Turns out I’m not really normal. Let me ask you something: What do you usually do on a Saturday or Sunday morning? Rest, have breakfast, chat with your loved ones, prepare to spend the day somewhere nice or travel? Can’t say if that’s good or not, but my usual Saturday or Sunday morning doesn’t look like that.

I love waking up early on a Saturday morning, making myself a nice cup of coffee, snuggling on my sofa in my blanket with my laptop in my lap and catching up on all the reading that I’ve missed during the work week. That’s the perfect rest for me. And the additional perk – I learn that way.

Over the years, I’ve garnered a pretty long list of blogs and magazines that I religiously follow. And my little tradition on a Saturday morning is to open up my feedly – where I have all the RSS subscriptions of those blogs and magazines – and go over about 200 articles.

Reading inspires me and feeds my inner need to always learn.

Going over my feedly gives me energy for the rest of the day and the following week as well as new ideas – whether for blog posts that I could write or for advice, tips and new things (e.g. the ‘new kids on the block’ like blab.im) that I could implement at work or show my customers. To quote Jack and Suzy Welch in “The Real-life MBA”, this is my “learn-it-today, apply-it-tomorrow  technique”.

Next to inbound PR, my latest area of interest and learning has been leadership. You may recall my recent infographic on the differences between leadership and management.

I’ve been reading a lot on the topic and recently finished one of the classics: Warren Bennis’ On Becoming a Leader.

It’s certainly a book that I can recommend to anyone, not just people interested in learning more about leadership, and so I thought I’d share with you my favourite quotes.

You can check out the leadership quotes in the SlideShare below, but there were a few other things that impressed me, so here’s some more food for thought for you:

"Change—relentless change—is our weather now. It is that constant and that unpredictable."

On Thursday evening, I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Waddington. It was an inspiring dinner of intellectual curiosity and thought-proving stories and conversatios. I think we both learnt a lot from each other.

Of course, we spent most of the evening talking about the PR industry and our experiences over the years and I kind of got to pitch my concept of Inbound PR and how the inbound methodology is the perfect fit for PR.

There are two main reasons, I said, why inbound is the perfect fit for PR:

1. PR people are natural content creators and storytellers.
2. PR people suck at measurement.

If you are familiar with the inbound marketing methodology, you will see that content is at the centre of inbound (refer to this page to learn more about it). And content is something that PR people do better than anyone in the creative industry – marketers, advertisers or digital experts.

However, the single biggest challenge that PR pros have been facing since forever is measurement. Just google PR measurement and you’ll see tons of articles explaining how AVEs don’t work, we need a new set of tools, how PR hasn’t adjusted to the new era of digital and metrics etc. (See here, here and here for example.)

Inbound makes measurement possible. Inbound also doesn’t work without content.

But there’s even more.

It was the first time I had ever participated in a digital-only congress and it was great fun. How it works you ask? Well, it’s online only – you sign up in order to watch the live broadcasts of the presentations on the designated date and time, and you participate in a live chat after each presentation.

I was invited as a speaker by one of the agencies I take care of at HubSpot (they organise the event) as they noticed that my background was social media and PR and I had written a dissertation and a book on the topic, so they thought it would be quite useful for the participants to learn more about this.

You can still watch the video here, but I thought I'd share the slides of my presentation with you as they very much summarise my findings from back then, adding up some more research and still making the point that PR pros are unfortunately slow to catch up with all that’s being happening in the realm of social media, 10+ years later.

I started university again this week. Yes, I did. As busy as I am at work, or perhaps at work and in my free time as I am a bit of a workaholic, I have this innate need to always learn and grow. And because I am driven to succeed in my career, I felt it was important to start preparing for the next step – and so I began a part-time Professional Diploma in Management at the Dublin Business School.

On Wednesday, I had my first lecture, which I thought was a great start. We delved into leadership and particularly the differences between leadership and management.

It was an inspiring evening of learning and reflection for me that got me writing this blog post and creating the infographic on the differences between a leader and a manager below.

The key learning really is that leadership and management are fundamentally different, but they often need to go hand in hand.

Warren Bennis distinguishes both explaining that “To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion.” He also says that both are important.