There are two main kinds of uncertainty – internal and external. Many external kinds of political, economic, social, educational and occupational uncertainties arise from internal uncertainties. The greed, arrogance, superiority and emotional and social neglect that individuals at the top of financial and some multi-national companies exhibit arise from inner insecurities. An illusion that many of us subconsciously create is that financial prosperity will lead to emotional and social prosperity. It is more realistic to say that the making of profits needs to include equal efforts to foster emotional and social security.

A fifteen year old girl tells her parents that she had a vision. While watching two girls at the playground, she saw their ‘limitless native little girl genius’ and realised that ‘we all are geniuses.’ This, the daughter explained, is ‘the unspoken secret we are afraid to acknowledge.’ The good news is that she, Sally, has been chosen to cure us of the suffering of all this repressed genius is inflicting!

This vision experience of this fifteen year old echoes the much quoted line of Nelson Mandela ‘our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’ My own experience in speaking to different audiences across several continents is that all but a handful of individuals will assert that they are not geniuses. Fortunately, science is now stating that each human being is a genius, a fact that I have been asserting for some thirty years!

Every large scale long-term study of family life is showing that the absence of fathers is the biggest challenge facing Western society today. It appears that the absence of father is ‘bigger than anger, aggression, alcohol, drugs, crime and underachievement by children, because it is the biggest single contribution to all of these troubling behaviours shown by children.’ When separation occurs up to thirty per cent of fathers cease to have any involvement in their children’s lives. There is also the reality of thirty per cent of babies being born to single mothers and no paternity being followed through on. The physical absence of fathers leaves children having to face and cope with the abandonment by their biological fathers; it also means that they have the absence of male role models in their lives. After all, if it is true that the first and most important woman in a boy’s or girl’s life is his or her mother, it is also a fact that the present father is the first man that the male or female child experiences. When the most important woman in your life abandons or neglects or violates you, it is difficult for that child, male or female, to trust any other female. Equally, when a father is absent, his children, boys or girls, will struggle to trust any other male.

One of the dreaded experiences of many employees is performance appraisal, an annual audit of your work performance. It is interesting that work organisations persist with this mechanism even though it is a dreaded experience. It is similar to a teacher or lecturer persisting with a teaching method that students hate.

Employees find performance appraisals threatening because, one, the appraisals are judgemental and, two, are a one-way street. Certainly, employees are encouraged to state their own case about their work, but the final rating is done by the manager or director. There is no space for the employer to do a similar appraisal on the manager. This is a deficit I have long questioned – who evaluates the top managers? To suggest that they evaluate themselves would not be wise, because age, status, gender, career position and education are no indices of maturity. For performance appraisals to be fair and just there needs to be a level two-way playing field.

It is that time of year again when multiple and, dare I say, ‘gaudy’ images of hearts flood the retail market and the rush in on to secure relationships with Valentine cards, roses and jewellery. A relevant question in this romantic quest is: to what degree does heart truly play a central role in the development of an intimate relationship?