Amazon link Official book site When I met Nilofer Merchant at a Seth Godin workshop several years ago, I was impressed by her presence and her clarity of thinking on the emerging social-network-based world. I finally got around to reading her latest book, The Power of Onlyness, where she makes the emphatic case that each […]
Category: people
Find the Others
Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, […]
Changing the pattern of a relationship
When people are in a relationship, whether as romantic partners, friends, or co-workers, they often fall into a routine of how they interact with the other. Once this pattern is set early in the relationship, it often does not change. This can be problematic if the pattern does not serve one of the participants, or […]
The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyle
Amazon link I really enjoyed Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code, so when I saw he had written a follow-up book on organizational culture, I picked it up from the library. Subtitled “The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups”, Coyle investigates successful groups from the Navy SEALs to the San Antonio Spurs to a band of […]
What will you do differently?
As I have been doing more coaching over the last year, I have been seeing how some people tend to employ magical thinking. They believe that if they just think of what they want, then somehow it will magically happen. This is influenced by books like The Secret, which tout that visualizing what you want […]
Why don’t we change?
In my last post, I talked about how journaling helps you to discover patterns in yourself, and see what you’re actually doing as opposed to what you mean to be doing. In coaching, we call this gap between plans and action a breakdown, and a large part of coaching is how to deal with client […]
Vulnerability as filtering
I’ve shared an idea several times recently, and people have been finding it useful, so I’m writing it up for the blog to make it easier to reference in the future. Let’s imagine that you’re in a situation where you are looking for a job. You have some ideas of what you want, but you’re […]
Purpose and meaning
I’ve been having several conversations recently about purpose and meaning, so I thought it was time for me to write a blog post to try to sort out my own fuzzy thoughts on the subject. What does it mean to have a purpose? Do we all have to have a purpose? Do people with a […]
Give and Take, by Adam Grant
Amazon link Book website Adam Grant’s TED talk on the subject Vince Lombardi, the famous football coach for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named, once said that “Nice guys finish last”. Adam Grant did a study to see how successful people were who habitually sacrificed themselves for others…and confirmed that a disproportionate number of […]
Abandoning The Island
In the first weekend of my coaching class, they discussed three meta-narratives that permeate Western society, and yet are toxic and corrosive. They were: Performativity: something has value only if it can measurably achieve a desired result The Inner Critic: the feeling that “there’s something deeply wrong with me”, which I’ve mentioned a couple times […]
