Ideas are free, execution is priceless.

If you want to signal loyalty, affinity, closeness and camaraderie for your family or team, here are my recommendations. Number one, listen loudly. Pay attention during conversations, phone calls, video chats and other communications. What specific language do your colleagues always use? Which acronyms or phrases are repeated most often? Are there any references that regularly sneak their way into people’s emails and chat messages? If you spot a…

Organizational psychologists have found that our informal, nontask related workplace social interactions matter more than we realize. Those little moments represent what are called affective events. They’re the emotions and moods that influence job performance and satisfaction. And it is largely through the accumulation of those very events that lead to healthy outcomes of more enduring workplace relationships. The more affective events we can experience, the more we will…

I am wrong all the time. I actually enjoy being wrong. Nobody learns from being right. People don’t grow from success. Show me one athlete who transformed from winning every game. What about you? What kind of intention do you hold around reflection? If we want to ramp up our experiential learning, it’s helpful to have a framework to guide our efforts. Mine has three parts. Insightful exploration, critical…

History repeats itself over and over. The rhythms of time never stop beating. And yet, humans have notoriously short memories. Our brains are liars. We easily and rapidly reimagine experiences to fit our preconceptions, rather than accurately recording what happened. I read a popular study from a psychology journal showing that our brains generate false memories of events mere seconds after they have occurred. We paraphrase, distort and misremember…

Empowerment is the ability to take personal agency. This is what living life fully is all about. I was reading a paper in an analytic philosophy journal, and the researcher made a distinction between two forms of empowerment. Hypoagency and hyperagency. Hypoagency means that anything bad that happens to us isn’t our fault. It was society, or culture, or some outside influence that made us do it. Hyperagency means…