How can we help them help us?

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 are as many moments of disappointment as there are people to...

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 of work involves spending time doing things you never envisioned doing...

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 monk. Humility a virtue that takes blood, sweat and years to...

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 from first rate performance to excellence. Sadly, not every manager understands...

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 the beauty of human transformation. It affords us contrast, perspective and...