I have been quiet on here for a week or two, mainly because I have been spending a lot of time meeting new people and promoting my business far and wide!

It has been a great pleasure, and honour, to be asked to take on the role of Group Leader for O4RB in Huntingdon. I have decided that O4RB is one of the business support groups that is going to work for me, because I like the values of the organisation. It’s not-for-profit, to start with, and is a business support and collaboration community, which means that it’s not all about microbusinesses selling to each other. I’m happy to be involved and will spend as much time as I can promoting and developing O4RB with the support team that we are putting in place.

Last Friday I had the pleasure of travelling to Crewe, as I was invited to the Virgin Trains Training Academy Open Day. An excellent day with a lot of great speakers, including Eilidh Milnes, Debbie Catt, Chris Davidson and Olivia Stefanino. I was  fortunate  to receive a free copy of Olivia’s great book ‘Be Your Own Guru’ for assisting with her presentation, and a free book from Chris as well. What a motivational day, and I also had a tour round the training centre with one of Virgin’s enthusiastic trainers who took me back to my own roots in learning and development when I used to deliver training for the staff at GNER in the 1990’s. There was free champagne too, and I wouldn’t recommend drinking two glasses of champagne in the middle of Friday afternoon if you want to keep a clear head for the rest of the day!

On the way to Crewe I wrote another 1,000 words of my first book, which will pass the 50,000 word mark today. I have set myself the goal of having the first book published by the time of my 55th. birthday in June, so please keep asking me if I’m staying on track to achieve that. I am trying very hard to write 1,000 words every day, but don’t always achieve that on weekends!

My Toastmasters journey is about to go into overdrive as we have our Club Officer Training sessions scheduled during the next few weeks. As I support six Area Governors, I try to attend as many of these sessions as possible. We also have the International Speech and Evaluation Contests starting, with Club, Area, Division and District levels of these contests to attend and help out with, so many of my weekends are busy until mid-April!

I gain so much pleasure from doing something for a hobby which I also do for work, and I have learned so much and gained tremendously in my own self-confidence over the past seven years that it is great to be able to give something back.

Early in March I will be attending a three-day course in London to become a Quality Assured trainer to deliver the WorldHost training that is going to raise customer service standards in the U.K. to previously unseen heights! Watch this space for more details, and if you know someone who has between 5 and 100 customer-facing staff in the leisure, hospitality or transport sectors, please let them know about this amazing training that is going to be available from mid-March this year.

Well, that’s it for today…..how are you getting on with your goals for 2011?