Another year, another Christmas Special! We've scraped the barrel of festive ideas and selected Love Actually, the "greatest Christmas movie of all time", as the unfortunate premise of this year's audio horrorshow.

In this edition, Ross G will be asking questions that are very loosely based on the Richard Curtis classic, with answers from Ross D, Anna and Owen.

Including:

• In Love Actually, grumpy husband Alan Rickman gets into trouble when he buys a necklace for a woman who isn't his wife. If you were to buy a gold necklace for another profession, other than L&D, what would it be and why?
• Creepy romantic Andrew Lincoln spends Love Actually pining after Keira Knightley: The wife of his best friend. What aspect of L&D do you secretly love, but know that you can never be involved with?
• Spurned husband Colin Firth spends Love Actually learning Portuguese to be with the woman he loves. What L&D language do you plan on spending the Christmas season learning?
• Aging rocker Bill Nighy performs his single 'Christmas Is All Around Me' naked on TV, to celebrate it taking the Christmas Number 1 spot. What's your great ambition for 2025?

During the discussion, Ross D referenced our newsletter 'Every learning intervention you design should be award-worthy'

Ross G referenced the Mitchell & Webb sketch 'Are we the baddies?'

Anna recommended our 'critical thinking' Skill Bite course.

The papers Anna discussed were:

• Carter, J. W., & Youssef-Morgan, C. (2022). Psychological capital development effectiveness of face-to-face, online, and Micro-learning interventions. Education and Information Technologies, 27(5), 6553-6575.
• Carpenter, S. K., Pan, S. C., & Butler, A. C. (2022). The science of effective learning with spacing and retrieval practice. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(9), 496-511.

In 'What I Learned This Week', Ross D revealed a shocking truth about Darlene Love's 'All Alone On Christmas'.

Ross G recommended A Christmas Carol, as read by Hugh Grant.

For more from us, including details of our new Manager Skill Builder, visit mindtools.com.

There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.  

Connect with our speakers   

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Owen Ferguson
• Dr Anna Barnett
• Ross Dickie