Nigel Cumberland on Mind

"Any team, consciously or unconsciously, agrees a set of understandings around which all of their thinking and activities are organized. This is your team’s culture."

"If you need to get upset or angry with someone, do so in a very conscious way so that you don’t lose control or react without thinking. You cannot spend your life apologizing for having lost control of your emotions."

"It is too easy and simplistic to feel that, if you have not succeeded yet, you will not succeed in the future. Overcoming fatalistic thinking is essential if you really want a great future."

"‘Once you stop learning, you start dying.’ I first heard this maxim by Albert Einstein in my twenties. At the time I thought it was nonsense. How wrong I was. Learning and success are totally interlinked. Do not make the mistake of thinking that learning ends when you complete your final exams."

"If you are unable to change many aspects of your work, you must alter your mindset – learning to stop thinking about your work as boring or dull; viewing the glass as half full rather than half empty; finding the positives in your daily work and career."

"Thinking and doing the opposite of what the majority is doing isn’t about being different for the sake of being different. There are lots of times when the well-trodden path is the right one to take. Your challenge is to know when it will be in your interest to do the opposite."

"Good decision-making is like playing chess and you must avoid making hasty decisions without thinking of how that particular decision will impact on different aspects of your work and organization. The worst kind of decision-making is to decide to delay a difficult decision until later or to pass it to someone else to have to make. You will never excel and be valued by your colleagues if you get into these habits of procrastination and passing responsibility to others."