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Imagine your boss hounds you for months to stay on top of a new project. That workload consumes a nice chunk of your time and attention, causing you additional stress that normal. Then, in the eleventh hour, right before you’re about to ship something out the door, your boss suddenly decides that project is no longer a priority. Look, thanks for all the awesome work you’ve done so far,…

Our society’s norm has become to instantly criticize anything that the public encounters. People have developed a zero tolerance policy for ideas that are different from their own, and so, their default response is to throw negative energy at others. If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s their strategy. Focus on what’s wrong, imply the worst, cast blame, try to control, devalue people. People actually think this works. Probably…

Buddhists teach a concept called the second arrow. It’s when a person encounters something that leads to pain, and then launches into a whole chorus of mental processes that lead to more suffering, often adding more pain than was there originally. The first arrow is our reality, like tripping over a crack in the sidewalk and face planting into dog poop. The second arrow is the sense of unworthiness…

Everyone seems to want to work faster, stronger, smarter, better and cheaper. But is that actually what drives optimal performance? Even if it does, do we really need yet another superlative to elevate our pulses and spike our blood pressure into the red zone? Doubt it. In my experience, the force multiplier of human potential is not any of those things. What has far more power is the practice…

One of my coworkers was a chronic kick the can down the road personality. She would consistently cancel and postpone our meetings. Three or four weeks in a row. Every time we were due for a check in on our latest project, her excuse was that she just needed got a better handle on things and get some projects off of her plate so she could prevent projects from…

Here’s a simple trivia question. How do you open the lid of a paint can? Simple. Grab a screwdriver. Place the flat edge between the lip of the lid and the lip of the can. Once the screwdriver is in its place, carefully push down the handle, and the force you exert will eliminate the air tight seal. Next, move to another part of the lid and wedge the…

Playing trivia doesn’t require someone to have a ton of specific knowledge on sports, history, music and politics, although that certainly helps. What makes a strong player is their ability to engage in divergent thinking, which is thought process by which you explore many different solutions to a potential problem. You give an enthusiastic yes to all answers from all team members at the onset, build a bank of…

According to various personality inventories, my psychological orientation is intuition. That means my artistic, abstract brain is wired to pay the most attention to impressions or the meaning and patterns of the information presented to me. I tend to remember events more as the impression of what it was like, rather than actual facts or details of what happened. Compare that to the opposing orientation, which is sensing. If…

Companies spend millions of dollars every year on customer service education. And it really works. When I was in the corporate training business, many of those organizations hired me to conduct workshops for their staff, and customer service scores almost always increased within a few weeks of the programs. But what amazes me is how little time and energy is focused on the reverse. Nobody really teaches us how…

Travel is humbling, as it reminds us the world is full of things that have nothing to do with us. Traveling gives us perspective, as it allows us to look at our own life from a far. And travel ignites imagination, as it disrupts our routine, introduces novelty to our brain and reactivates reward circuits. But let’s be clear. There is nothing in this world that we can’t turn…