Avoiding a conflict is sometimes a strategic move. We avoid conflicts for the obvious reasons that dealing with them makes us scared, threatens our sense of security, or we feel as though we don’t have the competency to address them in a way where the outcome will work for us. Read more…
…don’t have the courage to confront the ongoing, unresolved cultural conflicts and frictions in your organization. …if the resistance to change at scale from the organization and even individuals is too hard to address. …if your fellow employees who should be your allies, cannot be motivated because of internal, intrinsic Read more…
Teutonic organizations believe that size makes up for persuasion. Small organizations believe that persuasion makes up for size. The problem in both organizations is scale, not properly understood. Because your organization, your team, your personality, or your project is large, that doesn’t mean that persuasion is something to be abandoned. Read more…
Worry about things you can’t control and outcomes that are dependent upon other people responding (or reacting) is at the heart of anxiety. Our modern struggle with anxiety comes from three areas: Our desire for immediacy of outcome (or resolution); Our lack of internal resilience; Our impatience with process as Read more…
Recognizing that you once held a belief and that now this belief is changing, is the essence of learning. And by the time you attain that essence, you won’t need the extrinsic validation from an “A” letter grade, a raise, a promotion, or any other validation that you believe extrinsically Read more…
What happens when how I remember an event doesn’t match how you remember an event? This mismatch in memory—and framing of those mismatches—leads to people constructing palaces to specific memories in their minds. These palaces are filled with feelings, ideas, thoughts, and conclusions that may not be objectively accurate. And Read more…
Do you care? This is the binary core question that we avoid asking out loud, or ask each other in unclear, murky, nonverbal ways, or just don’t ask at all. This is the right question to ask before thinking of strategies to engage in the practice of emotional alchemy. The Read more…
The person who walks around while the Titanic is sinking, and calmly begins rearranging the deck chairs, organizing the evacuation, and gets everyone off the ship before it sinks becomes, by default, the future captain of the rescue vessel in the North Atlantic. That person also becomes a new Noah. Read more…
Resonance is underrated as a way of sparking change. There are two things that happen when we hear an idea that resonates with us: We admire the person who shared the message with us. We file the message away in the back of minds. Occasionally there are those people who Read more…
Reassurances are the fuel on which feelings of safety run. The overwhelming need for more reassurances often stops us from doing the courageous work that matters. The resistance (the Lizard Brain) is driven by the need for safety, which is why reassurances are so useful as a tool to drive Read more…