It is officially spring. As I write this I am looking out at snowdrops, primulas, daffodils, crocus and buds on trees and shrubs. The sun is shining and it is glorious.

However my mood is not so joyful. We have just seen grown men, politicians, responsible for keeping their own people safe and so the rest of the world, squabbling and bullying each other, just like children in the playground. So my heart is heavy. I hope by the time you read this people will be building bridges and finding a way to keep Europe free of war and the rest of the world peaceful.

So apart from this what have I been thinking about?

There was a report just recently saying that children are experiencing reading books not by holding a printed book in their hands but via audio books. A couple of weeks ago I posted asking my audience when you are doing your business reading. A few people came back publicly to say that it is an issue for them. Privately people were saying to me “I listen to audio books because I can do that whilst I do my gym work or walk the dog or am doing the school run”. It made me think a lot. The first thought as how we love being read to as small children. My parents did read to me but were not very talented. However I had a dramatic aunt who did all the voices in The Wind in the Willows or whatever else she was reading. She even read some of the long narrative poems doing effects as she went along. It was fantastic. I loved it.

Of course as human beings before writing was common, we sat around the campfire and the family told stories. If you were really lucky there was a visitor who bought new tales. It must have been wonderful. Almost without realising it stories were committed to memory.

So the present trend to audio books is simply going back to the way in which our ancestors learnt and shared their stories. The only difference is that the pace of modern life means we do two things at the same time.

Everyone is taking photographs of everything. When someone tells you a story now their phone is on and they are sharing photographs too. We enhance our stories with images to engage another sense and make the story more memorable.
The means of telling stories may be different but the intention is the same. We want to hear stories whether they be fiction or business stories.

I use stories all the time. I talk about examples of things in business life where things went right and where things went wrong. People seem to learn much more from these than they do in learning the traditional business models. Yes, we might touch on those. Who has not heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

But it needs bringing to life with examples. When I first came across it I remember the trainer explaining the lowest level (remember these are the physical needs) by talking about food, drink, fresh air etc.but then bringing it home to us by asking how often we had been desperate to go to the loo and either not being able to get out of that meeting or desperate but on a train where no loos were working. She made us relive that feeling of a bursting bladder in real time. Nowadays we all use this technique.
So this thought process took me further into how we need to achieve the same things but using different tools in 2025.

I was angered and saddened recently when someone told me that soft skills do not matter these days because we do not work together in groups. It is absolute nonsense. It is just like the book situation. We want and need stories in our lives but they might not come from a book. We need to persuade, to influence, to motivate, to negotiate and all those other things in our lives but because of the ways in which we work we do them in different arenas. But sometimes we need to do them in the old fashioned way too. We saw last week Macron and Starmer influencing and negotiating with Trump just as Churchill might have done with Roosevelt over Lend-Lease. Then we saw Zelensky ruffled and knocked sideways because the ambiance was not about a negotiation that builds a joint solution but submission.

I just wonder how people acquire these skills these days. This is not something you can do online. That type of training is great for factually based learning but not for these skills. This is why we go to webinars and watch scenarios on YouTube. However sometimes role play is still the best way. I love putting people into situations, watching them work their way through them and then helping them draw out the learnings. It is a safe learning situation. However my rant here is not really about how we learn so called soft skills it is about recognising what we need to have and how to exercise them.

So let’s concentrate on what we want to achieve whether its to enjoy the story or to influence our co-workers or negotiate a business deal. Then find the way in which we can do this best in 2025 and beyond.

If you want some help then please reach out to me. Let me be your buddy. Please talk to me. We can talk about the skills you and your business needs and go on from there. We can find ways of developing your skills; of using that amazing asset you have: you. I love speaking with people, off the meter, to help them explore possibilities and whether/how to take them forward. I hope you will be one of them.

Now I am off to read a book. This one is not a physical copy nor is it an audible, it is on my Kindle!