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Over the past twenty years, thousands of people from around the world have reached out to tell me that my nametag experiment has been featured as a case study in their business book, college course, company newsletters, training seminar, student project, trivia archive, teaching resource or documentary film.  My personal favorite was when my seminude picture wound up on one of those media roundups of the worst tattoos of…

Jaws was such a terrifying film because you barely ever saw the shark.  After all, what we don’t see is scarier than what we do. Spielberg knew this.  And so, he advertised the shark’s presence and attitude with the two most terrifying musical notes in history.  Dah dum.  Not surprisingly, the summer his movie was released, beach goers nationwide started seeing phantom sharks every time they waded into the…

Schein’s research on helping professions reminds us that not everyone who asks for help is actually seeking it, but help may be a convenient word for whatever is being sought.  Sometimes the person already defined the problem and worked out a solution, but still wants confirmation and affirmation.  Businesses ignore this fundamental human need on a daily basis.  In fact, one of the most common complaints on customer review…

Every organism must keep changing just to stay competitive.  If we are not ready to adapt and remake ourselves as we grow and as the environment changes, then world will evolve and leave us behind. Time waits for no man. Evolution has zero interest in our being happy.  The good news is, as humans, our greatest tool for survival is our ability to change.  Certainly, we fear change, but…

Cooke famously sang that change was gonna come.  We just didn’t realize it would come so suddenly.  That’s often how change works. Everything is gradual until it falls off a cliff. Our world is at a standstill, and then all of the sudden, it’s not.  Sociologists would call this a point of instability. It’s when life gives us no choice but to rapidly and dramatically change our behavior.  Illness…

Our loss of innocence can come from any source of heartbreak. And when it happens, when we are a young person standing at the threshold of a new maturity, there is a shedding of an outdated pair of eyes and ears. Our comprehension of the world is revolutionized.  The change or loss or disappointment pulls the rug out from under us, and all of the sudden, we are not…

Every day, we are tempted to binge on negativity.  It is our society’s most seductive attention magnet. Whether it comes through our screens, in our ear buds, on physical media, our out of the mouths of other people, it has grown more and more difficult to see past the downpour of pessimistic thoughts.  According to the definitive study on negativity bias from a psychophysiology journey, participants would not only…

My old startup founder had a mantra for all our company leaders: Be soft on the person, hard on the problem.  Which is wonderful advice in the world of management, but it’s also profoundly useful in the conversation we have inside our heads.  Because that’s leadership too. How we choose to be with ourselves. Even when nobody is watching. Especially when nobody else is watching. This determines how we…

Human beings prefer that our thoughts and feelings are in in harmony with each other at all times.  It makes us feel safe, controlled, competent and satisfied in this chaotic chamber of horrors called life.  That’s why, when our inner planets fail to align, we go to great lengths to restore the balance. The internal inconsistency is too psychologically uncomfortable.  Unfortunately, the cash value of cognitive dissonance rarely pays…

There is a great saying the recovery community.  Addicts are like pickles, they can never become cucumbers again.  Meaning, certain predilections are never out of our lives completely. We take ourselves with us everywhere we go. Genetics combined with environment says that any one of us could relapse into old patterns that diminish what we are in our best moments.  Here is a morbid way to think about it. …