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My mentor use to train his sales and customer service agents to give something called the response before the response. After a customer complained, employees would smile and say, that’s my favorite problem, and I’m the perfect person to help. Jeffrey said this attitude helped diffuse angry customers and set the tone for a positive interaction. What’s fascinating about this strategy is, it also works on ourselves. We can…

Positivity doesn’t increase our success, but it does increase our field of vision, which allow us to better notice the opportunities that lead to success. My experience has proven this time me countless times. And yet, it’s more than motivational rhetoric. It’s been clinically proven. Fredrickson, the professor and social psychologist who teaches positive psychology, did research on what’s called the broaden and build theory of positive emotions. Her argument is…

Doesn’t anybody like anyone anymore? Are we really so busy that we can’t be bothered to rustle up some respect for each another? Apparently not. Everyone is so critical, negative and angry. Our collective inability to find anything good about anyone is downright embarrassing. And at the risk of blaming technology for our interpersonal problems, here’s my theory. Computers make humans meaner. They give us permission to act from…

Here’s a cool paradox. For certain things, we don’t need as much as we think we do. And for other things, we need much more than we think we do. Take the concept of time. The story we’ve told ourselves is that if we only had a few more hours in the day or one extra day in the week, we’d cross off everything on our list. But time,…

Response flexibility is the habit that enables us put a temporal and mental space between stimulus and response, and between impulse and action. Siegel’s research showed that widening our window of tolerance is what broadens the span of arousal within which we can function adaptively. Think of it as the clinical version of the best mindfulness advice our parents and teachers ever gave us. Sweetheart, take a breath. Now,…

Who has let you down in the past month? Maybe it was a friend who bailed on the concert at the last minute. Or a coworker who didn’t meet your project deadline. Perhaps a public figure who accidentally said something offensive during a press conference. Or maybe the barista at the coffee shop put the wrong kind of milk in your drink. The list goes on and on. There…

Whyte, the poet master general, explained that his work is only a career looking back. Looking forward, it’s a frontier, he says. He just tries to keep an integrity and groundedness, while keeping his eyes on his voice dedicated towards the horizon. This sounds eerily familiar to me. My professional life resembles that trajectory as well. It’s like, one day you look around and realize that your current mix…

The most rewarding thing we can do is update our definition of humility. We accept that it’s not a strategy, program, goal, posture or technique. It’s not something we try to be. Nobody wakes up in the morning and just resolves to be humbler. We can’t slip on humility like a pair of wool socks. We can’t whip or will ourselves into a state of modesty like an ascetic…

There’s a difference between getting out of your comfort zone and jumping off a cliff. One is a useful exercise that involves healthy risk, stretches you in new directions and stimulates growth. The other is an exhausting, frustrating, wasteful effort that doesn’t play to your strengths. Drucker, in his bestselling book on managing yourself, wrote: it takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than to improve…

Nothing seems crazy when you’re used to it. Whether it’s an abusive relationship, a toxic workplace, a compulsive habit, or some other harmful circumstance, you never realize how bad it was until you walk away and heal from it all. It’s only when you get to the other side and find the happiness you didn’t know you could feel, that you see your past with straight eyes. But that’s…