Great leaders possess unique traits that allow them to motivate teams, drive innovation, and create lasting impact. Here, we explore the six fundamental leadership qualities that define great leaders and how these attributes contribute to their influence and effectiveness. These are drive, emotional intelligence, integrity, authenticity, confidence and curiosity. There are also examples drawn from Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, Sundar Pinchai, and Jacinda Ardern. For...
Jun 30, 2025•5 min•Season 7Ep. 11
Listening skills refer to the ability to actively receive, process, and understand spoken information. Unlike hearing, which is a passive physical process, listening requires focus, attention, and comprehension. Good listening skills involve not just hearing words but also interpreting tone, emotion, and context to fully grasp the speaker’s message. Effective listening helps to establish rapport, build stronger relationships, prevent misunderstandings, and foster better collaboration in both per...
Jun 23, 2025•4 min•Season 7Ep. 10
No matter where you are on your leadership development journey, an understanding of different leadership styles will help you. There are various types of leadership styles, each with its own unique characteristics and impact. Understanding these styles is essential for identifying the most effective approach for different situations and individuals. This podcast introduces six of the most common styles and approaches. You can find out more by following this link to the related article: therightq...
Jun 16, 2025•9 min•Season 7Ep. 9
When dealing with any group or team, understanding how individuals engage is crucial for success. The 5 Ps Model categorises people based on their level of involvement, attitude, and contribution within a team or organisational setting. These five roles or types are: 1. Pilot, 2. Participant, 3. Passenger, 4. Protestor, and 5. Prisoner This podcast explains each role and how leaders can best engage each type. For further information, follow this link to the related article: https://therightquest...
Jun 09, 2025•6 min•Season 7Ep. 8
Listening is an essential component of effective communication and is foundational to both building rapport with people and demonstrating emotional intelligence. Being able to listen properly is also a crucial leadership skill. Understanding the stages of the listening process helps us to be better listeners and to improve our listening skills. Joseph DeVito identified that the listening process consists of five key stages, each playing a crucial role in understanding and interpreting messages. ...
Jun 02, 2025•3 min•Season 7Ep. 7
Wherever you are on your leadership journey, whether you are just leading yourself or managing thousands of people, there is always room for growth and improvement. Here, I will introduce a competency framework to support leaders in their leadership development as well as the five foundational competencies that relate to each level. You can find out more in the related article by following this link: therightquestions.co/leadership-skills-the-five-level-competency-framework/...
May 26, 2025•8 min•Season 7Ep. 6
What is the biggest problem that you are facing now, and how should you try to solve it? Professor Keith Grint identified that there are three key types of problems: tame, critical, and wicked. His premise was that If you can work out the sort of problem you are dealing with, you can then apply the right leadership style or management approach to solve the problem. This episode explores each type of problem in turn, with some examples. If you would like further detail then please follow this lin...
May 19, 2025•6 min•Season 7Ep. 5
Have you ever had a problem that, in trying to solve it, you have made it worse? When trying to solve problems we make mistakes when we don’t properly understand the problem in the first place. Therefore, one critical step in decision-making is classifying the type of problem that you are trying to solve. This is where the Cynefin framework can help us. It is a decision-making model championed by the Harvard Business Review and used by countless decision-makers, such as the US and UK governments...
May 12, 2025•6 min•Season 7Ep. 4
There are many types of questions, for example; open and closed, rhetorical, leading, loaded, or compound questions. This episode looks at six of the most common types using an example of two people going on a first date to the cinema. To find out more you can read the related article by following this link: https://therightquestions.co/what-is-an-effective-question-and-was-that-open-or-rhetorical/...
May 05, 2025•7 min•Season 7Ep. 3
12 Common Biases Explained With Help From Simon Sinek Implicit biases are assumptions, beliefs and rules of thumb in our minds, often based on our experiences, but that may not be reasonable or accurate. Bias affects all thinking, and it is not always bad, but we should be aware of it. This is because the brain, as with a computer, loves speed. And, to be as fast as possible, the brain loves to take shortcuts. These decision shortcuts (known as heuristics) can help us make judgements at much gre...
Apr 28, 2025•6 min•Season 7Ep. 2
Mind Maps are a form of visual, non-linear notes developed by Tony Buzan and used by countless successful people.If you are anything like me, and used to doodle a lot at school (or still do when trying to listen and take notes) then you will likely love mind mapping. Mind Maps can be used for many things, including: · Planning essays · Taking notes (for example in talks and lectures) · Making notes for presenting and prompts for public-speaking · Memorising facts · Brainstorming and problem-solv...
Apr 21, 2025•4 min•Season 7Ep. 1
What are the most important life skills? How should we navigate work, survive challenges, and thrive in our relationships? Research by UNICEF , UNESCO , and the World Health Organisation (WHO), identified 10 essential life skills, common to the well-being of everyone. So here is the list of the ten most important life skills, as per the research: 1. Critical thinking 2. Creative thinking 3. Decision-making 4. Problem-solving 5. Empathy 6. Interpersonal relationships 7. Effective communication 8....
Apr 14, 2025•5 min•Season 6Ep. 19
What is The Difference Between Coaching and Mentoring? The terms coaching and mentoring are often used synonymously but in professional terms there are some subtle yet important differences. It is not that one is better than the other, it is that they are slightly different approaches to achieve slightly different things. It is also worth noting that there can be considerable overlap between the two but mixing up the terms can be confusing and frustrating. Therefore the differences in emphasis a...
Apr 07, 2025•5 min•Season 6Ep. 18
So, what is a life coach and what do they do? A good coach can do many things but commonly a life coach helps people with: · Clarity and Direction · Personal Growth and Self-Improvement · Work-Life Balance and Stress Management · Relationship Improvement · Career and Professional Development · Health and Well-being · Motivation and Accountability · Transition and Change Management · Financial Success This episode talks about who coaching is for and how to choose the right coach for you. You can ...
Mar 31, 2025•4 min•Season 6Ep. 17
How to Build a Personal Network or Team and the Key Roles You want to start a grand venture. You are in the driving seat ready to go. But, who do you want on the bus with you? Organisations expert Jim Collins poses this question in the bestselling book Good to Great . I love this analogy as it is a picture we can all identify with. For instance, whether we are off on a family holiday, a team excursion or an expedition, we can empathise with checking off to see that we have the right people in th...
Mar 24, 2025•5 min•Season 6Ep. 16
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ® (or MBTI®) is a popular psychometric questionnaire for helping to understand personality types. The MBTI approach is largely based upon the work of Psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961). Jung’s research was developed into the MBTI model by Isabel Briggs Myers, alongside her mother Katherine Briggs. They sought to apply Jung’s theories to understanding normal behaviour, not just the psychiatric disorders which were of primary interest to psychiatrists such as Jung. ...
Mar 17, 2025•4 min•Season 6Ep. 15
Deliberate Practise: The 5 Elements Don’t underestimate the cumulative effect of applied time. Investors understand the power of compound interest when it comes to money. The same applies to the time we invest in something, including our personal development. If we continue to invest our time wisely and with focus then we can achieve great things. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success did a study that explored the lives of many of the world’s most successful people and looked at the...
Mar 10, 2025•5 min•Season 6Ep. 14
How to Apply the 4 Principles from Atomic Habits (by James Clear) Starting towards any goal means changing our behaviour and changing behaviour means developing new habits. The key to instilling new habits is knowing a bit about the psychology of behaviour. With this knowledge, we can craft new habits to give us the best chance of success. This is where the work of Charles Duhigg and James Clear can help us. This episode introduces the habit loop and the four stages of James Clear's Atomic Habit...
Mar 03, 2025•3 min•Season 6Ep. 13
Breaking Down a Goal or Mission to Create an Action Plan To take a mission statement and turn it into something actionable we need to break down the overall mission into constituent parts. We then end up with a hierarchy of larger down to smaller activities. These various elements can be called different things, but I think about the overall vision and mission, and then break this down into various goals. Each goal is then broken down into key tasks, activities, and milestones. This then becomes...
Feb 24, 2025•4 min•Season 6Ep. 12
Neuroscience research has proven that slow breathing techniques have positive effects on our central nervous system and psychological state. Using effective breathing techniques to slow respiration increases comfort, relaxation and alertness while reducing negatives such as anxiety, stress, depression, anger, or confusion. The simplified science behind breathing techniques is that changing the rate of your breathing changes your heart rate; if you increase your breaths, your heart rate increases...
Feb 17, 2025•4 min•Season 6Ep. 11
The Fight or Flight Response and What Happens During Amygdala Hijack Can you remember the last time you were nervous or angry? Perhaps you felt red-faced or that your pulse was racing? What you were feeling was a psychological threat state, known as the fight or flight response. Whether it was a physical, social or emotional threat, the physiological symptoms and psychological response would have been similar. Physiologically, when feeling in a threat state, it is common to experience an increas...
Feb 10, 2025•4 min•Season 6Ep. 10
Everything we do has an element of risk. We might decide to act or to do nothing but both options carry risk. Therefore assessing, and managing risk is an important part of completing our goals. This is how you can use this tool to identify, assess and manage the key risks that you face. Risk management can become very detailed and complex but the essentials are simple. We need to: · Identify the risks · Assess the risks · And mitigate the risks. By doing this we can create a basic risk manageme...
Feb 03, 2025•4 min•Season 6Ep. 9
Which brainstorming technique do you use to get new ideas? How do you improve your creative thinking? What do we mean by brainstorming? What is brainstorming and why should we do it? Brainstorming is about thinking creatively and generating new ideas to start initiatives or solve problems. Effective brainstorming encourages lateral and divergent thinking, allowing us to explore ideas beyond the expected approaches to challenges. By forcing our brains to think divergently or laterally about somet...
Jan 27, 2025•4 min•Season 6Ep. 8
How do you maintain a good life balance? People often talk about work-life balance but the problem with thinking about balance in these terms is that it is purely binary. But work is an aspect of life, not a separate entity, and there are many other aspects of our lives that we should consider when maintaining balance. I found this out the hard way when I burnt out, physically and emotionally, but I learned a lot in the process. I have found that it is useful to think about life balance in the f...
Jan 20, 2025•6 min•Season 6Ep. 7
If you could sum up your life purpose in a statement on a t-shirt, what would it say? What do you tell people when they ask you what you are about? What is your life purpose and how would you sum it up? When we talk about ourselves, we frequently share details such as what we do for a living, what we are studying, where we live or where we are from. But even though those things give some clues to who we are, they don’t necessarily reveal our principles, dreams, or life purpose. Our personal bran...
Jan 13, 2025•4 min•Season 6Ep. 6
How to Create Your Own Life Journey Map The metaphor that life is a journey is a popular one. Many of our favourite stories, from historical literature such as The Odyssey and The Canterbury Tales , through to modern classics including The Lord of the Rings and The Alchemist, use this premise. We are naturally drawn to such adventures and can relate to the idea of travelling and challenges in life (even if not faced with actual sirens or orcs!) When we thread together the events in our past, and...
Oct 28, 2024•4 min•Season 6Ep. 5
What is a CV or résumé? A résumé is a document that summarises your professional experience including your work history and qualifications. 'CV' stands for the Latin ‘Curriculum Vitae’ meaning ‘the course of my life’, and a resume is effectively a concise version of your work life. To create your own CV or resume, just follow these 5 steps: Content . Write out your CV in full. Tailor . Adjust your content for the specific application. Edit . Reduce the resume to under two pages of text. Format ....
Oct 21, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 4
The Hero’s Journey is a structured story arc, and common template, used by storytellers, from authors of ancient mythology through to Hollywood screenwriters. If you think of tales of heroes, be that Odysseus or Luke Skywalker, Perseus or Katniss Everdeen, you can see the underlying similarities. A 17-step structure was proposed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) and this was refined into a 12-step process by Christopher Vogler in The Writers Journey (2007). But both tem...
Oct 14, 2024•8 min•Season 6Ep. 3
What are your priorities in life? How does the way you use your time and money reflect your priorities? We all have priorities, whether we recognise them or not. We all have priorities, whether we recognise them or not. Even if we think we know our priorities, it is good to reflect on our actions to see how well our ideas and behaviours align. A good way to examine our priorities is to look at the evidence of how we spend our time and money. It is effectively an audit of our schedule and finance...
Oct 07, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 2
What are your passions? What motivates and drives you? How about your job? Do you do what you love? Work isn’t always fun, but most people want to do a job that they are passionate about, something they can enjoy, where they feel they can make a difference, all while earning some money. We all have a unique blend of skills, passions, and strengths. When these are expressed in how we spend our work time, then we have a vocation. This episode introduces The Spark Tool that you can use to explore y...
Sep 30, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 1
