Never moan, ‘vote with your feet’

There has been a good deal of moaning and criticism of British Gas’s announcement to increase prices by 12%, hardly justified for a private company that saw profits of £1.6 billion just two years ago. Especially, as other energy suppliers will follow suit no doubt and this is the worst situation for the consumer, a private cartel controlled monopoly.

None of the moaning, however, will influence anyone at British Gas to not put up their prices.

However, many people have ‘voted with their feet’ in recent years, like 377,000 have left them to another supplier. This has led, along with some other bad business decisions, to a major fall in profits. Before you start feeling sorry for them they still made a hefty profit.

As the Dalai Lama said ‘if you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito’.

We all have the power to make change happen if we choose. If we are unhappy we can ‘vote with our feet’ and it is far more powerful than we realise.

Working together, could that be better?


This is something that the human race has been doing since its very existence.

Yet, amazingly, we seem to taken a turn backwards rather than getting better. 

The key missing ingredient is our lack of skills in listening. No surprise given that it’s not on the school curriculum. There are no listening lessons. 

Listening with the only purpose of understanding the other person would dramatically improve working together. 

Many times we listen for a gap for when we can speak, jumping in at the first pause. 

Often we kind of listen at the same time as we are formulating our response and that’s while the other person is still speaking.

At times we do not listen at all. We have evaluated in advance, without hearing a word, what the other person is saying will be of no worth.

Imagine the change to work if we just listened, as in with our ears and not our mouth. Evaluating after the person has spoken, using questions to further clarify the other person’s views.