour - how we can lift our own performance, increase engagement and drive influence in our organisations, our teams and our communities.

The art of recognising a time waster and knowing when to walk away

I talk to thousands of people every year about the art of influence, and reading the client. In sales, we win some and we lose some and the same applies to any industry where you are dealing with people, especially HR. Hopefully we win more than we lose. But how much time is spent wasted on trying to influence a decision that is never going to go your way? How many times can you think of when you’ve spent countless hours trying to follow up after an important meeting with a team member, expecting changes and practises to be put into place only for it to seem as if your thoughts went in one ear and out the other.

A day in the life of a HR professional is often like a roller coaster ride, it can be stressful, hugely demanding and at the same time incredibly rewarding. One thing you can guarantee is that no one day is the same. One minute they can be dealing with a stressful dismissal and then suddenly they have to think strategically and make a decision that will deeply affect the business. In response to this pressure some HR professionals thrive, while others don’t get anywhere near their potential.

We live in a fundamentally changed world. It's time for your approach to strategy to change, too.

In this short video I'm going to very clearly outline how businesses need to drive change in order to gain huge profits from this new, greener frontier.

If they aren't in our hands, or in our pockets, they are under our pillows or infront of our faces.

Screen time - we dedicate more of our life to looking at laptops and phones than we do exercising or hanging out with loved ones and it's becoming a very worrying trend. We now have 12 month olds knowing their way around iPads before they learn to count, and when the sun is out valuable play time is being missed.

Selfish is hard to resist

As part of my work as a speaker on human behaviour, I'm constantly teaching those in the HR industry how to use our key human drivers to do better business. One of the key drivers, our biggest motivator as human beings is self interest. Which doesn't seem like a good thing does it? But once we get that, as leaders and professionals in HR, we can actually use this knowledge to do a lot of good.

In a recent UN/ICAO commissioned survey on the use of signatures in passports, a number of countries including the UK recommended phasing out the long held practice because it was no longer deemed of practical use. More significantly, however, is the emerging trend that has some parents, educators and lawmakers espousing their concern - when asked to sign most kids these days are simply writing their name - the art of the signature may soon be a lost art. A recent report in Gulf News disclosed that this is a global problem with kids in Canada, Tokyo, Hong Kong and elsewhere moving away from written signatures because they live their life through technology, but without the need to sign.