“Planking is a powerful pose.” This is the sort of thing my yoga teacher proclaims to exhort me to sweat out another minute. Surely there is some power involved here, but who knew it was the same kind of power that you might witness in a persuasive meeting, a TED talk, or a board meeting? I trust my yoga teacher implicitly, and as it turns out, it happens that she knows a thing or two about what it takes to…
Learn the seven signs of anxiety that show your stress level has tipped beyond the healthy point. Secretly, I like stress. It revs me up and puts me in warrior mode. I’m at my best when I have too much to do and too many problems to solve. But when stress tips into anxiety, the opposite happens. I can’t get anything done. Anxiety is the low static hum left over from unresolved stress, a persistent, residual pattern that grates on the…
I feel sorry for this guy. Not because his car is jacked up–it’s a commercial after all–but because, as an actor, he has the same script as a 16-year-old girl getting surprised with a car for her birthday. His job is to make us feel sorry for him, but the words are not going to get him there. He only has tone to do it. The commercial is effective because he and the girl get the tone right. There is…
The difference between scarcity and abundance mindsets explains a lot about why we get the best or worst out of people. A scarcity mindset can result in some pretty awful actions, like those of Harvey Weinstein or Larry Nassar. An abundance mindset can enable the most extraordinary actions, like those of Malala Yousafzai, or the many heroes who went back into the massacre in Las Vegas to save more lives. If you want to inspire people to do more than they…
An astounding number of managers and business leaders, 67% of them, report being uncomfortable communicating with their employees. That discomfort is about half attributable to the difficulty of delivering tough messages to employees, from feedback to company initiatives. It also includes a fair share of people who find it difficult to communicate even good news to employees. It’s difficult for many bosses to even deliver positive feedback like crediting others with good ideas (16%) or praising employees for their achievements…