What I learned on International Women’s Day 2016

Yesterday, March 8 2016, was International Women’s Day.  A very good (male) friend put up a Facebook post today saying that International Women’s Day was supposed to be yesterday but seeing as how it took the women so long to get ready it was now on today instead. He obviously likes to live dangerously! He has a wife and 3 daughters – I’ll miss that man!!

Joking aside, on one hand it is unfortunate that we live in a world where havingto have a day to celebrate women is still necessary. On the other why not have a day to celebrate women? Aren’t we worth it?

Here at Hummingbird Learning Centre, one obstacle that I keep coming up against is my clients feeling that they are not worthy. In their eyes anything that they can do is just ordinary; if they can do it then it’s nothing special. Their attention is constantly being brought to things that they aren’t good at yet and everything that they have mastered is disregarded.

So who decided what people should & should not be good at?  Isn’t there a place for everyone? Doesn’t attempting something, even if one fails in that attempt, trump doing nothing? What about everything that one has already learned, doesn’t that count?

Learning is a constant state. We are all learning.  Every day we grapple with new technology and then it becomes common place and then overnight it can become obsolete and we have to learn something new all over again.

I learned something new yesterday.  I learned that when you put a group of people in a room together, magic can happen. There were men & women in the room – it might have been International Women’s Day but the theme of the seminar was #SuccessIsSimple, which is universal.

Yesterday it was primarily a business focused event, yet we danced, drank juices and walked on glass!!! It was my first time to be a speaker at an event such as this and I got to share the stage with incredible and inspiring people but one thing that each of us had in common was that we are ordinary people, the same as everyone else.

One of the speakers talked about the customer experience verses customer service and explained that how a customer is made to feel will always win out over the service that is given. When applied to learning, how a person feels about their abilities will always come first for them. You can show someone how to do something but if they don’t believe that they can, then you must deal with that before starting anything else.

I did my first Glass Walk yesterday.  I might sound a bit blasé about it but it really wasn’t a big deal in the end. In fact most people who were at the seminar yesterday did it and why? Because after such an amazing day, we all believed in ourselves and wanted to do it. It was easy!

So, my take aways from the #SuccessIsSimple seminar on International Women’s Day are this: Believe in Yourself, Be Nice to Yourself, Celebrate Each and Every Success!!!

Elaine Sparling is the CEO of the award winning Hummingbird Learning Centre®. Based in Adare, Co Limerick and Tralee, Co Kerry, she works with clients on a one to one basis and can be contacted on 087-2996054 or through their website www.hummingbirdlearning.com. The online version of their popular workshop The Secrets to Successful Spelling™ is available through their website and Facebook page. They are about to start their new Successful Studying Course for second & third level students and are currently developing a week long Irish Course for summer 2016.

Dyslexia & Me: Richard Branson

At Hummingbird Learning Centre we always say that dyslexia is a wonderful thing – it’s just that it needs a different strategy for reading & writing.

I remember when the Virgin Megastore opened in Ireland. I was working in Dublin in the late 80’s early 90’s and it felt so cool,modern & kind of dangerous to be in there, browsing through the records. The store had caused all kinds of outrage because they were selling condoms openly on the counter, flouting the law at the time. The radio waves were jammed with moral condemnation, probably I suspect, to the delight of its owner, the maverick entrepreneur, Richard Branson.

Early in his life, Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Media, struggled with dyslexia. “I struggled with dyslexia when I was at school, long before it was widely known—my teachers just thought I was just stupid, lazy or both. Words just looked like jumbles of letters on the blackboard to me.”

Richard Branson has made a name for himself by mixing creative passion with business ideas. His first commercial success came after he founded his dream business: a record label. That company, called Virgin Records, produced the Mike Oldfield album “Tubular Bells,” which was later used in the film The Exorcist.

But that wasn’t Branson first business.  His first was a magazine that he started while still at school. The magazine was so successful that he left school early to continue with it.  I always think that this was incredible.  Here was a guy who struggled with reading and writing, yet he started a magazine, where his trade and tools were words!

In a blog post on Virgin’s website, Branson attributed the Virgin brand’s success to his dyslexia: “However, there are still many dyslexics out there, especially young people, who feel held back by their condition. I used my dyslexia to my advantage and learned to delegate those tasks I wasn’t so good it. This freed me up to look at the bigger picture, and is one of the main reasons I have been able to expand the Virgin brand into so many different areas.”

That ability to see the ‘big picture’ is one of the many positive attributes of dyslexia.

There are many, many talented dyslexics out there,” Branson wrote. “In fact, some of the most creative people happen to have the condition.”  One of his ‘big picture’ ideas really couldn’t be any bigger – he created a company to make commercial SPACE travel a reality!

In addition, Richard Branson owns his own train company, an airline, a media group and even a Caribbean island, but it’s not all about making money.  He takes a different approach to customer care.  He advocates for looking after your staff first, then they will look after the customers. “I have always believed that the way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers, and that people flourish when they are praised.” “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

Branson also knows the value of making mistakes, something people who do dyslexia often find difficult: “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it’s because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over.

He credits dyslexia with another of his signature management techniques: the habit of always taking notes. He writes in his 2014 book “The Virgin Way” that he learned as a child that if he ever had a chance at remembering anything, he’d need to jot it down. To this day, he says he carries a notebook everywhere.

The handwritten note habit has come in handy in management, negotiation, and even legal situations — he’s submitted his notebooks as evidence in lawsuits, he says.

It’s one of the “most powerful tools” in his “bag of business tricks,” Branson writes.

Dyslexia, Branson claims, actually made him a better manager, he wrote in his 2012 book “Like a Virgin,” and it became what he considers his “greatest strength.”

October is Dyslexia Awareness Month