By far the best book I read this summer was The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan.

Obviously, this book is about focus. It's about asking a powerful question: What's the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

You see, I don't have an issue focusing. When I need to finalise a task, I'm pretty good at hammering it.

But I do have an issue with doing too many things and wanting to be part of very many things. It's hard for me to say no when others come to invite me to be a part of their projects which often have very little to do with what my priorities are at the moment. As the authors explain, when you say yes to something you are inevitably saying no to something else (often what matters most to you) in order to find time for the former. 

So this book got me thinking a lot about focusing only on the right things at a given time and prioritising my energy for those. It also made me realise that I need to be more vigorous about how and when I should be utilising this energy best. That includes my own time management and planning as well as my surroundings because according to research we lose 28 percent of an average workday to multitasking ineffectiveness and on top of that, we get interrupted every 11 minutes and then spend almost a third of our day recovering from these distractions. 

It's been a while since we've had a "Why Work in PR?" interview but today we have Angharad Welsh sharing with us her PR career story and offering some very actionable advice for students and young professionals who want to learn more about the industry and how to get into it. 

Angharad and I have never met before but I discovered her article for the #FuturePRoof book project where I also wrote a chapter and I was intrigued. I found that, in addition to #FuturePRoof, we had a few other things in common, like Cheltenham where she lives and where I used to live and Muddywall - a magazine we both used to write for.  

I dug into Angharad's online presence a bit and I found that she had an interesting story to tell, coming from a broadcast journalism background. So I emailed her and I invited her to do an interview for the series. She accepted and I was delighted. 

Before you move onto the interview, don't forget to follow her on Twitter @Welsh_PR and check out her website too. 

(If you've missed any of the previous interviews, you can take a look as well: Richard Bailey, Pippa Hanson, Jessica Hodkinson, Chryssa Skodra, Farzana Baduel, Scott Guthrie and Sarah Hall.) 

Why Work in Public Relations: Interview with Angharad Welsh

I'm really big on leadership. It's a topic that I've been actively reading and learning more about over the past year.

That learning journey led me to an essay by Daniel Goleman from the HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People called "Leadership That Gets Results" 

In his piece, Daniel Goleman explains that emotional intelligence (EI) really is the key ingredient for leadership and that successful leaders have the following EI competencies: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill.

But what makes the best leaders is their ability to adopt the correct leadership styles and use them at the right time with the right people. 

Daniel Goleman defines six leadership styles that I want to show you below in more detail and that I have summarised in the infographic at the end of the post. 

The Six Leadership Styles: 

After a little over a year of having my email open to anyone and offering PR students to reach out to me for advice and help with their PR dissertations, I'm now done with this free service and free will to help. I'm shutting the PR mentoring down. I've kinda had enough. 

I don't  usually start or seek a rant, but I need to say all of this hoping that someone will be able to explain it to me. 

I can't even count the number of thoughtless, pointless emails I've received over the past year:

• My advisor says I need to narrow down my topic – can you give me a narrowed one please? 
• I like PR and social media – can you tell me what a good topic is that I should go for? 
• I want to conduct research around PR and have this brand's Facebook page – can you suggest a topic for it and what the hypothesis should be? 

Do you use Medium?

Turns out you should. It's the next big thing. Actually, it's already a pretty big thing.

For those of you who don't know what Medium is, it's basically an online publishing platform for anyone to share stories. It's kinda of like a magazine for personal blogs. You should check it out. 

I started reading it regularly a few months ago. It's cool because I simply chose the topics I am passionate about and every day I get a daily digest email with the latest posts for those topics. Many things there are different than my usual list of regular reading which is why I enjoy this so much, for example there are lots of personal posts (like this or this or this) rather than just the usual industry-related stuff that I follow and so it's nicer to start the day with such an inspirational piece or some sound leadership or business advice.  

I only posted something on Medium a couple of weeks ago because I feel it needs to be more personal there, different than what I usually publish here or on LinkedIn. I'll certainly be exploring it more but what I noticed is how people like, recommend and highlight pieces of your post. It's really cool to see which thoughts of yours people find most interesting and worth remembering.