One of the more heartening things I’ve seen over recent days was the report around the knighting of Captain Tom Moore in England.

The 100-year old was recognised by the Queen for walking more than 100 laps of his garden in Bedfordshire.

For this, he started a crowd-funding campaign looking to raise several hundred pounds for NHS charities and ended up raising over £32 Million!

If you’re Irish you’ll know that someone special to Irish people everywhere left the planet over the weekend – Jack Charlton.

For those reading this that have never heard of him, Jack was an English coal-miner’s son who became a professional footballer and won the soccer World Cup with England in 1966.

It can be difficult to talk about gratitude in a business context.

I think it’s because it’s seen as a soft skill but also business is usually a lot about solving and preventing problems.

And when you’re consumed with problems it’s easy to be consumed with everything that’s ‘wrong’, which kind of makes the whole gratitude thing more difficult…

Last Thursday something happened that brought a lot of joy to some of my friends and clients.

Liverpool became the champions of England’s Premier League soccer competition for the first time in 30 years.

For them it has been the longest of waits.

Twenty years ago I was a young executive working with a large multi-national and I was keen to make an impression. At one point I was given responsibility to bring new robotic technology into an aspect of the business. It was exciting but also challenging as there were multiple challenges to making a success of the project.

“You mean I’m doing it to myself?, the leader said.

We were in the middle of an advisory/coaching session and my client had been telling me repeatedly about the difficult situation they found themselves in – and the challenging people they had to deal with.

Yet this was a re-curring theme over the months we had worked together i.e. there was always something or someone annoying them…

“There’s a few reasons why I don’t see it happening”

These were the words spoken by a smart woman I was working with a few years ago, in response to me asking if she thought she could ever be a CEO.

She was very convincing in her argument as to why she couldn’t get to the top spot.

But it turned out that despite her comments she actually had a huge desire to get to the role.

With everything going on, it feels strange to say I took a few days off… but I did.

It was a bank holiday in Ireland, so I bolted on some extra time and enjoyed the incredible sunshine. And it was a complete switch off – so much so, I even gave myself permission not to send an email on Monday! 🙂

But not to let me completely off the hook this week, here’s something a little different.

What many people don’t realise is that optimism can be learned. And now is the time to step into it. (See ‘Learned Optimism’ by Martin Seligman)

What if you believed a much better future was coming? And that you could help create it?

We need to be in touch with reality. But we also need to be positive shapers of the future.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve most likely heard of ‘Normal People’, the Irish drama based on Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel.

The BBC series of the book has become a smash hit around the world, breaking all sorts of records. For example, the new series received 16.2 million views in it’s first week on the BBC streaming service. The opening week record was previously held by the first season of Killing Eve, which received 10.8 million total requests in its first week.

I wasn’t going to watch it until a friend of mine I wouldn’t have expected to like it, said he really did. So I was curious.