Stop Drop & Roll into Deeper Listening

A few years ago, when my daughter was in her gap year between high school and college, she and I went out to lunch. She had been accepted into the college she very much wanted to attend, and they had signed off on her delayed start. So as far as I knew, when I sat […]

Let’s Add Value over Noise in 2020…

New Year, New Decade, New opportunities for… let’s call them “Behavioral Upgrades”.  Feels like a good time to ask “Am I adding value or just adding to the NOISE? “ We all have a driving need to be heard, connected, part of community of people who truly “see” us.  But now everyone is screaming to […]

Spring: Time 2 Plant a Pod!

I’ve been intrigued for some time with podcasting.  I’m very taken with the potential to broadcast powerful true stories via audio flash and human imagination.  Some of my favorites include The Hidden Brain and RadioLab; specifically, the kinds of stories they tell, and the audio elements they use to help energize the material.  Kelly Merrilland […]

Changing Your Mind in 2019

How can we Build a Shared Reality in a Fractured World? ’Twas the Season.  Many of us made the journey home to reconnect with our family of origins…. and all the relational baggage that implies.  Some of us were lucky to get back on the plane without having had a literal food fight during the […]

Your #1 Weapon Against Blind Stupidity…..

Curiosity is the opposite of fear. You hear that Love is the opposite – well ok, but in actual experience, love is too big a stretch. All kinds of people can claim they “love” the disabled or Muslims or old hippies, but in that context, the L word is almost meaningless. Genuine curiosity on the […]

Big Mouth? Big Buck$! You Might Want to Rethink that Clever Putdown…

One of the benefits of being self-employed is the variety of workplace cultures I get to experience. Being a bit of an outlier in a company lends some perspective on best and worst practices, and the curious chemistry within particular organizations. I’d like to profile two recent cultures I’ve worked within as a study in […]

Your Group on Conflict: 7 Questions that Reveal Team Chemistry

I had a problem. An important element of my newly invented facilitation tool Shift/POV was not being received as well as I had hoped.  And no matter how I tried to rework the marketing language, the instructions, the methodology, somehow, the Random Factor insight prompts were not being perceived as particularly useful to facilitators in […]