Do you want to be more helpful and have more impact in your conversations? A friend of mine, Caroline asked an important question: “Do you think most ...more
Articles
A Powerful Mindset Shift: “Everyone is Doing Their Best”
The Magic of Seeing Others
It doesn’t have to be massive effort – it just takes a small gesture. In a very short timeframe, the world has changed. But you ...more
Getting Clear on What You Want
“Whatcha, whatcha, whatcha want?” -Beastie Boys How well have you defined what you want out of your career and your life? When I ask my ...more
The Difference Between ‘BEST’ and ‘EFFECTIVE’
What do you think the difference is between the BEST tech staffer and the most EFFECTIVE? Over the past couple of years, I have experimented ...more
How to Get Anything You Want
For many years of my life, there was a dull hum in the background of my inner monologue. It wasn’t loud, but it was powerful. ...more
Fear and the Art of Redirection
Learn to Conquer Redirect Your Fears for the Biggest Breakthroughs Were you awkward in eighth grade? I certainly was. It’s no surprise to anyone that ...more
Get Unstuck: A Bias Toward Action
Who are the most productive people you know? Think about their day-to-day actions. Are they prone to getting stuck? Or do they simply crank out ...more
Slowing Down to Speed Up
How Being Busy Hurts Your Progress “How are you doing?”“Busy – really busy!” Have you had a conversation like this recently? We go from being ...more
How to Assess Your Value
This week I had an interesting conversation about value. The person I was coaching said, “I didn’t really do anything yesterday – I was a ...more
Why Good Metrics Don’t Always Equal Success
I love cake, don’t you? There was a cake at the big meeting, so you know it was a happy time. Our company had just ...more
Remote Work: Is Anybody Watching?
How to keep your career on track while working remotely. Out of all the challenges of working remotely – working from home, a coffee shop, ...more
How I Slowed Down Time with One Weird Experiment
“It’s only 9:30?” I said to my wife after a morning full of conversation, reading, and sipping coffee. “Yes, it is weird, isn’t it,” she ...more
Three Keys to Giving Effective Presentations
All technologists need presentation skills, whether you’re presenting to one person or to many. As such, here are three tips that I’ve found particularly useful ...more
Why Being Helpful Can Be Such A Challenge
When you come across someone who is truly helpful to everyone around them, regardless of their level or status, you know you have found someone ...more
Reducing Overwhelm with Just One Piece of Paper
One common refrain I hear from technologists is, “When am I ever supposed to get any work done?” The biggest challenge working in technology is ...more
When Did You Last Learn Something That Changed Your Career?
It’s been a while since I reviewed the ELEVAROS foundational model. I last wrote about it in April – but this time, I made a ...more
Impostor Syndrome is Your Friend
Letting your fears and insecurities guide you can be scary, but they can also lead you to tremendous growth. Have you experienced Impostor Syndrome? If ...more
The Meaning of Sonder
Often we get stuck in our own world and think others are experiencing something the same way we are. But often, it is not the ...more
What’s In Your Blindspot?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking with a lot of people. The good news is people are connecting with my work, and the ...more
Seek Out the Positive (and It Will Spread)
If you have ever had to work with negative people, have you ever noticed how their negativity impacts you? It is contagious. Guess what? Positivity ...more
‘We’ and ‘They’: Expand Your ‘We’ and Watch Your Career Accelerate
I’m reading the book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Author Dr. Yuval Noah Harari writes, “Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.”The ...more
The Hard Truth About Your Team’s Culture
In the book, All In, authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton focus on how managers create great places to work. The subtitle of the book ...more
The Scarcity Mindset is Sabotaging your IT Career
I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the hosts were talking about the scarcity mindset and how it sabotages people’s success. Stephen Covey wrote in The Seven Habits of ...more
The Secret to Getting More Done
There are myriad tools, techniques, and methodologies to help you become more productive. But what is the RIGHT one? Maybe you’re a fan of David ...more
Meetings, Meetings, and More Meetings: When Will I Ever Get Any Work Done?
I have yet to meet a technologist that believes that going to meetings is the best thing about their job. In fact, most technologists hate ...more
You Are an Artist
In my 20+ year IT career, not one person has ever said, “You’re an artist.” I’m betting you’ve never heard it either. But you most ...more
“You Will Gain”: An Easy Way to Focus Your Efforts
As a teenager, I really wanted to work at a bike shop, but I was running into dead ends. Over and over, I would travel ...more
The Power of Vulnerability
What does it mean to be vulnerable when you work in the IT department of a major corporation? This is where most technologists stop reading. ...more
The Self-Imposed Blind Spot
One of the great lessons I learned while serving in the U.S. Air Force was about the self-imposed blind spot and how it can derail ...more
The Project That Fell on Its Face
My team and I completed a year-long project to implement a new technology solution for our customers. It was hundreds, if not thousands, of hours ...more
Finding Traction: Get Unstuck and Back to High Growth
Feeling Stuck in your IT Career? Remember the Three Truths About Being Stuck: It happens, and it’s ok, and it’s not permanent These three truths are ...more
Three Truths About Being Stuck
In my last article, The Technical Interview Failure, I opened with the line, Imagine you are in a boring meeting and one of your coworkers ...more
The Technical Interview Failure
Imagine you are in a boring meeting and one of your coworkers suddenly yells, “I really don’t care!” A few years ago, I was interviewed ...more
How Getting LESS Feedback Can Help Your Career
It is well established that getting feedback can help your career advance.You’ve seen articles like, “5 ways feedback can boost your career” and “Top questions ...more
The Sports Bar Confusion
My wife was at a grocery store we don’t often shop and she was having trouble locating an item on the shopping list.She spotted a ...more
Three Essential Truths to get the Most Out of Conferences
Finally it is here, that conference you’ve been looking forward to for months. You’re excited to learn and stay connected with the latest and greatest ...more
Too Soon!
If you’ve spent any time in IT, you’ve likely been a part of a significant change that either introduces a new system or replaces an ...more
Negotiation: Getting to Yes
Over the past few weeks, Kirsty and I have been in the midst of a move from the suburbs back to the city. Now that ...more
Write It Down
One of the most common mistakes I see among technology professionals is the failure to write down the tasks they commit to complete. Consider this ...more
Emotional Intelligence for Technologists
In the early 2000’s, I ran across a book called Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee, and Richard Boyatzis. I was a new technology ...more
The Status Report Blues
It’s uncanny how many managers, particularly inexperienced ones, ask their staff to complete a status report on a regular basis. The intention of this report ...more
You Don’t Have to Know Everything
There’s a common misconception among technology professionals that to be effective, you have to know everything. The desire to know a little bit about everything ...more
Armageddon
“The entire Internet is down” the CFO’s admin assistant tells you as you walk past his office. You stop and turn towards him. “The entire ...more
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