The first issue of Starlink for 2010 is just off the press this evening!

The emails will be going to our newsletter subscribers first thing tomorrow morning.

It’s another jam-packed collection of useful resources, inspirational stories – and, we hope, fun.

For non-subscribers, if you’d like to check it out, go to Starlink Newsletter area of our site – and you’ll find each new issue on the Archives page as soon as it’s published. :)

Drawing on Glasser’s Choice Theory and on Reality Therapy, the Cars R Us Kit is another wonderful strength-focused resource from St Luke’s Innovative Resources.

Recently I was asked to facilitate a three-hour  ‘teambuilding workshop’ for a client.

Rather than opting for more traditional or often-used approaches, I chose to make the Cars R Us kit the framework for the whole session.

The “Fleet Cards” from the kit were a terrific start – team members selected one image each to represent themselves as individuals and team members at this point in time. Sharing the reasons why they’d chosen their cards proved a great way for them to connect and understand where others were coming from.

We then focused on the “Know Your Vehicle” cards for the remainder of the session – again this proved a wonderful analogy for everyone to understand and discuss various aspects of their team, their roles within it, and the differences or similarities in their working styles.

Indeed, the discussion proved so fruitful that in three hours we covered only 6 of the 16 ‘parts of the car’ or aspects of the team! They have asked me to come back and facilitate another session to support them in their discussion and learning together.

If you’re wanting to enhance your team, you might also like to give Cars R Us a workout.

Of course it’s possible the car theme won’t be right for you. You’ll need to know your team – and you may need to have other approaches up your sleeve, just in case.

But if the vehicle analogy resonates for your team – and in our experience it almost always does – it’s a wonderful way to encourage deep conversation and transformation! :)

We first shared this with our Starlink readers in February 2006. We think it’s worth revisiting, because it still makes us smile. :)

Astronauts quickly discovered ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity.

To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, under water, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C.

… The Russians used a pencil.

We’ve discovered a great plugin for Wordpress called Table of Contents Creator (TOCC).

A sitemap is an important addition to any website these days, offering visitors another method to find their way around.

After trying several sitemap creators and becoming disillusioned with most of them, TOCC was a real find.

Very easy to install and configure, this plugin had our new sitemap ready to go in minutes!

We like the look of it and love the way site visitors can configure how they’d like to view the map – expanding or collapsing child elements from the menu as they wish, and also being able to sort the viewing order in several ways.

All kudos to Mark Beljaars for such a simple and elegant solution. :)

If you decide to check out our sitemap, we’d love to hear from you about what you think of it.

A favourite resource of ours recently is the Ups and Downs card set from St Luke’s Innovative Resources.

With no text, just images, these cards are wonderful conversation starters. And with their quirky little figures adrift in bathtubs on the ocean, they are great fun for groups of all ages to use. The images capture a wide range of different situations and the ups and downs of these wee sailors’ journeys on the ocean, matching the many moods and ups and downs of life.

St Luke’s Innovative Resources, based in Bendigo, Victoria, is the best source we know for strength-focused resources of all kinds.

From their website:

Our range of therapeutic card sets, books and stickers can be used by human service professionals in many different roles and cultures. Innovative Resources is committed to creating materials that promote a strengths-based philosophy, use straightforward language and require no special training.

All our published materials reflect St Luke’s motto: Respect, Hope, Fairness.

We use many Innovative Resources card sets in our work with clients, and find they are always a resounding success.

We have spent some time improving various aspects of our site this week. Much of that improvement has taken place ‘under the hood’ so to speak – for example installing several Wordpress plugins to make life easier. More on those another time perhaps. :)

One of the main modifications we’ve made is to enable the blog facility in Wordpress, which we’ve previously not used on this main website of ours.

This “What’s New” section of our site will therefore contain news items and updates about such things as:

• interesting resources we’ve found or used in our work
• updates about the work we are doing
• an announcement each time there is a new issue of Starlink

Our hope is that this will be a useful information source for visitors to our site, for our clients and for our Starlink readers.