A Powerful Mindset Shift: “Everyone is Doing Their Best”
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 people are doing the best job they can?” I responded: “It doesn’t matter if they are or not. But if I treat every interaction with the mindset that others ARE […]
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 have the power to help make this easier to navigate. Yes, you. You have the power to create magic. We are in this thing together. If we connect with our […]
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 real piece of s**t.” And something really important clicked for me. There’s a huge difference between your economic value (what you output and give to society) and your inherent value […]
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 completed a year-long initiative to implement ITIL – a process improvement effort to make IT more efficient. We were celebrating the completion of a ton of work- this was tough […]
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 that can help you get your message across. What is the cognitive effect I want my audience to experience? Often times, we forget the audience when we’re developing our presentations. […]
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 case at all. There’s a new-ish word out there that explains it somewhat: ‘Sonder.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but ‘Sonder’ is the realization that others around you are living a life […]
‘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 concepts of “we” and “they” have powerful implications for your success. For most of my career, I maintained a very small “we.” Only a few select people were part of […]
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 is, “How the best managers create a culture of belief and drive big results.” If you’re a manager or director – I recommend it. But the hard truth is that […]
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 meetings. Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic pill that eliminates them all, but I do have some strategies to reduce them. Why do we have meetings? At their simplest, meetings […]
“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 to my favorite shops and apply, only to receive no callbacks. I was just another job applicant with minimal experience. I was frustrated. But then I read the book How […]