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Am I A Writer?

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Today I felt that I was an imposter.  I attended my first writers group meeting.  There.  I said it.  It feels good letting the world know I faked my way into this group of people who did not know me and assumed I was, like them, a writer.  Did I make it through the hour without being found out?  Read on.

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CayWriters, according to their Facebook page, is a community of writers who live in the Cayman Islands and offer support and encouragement to each other, share resources, and provide feedback. I have tried to get to a meeting for months but travel or other events kept getting in the way.  Today was my first opportunity to sneak into this group who really are actually writing.  My plan was to sit in the back.  Observe. Listen.

Dammit!

My happiest moment was meeting you, because that is where all my happiest moments have come from.

Christina Kirkaldy
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Can An Artist Teach Us Business Lessons?

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I have been visiting Toronto, Canada, this week placing my son in a pre-boarding academy at his new school.  I had 10 days between dropping him off and picking him up so decided to stay here, set up business meetings to try to generate future work and strategy ideas that eventually may help pay for the world-class education he will be receiving. I took a quick look at the cultural events that were available during my stay.  When I saw that Ai Weiwei’s traveling exhibit, “According to What?” was on at the Art Gallery of Ontario I knew I had to set aside time to visit.  What a moving experience!  Read on.

Ai Weiwei

If you don’t know, Ai Weiwei is one of China’s leading contemporary artists.  However, that short – almost pithy – definition really does the man, and his body of work, a severe injustice.  He is, on a macro level, the consummate social voice of his country.  On a micro level, he is an artist, an architect, a blogger, a photographer, a documentary videographer, to name but a few areas of interest he turns his prodigious talent towards.  He is, as he summed up in his book of blog posts, a voice of honour against abusive authority and ‘shameless people with one foot in the system and the other out the door‘.  “May 14, 2006, As Soon as You’re Not Careful … an Encounter with Idiocy on a Sunny Day.”

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Let’s Talk About Hats!

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Well you’re either reading this because you just love hats or the silly title pulled you in and I have just one paragraph to get you to stay.  Well here goes!  Have you ever seen a hat with an instruction manual?  Well, in a bit of an homage to Canada where I am for about 10 days, let’s talk about the Tilley Hat.  More specifically, the brilliant marketing and customer loyalty enjoyed by the brand.  Read on.

Tilly Hat

Tilley Endurables, as the manufacturer of the eponymous hat is nothing is not customer focused.  They compete in a space that is seriously crowded.  There are dozens of similar products on the market and yet there is something of a mystique about the company that other firms just cannot match for all the money in the world.  What is it?  I call it authenticity.

The brand is authentic.  If there is one takeaway to be gained from the four page instruction manual every Tilley hat includes in the ‘hidden pocket’ it is that a brand can gain global recognition by being authentic in its approach to the product and its clients.

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4 Reasons To Record Key Learnings When Notetaking

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The other day my wife had a coaching session with our business coaching company, Shirlaws Cayman. At the end of the session as papers were being gathered and coloured pens put away, Kristen, our coach, asked Christina to take a moment and jot down her ‘key learnings. Why is this so important?  Read on.

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Every day in business we participate in meetings. We pull out the requisite notepad, scribble away, then generally conclude the meeting with some tasks to be done before the next meeting. What is different about recording ‘key learnings’?  I thought about this for a bit, and reflected on my own past reporting of key learnings after my coaching sessions.  The list below is not exhaustive, by any means, but reflects my thinking on the value of recording ‘key learnings’.