Tis the season for …

Goals. Plans. Intentions. Let’s hit the ground running – it’s a New Year, New You, New Opportunity! Right? Not so fast. Let’s rethink this whole new year thing. I’m fond of saying that the only New Year’s Resolution I ever kept was … wait for it … to never make another New Year’s Resolution. And I recently heard someone comment …

Perfectionism, inconsistency, and leadership

A few weeks ago, I wrote a LinkedIn post stating that perfectionism is a recipe for failure and disappointment. Simply put, the more we strive for perfection in any field, especially interpersonal endeavors such as leadership and management, the more likely we are to fail and to feel like a failure. Leadership and management are inherently foggy gray areas, filled with …

Four tips about mistakes

I have a real fear of making mistakes. I worry about it in relationships, I worried about it as an executive in my corporate life, and I worry about it today as I work to serve my clients. What if I suggest the wrong thing? What if I screw it up? What if, what if, what if… There are a …

What’s on the flip side?

What’s on the flip side of your skills? What’s on the flip side of your success? What’s on the flip side of your failures or problems? Similarly, what’s on the flip side of your employees’ skills, successes, failures, and problems? There are two sides to everything. A failure at one thing is a success at something else.  And vice versa. You can …

What does it take?

Driving home this afternoon from having lunch with two of my favorite colleagues and friends, I was thinking … what does it take to be successful? We’d talked about this at lunch – not directly, but indirectly in the things we said about our own businesses and about the people we meet at different types of networking events. What does …

Clarity + Focus doesn’t mean perfection!

Saturday evening, I went with friends to see Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza. Clarity?  You bet.  Absolute clarity about what they want to accomplish.  Absolute clarity about how they’re going to do it. Focus?  Well, if you’ve ever seen Cirque du Soleil perform, you know there’s focus.  There has to be.  Without it, the show would come to a screeching halt …