newsletters & Thoughts
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Building Team Trust By Staying “Inside The House” Longer
Most teams are quick to look “outside” for the source of their challenges, but the teams that get things done have a weird habit that helps them in a big way.
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Why Your Team Needs Connection, Not Another Process
Connection and relatedness are the trust foundation for all other good things that can happen within teams – here are 3 experiments to try, starting tomorrow.
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No One Is Coming To Save You
If the cavalry weren’t coming, what would that motivate you to do for yourself?
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Using Experiments to Transform Yourself As a Leader
Experiments can help you transform as a leader fast than you would think – here we explore the benefits and advantages of trying new moves.
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The Simple Practice That Changes Everything for Your Resilience
Resilience is often touted as being tough, but the reality is that it’s built through small, simple practices that anyone can do.
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Building Trust By Taming Your Teams 3 Inner Voices
Learn how to notice the “3 enemies” to trust and innovation in teams, and experiments you can try to calm these distinct voices and build deeper connection within your team.
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The Team That Chooses To Go Deep
Less focus on the water, more focus on the glass. Teams that pause to work on “the glass” itself, not just adding skills, create deeper, adaptive capacity for moving towards how they want to perform together.
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The Helping Leader versus The Helpy Leader
When are you helping versus being “helpy” as a leader? Do you notice when you’re in either stance?
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The Benefits of Leadership Ankle Weights
Can you reframe challenges as “desirable difficulties”? How can this reframe, and wearing “ankle weights” as a leader help you become more adaptive and resilient?
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You’re An Accidental Diminisher, And That’s OK
Even with the best intentions, all leaders do things that accidentally diminish people – so what can you do about it?
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Leading With New Eyes
Leadership is a lot like vision, and sometimes requires a shift in perspective. Are you holding on to familiar but inadequate views?
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The Hidden Ingredient to Great Teams
A team that’s only as strong as its leader is a fragile team. A team that’s as strong as its relationships is unshakable.
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The Real-Deal, Authentic Leader
We need the real deal, we need the authentic leader – but it’s a practiced, difficult path full of self-reflection. We hope you take it.
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Where There’s No Word For Accountability
There’s a place that doesn’t use the word accountability, and it focuses on responsibility instead. Could you adopt the same mindset?
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How To Give Your Goals A Coach
Kicking off a new year might spark you thinking about and setting new goals. You might even…
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Getting To The Bottom Of The U
Are you looking to enhance your presence, or for *the* executive presence that some want? How can you show that calm, confident intelligence?
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Little “r” versus big “R” risks
Talking about risk might not be your love language, but understanding how you respond to risk can help your self-awareness.
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Trust Yourself First
If I asked you, “Do you trust yourself?”, what would you say?
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Learning Deeper Empathy to Practice Restraint
Many are familiar with the acronym, often pronounced “whif-um”, which stands for “What’s In It For Me?“….
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Eventually You Will Be You (A Leadership Reset)
There are times as a leader when your balance can feel way off. Like you’ve drifted from who you really are as a person…
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Are you in the boat-lifting business?
“A rising tide lifts all boats.” – John F. Kennedy famously said this referring to a growing…
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Looking for False Alarms in Leadership
Let’s go back to yesterday at 6AM. I’m asleep and our smoke/CO2 detector goes off which triggers…
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The Rescue You Don’t Need
You see someone struggling and say, “that’s OK, let me take care of it.” Someone from your…
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Are you trapped by the middle?
There I was in 2019, sweating through all of the things I thought I needed to start…
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What Are You Willing To Say?
One of the most common challenges that clients bring into coaching work is communicating with others. Specifically,…
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New Leadership Possibilities: Give yourself an “a”
When you go to work, there are usually 2 people involved – the person trying (you), and…
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The dream before the team
How do we design and build a team that’s based on a vision or dream? Can we shift from the default stance of a “team” being a group reporting to a single person? As a real team, what is your purpose for existence?
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A foot on the gas, a foot on the brake
Change is hard, there’s no way around it. It’s hard to change eating and exercise habits, and it’s hard to change ingrained, learned & rewarded behavior at a company or within a team where those behavioral norms are the only thing people know.
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Are you in a Relational standoff?
Are you in a standoff with a coworker and having a hard time resolving a conflict? What can you do to help?
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Fighting “The Drift” Of Change
How can we keep from relapsing after we make changes in habits, moving towards goals we want? It’s usually not an abrupt relapse, but slow and barely noticeable. What are some things we can do to notice and protect ourselves from “the drift”?
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What Could Better Be?
We end our calendar years often thinking about alllll of the things that could be better, and then make a bunch of goals for the new year. I often hear from leaders that they “just want to be the best leader they can be.” “Best” is elusive, mainly because we haven’t spent much time thinking about how “better” could get us there. A slight reframe helps us look deeper and reflect on what could better be?
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Bring Balance Back
We need balance in life and work. We need it to help us lead, to help us with priorities, time management, and being adaptable. Here are some suggestions to bring more kinkou into our lives.
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The pressure of practice
There’s a certain pressure when it comes to practicing something new or difficult. How can we change our view of it to a healthy one and enjoy it again?
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The Micromanager You Didn’t Know About
There are many different forms of micromanagement. As leaders and members of teams how can we can we boost our self-awareness, be less controlling, and demonstrate trust?
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Priorities Are A Crutch
The word “priority” was introduced into the English language in the 1400’s. It was a singular. It meant the very first, or “prior” thing. It stayed singular for 500 years. What pushes us to pluralize our #1 thing, and potentially hide behind priorities?
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Healing Yourself From Leadership Burnout
The term “burnout” has been around since the 1970’s, but it seems to be talked about more and more recently. How can we heal from burnout?
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The Inside Job As A Leader
How can we understand what’s going on with us enough to do the necessary work?
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Control Is All About Me
How does control show up for you and are you ok with it?
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A Sponge And A Brick – Learning About Boundaries
How can we balance creating healthy boundaries with having empathy?
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Imposters Unite!
How can we embrace “imposter syndrome” as a signal of growth and learn from it while supporting our teams?
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Not My Job
Why is it important to promote collaboration to create productive and fulfilling workplaces, especially when the professional world is uncertain and roles are becoming more defined?
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Obstacles? We’re Ready For You…
Why is it so hard to overcome the obstacles that stand between us and our goals? How can we get there?
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Shifting Away From Ice Cold As A Leader
How can we make our approach warmer and more palatable to those around us?
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The Leader That Worries Is Resourceful
How can we leverage our weaknesses and turn them into strengths?
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Quiet Quitting, Languishing, and Noticing the Overwhelming Meh…
Feeling “meh” and not sure why? How can noticing this feeling help us?
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Many Forms Of Messy
How can we let go of our idea of “perfection” and free up our mind for new possibilities?
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Doing Hard Things
How does doing hard things now pay off later?
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Freely And Easily
How can we discover our own “Native Genius” and that of our teams?
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Agency Of One
How can we be better agents for ourselves?
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All The Questions
What causes us to stop asking questions in our professional lives?
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Bring Your Leadership “Light”
“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
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“It’s All Invented”, And Other Useful Leadership Frames
Being in a state of transition from “what was” to “what is” can naturally bring up anticipation around “not knowing” and an anchoring feeling of nostalgia.
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Remember Your Fans
We all have fans. Every one of us.
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recovery
We tend not to think we need to recover from our day-to-day professional work, but we do.
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Leadership Choices: direction vs. destination
“You only need to know the direction, not the destination. The direction is enough to make the next choice.”
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go slow to go fast
Purposely slowing down, helps to calm ourselves, counterbalance, relax, and repair, which prepares us to do better things faster in the long run.
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challenges are gifts
“If you don’t do what’s important today, you’re robbing yourself of the gratitude you’ll feel tomorrow.”
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nice vs. kind
“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”
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social muscle atrophy
What’s it going to be like to work in an office again?
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optimization overload
Fighting the stress of wanting to do more productive things in every moment…
