Your inner critic, that’s who. And if you’re like most people, you’ve got a whole regiment of critics installed in your head, all armed with their own special sort of tomato. There’s the Slavedriver: you’ll never work hard enough to succeed. The Perfectionist: no matter how hard you work, it will never be good enough. The Martyr: you have to …
Want better conversations?
I have what may be bad news for you: better conversations start with you. They start with the conversations you have with yourself, with that rotten-tomato-throwing peanut gallery in your head that’s constantly on the alert for any mistake it thinks you’ve made. The peanut gallery holds us back from acknowledging ourselves for our success, it hates the loneliness of having opinions others don’t …
How is your “house” decorated?
One of my favorite quotes comes from the Sufi poet Hafiz: The words you speak become the house you live in. Think about that for a moment. How often do you judge yourself, call yourself names, berate yourself – all in ways you’d never inflict on anyone else? This morning, my husband made the wise and true point that we …
Change your beliefs, change your life
If you believe… If you believe that negotiation is hard and you have to be mean and nasty to get what you want … I want you to believe you can negotiate successfully from a place of empathy and understanding. If you believe that conflict is scary and to be avoided … I want you to believe you can hold …
Are they values if we don’t follow them?
A few posts ago, I wrote, “Is a value really a value if one doesn’t always practice it?” In hindsight, I can’t believe I asked such a naive question. We’re humans. And therefore, we’re fallible. So of course we’re going to fail to live up to our values some of the time. This includes organizations as well as individuals. While I …
The value of values
Did that title turn you off? I understand. Values are an eye-roller for many people. Organizational leaders love to create their core-values lists, but … how real are they? And when it’s just a bunch of nice-to-have / wish-we-followed words framed on the wall, who can blame people for rolling their eyes? Especially when we witness the mis-alignment between those nice …
“Work is Love made visible”
I encountered this Kahlil Gibran quote years ago on my first visit to the Esalen retreat center. I’d ventured into the kitchen to ask a question, and when I turned to leave, I saw the quote posted above the door out to the dining room. Work is Love made visible The impact was remarkable. I could easily imagine – and even feel – …
Failure … or defeat?
Failure is not the same as defeat. Unless you allow it to be. It’s probably cliché to quote Thomas Edison, but it’s also relevant: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” If he’d allowed his first – or 100th, or 9,999th – failure to equal defeat, someone else would have invented the lightbulb. We are …
Visible doesn’t mean exposed
I was talking with a client last week who told me that her biggest challenge in being in business has to do with visibility. “I’m a private person,” she said, and went on to describe her fears of having to put too much of herself on public view in order to succeed in her business. As an introvert and a private …
Is it hard, or is it scary?
It seems like every article and marketing email coming into my in-box these days is playing some variant of the “it’s so hard” song. Whether they’re harping on how hard it is to do some specific thing, or how hard it is to focus on doing anything at all, it seems like “it’s hard” is the current Hot Marketing Trend. I don’t buy …