Box of delight

Relationships need nurturing. Perhaps you’ve met someone interesting at an event. Or, perhaps you have a colleague who seems fun and helpful who you’d like to get to know better. Networking is not about how many contacts you have; it’s about building genuine relationships with people you care about knowing. How do you follow up with new connections and build the relationship in a non-awkward way? 

Educator Dena Simmons on engaging in antiracist work in the classroom.

Working from home and not having the option of in-person meetings and places to go puts enormous stress on most of us, including introverts. The lack of warning that shifted most of our work from an office to home is a shock and most unsettling. How do we all adjust?
Having worked from home as a free-lance librarian for most of my career, I’m sharing some tips that work for me.

According to Forrester Research, marketing departments spend 24% of their total annual budgets on live events in order to connect with customers, educate attendees, and generate new leads. But what do you do if you have to organize a conference on a tight budget? It can be a tricky undertaking. Fortunately, there are many ways to put on a successful event without breaking the bank.

We all have a list of goals — either written down or floating around in our heads — that will help take our lives in the direction we want.

Having that list is a great first step, but you have to actually keep track of, and then follow through on your goals in order to make them count.

Major behavior changes don't happen overnight — you're far more likely to succeed if you use Microsteps (small, science-backed incremental changes) that can make a big difference.

When companies think of diversity and inclusion, they too often focus on meeting metrics instead of building relationships with people of diverse backgrounds, says Starbucks COO Rosalind G. Brewer. In this personable and wide-ranging conversation with TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, Brewer invites leaders to rethink what it takes to create a truly inclusive workplace -- and lays out how to bring real, grassroots change to boardrooms and communities alike.

Academic writing has a bad reputation. “When a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual,” as David Foster Wallace diagnosed the problem nearly two decades ago, “his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly).” Indeed. But the disorders behind the kind of prose that inspires provocations like Philosophy and Literature‘s “Bad Writing Contest” are, if you believe University of Chicago Writing Programs director Larry McEnerney, even more basic than that.

During a recent Webinar that I co-facilitated, a participant asked me a question most of us have grappled with at some point in our careers:

How do I deal with a stakeholder that is nasty & argumentative?

My mind immediately went to: “Is your heart at Peace or at War”?

Can you spot a liar? We all know people who think they can, and very often they claim to be able to do so by reading "body language." Clearing one's throat, touching one's mouth, crossing one's arms, looking away: these and other such gestures, they say, indicate on the part of the speaker a certain distance from the truth. In the WIRED "Tradecraft" video above, however former FBI special agent Joe Navarro more than once pronounces ideas about such physical lie indicators "nonsense." And having spent 25 years working to identify people presenting themselves falsely to the world — "my job was to catch spies," he says — he should know, at the very least, what isn't a tell.

Learn how to do anything with wikiHow, the world's most popular how-to website. Easy, step-by-step, illustrated instructions for everything.

You do not need to manage a team of 100 people, in order to start working on your leadership style. No matter if your team is huge or incredibly small, you will always get the best performance and achieve highest results if you ensure that your substance, style, and service as a boss is helping you to lead an autonomous and empowered group of successful people doing a successful job. In the frenetic natural tendency to overcome the so-called "impostor syndrome" while getting to achieve greater power and glory, managers often envision their team solely as a supportive pillar necessary to help them to scale up their results. Too rarely, they realize that the people they manage can be a powerful ecosystem with independent life and potential to be unleashed. Empowered and autonomous ecosystems could bring it much further than expected in the business plan.

Each year, I train scores of educators and professionals to become Critical Friends Group© Coaches, and sometimes I lead shorter workshops around the proper use of protocols, our term for structured conversation tools.

As I take people through their first protocol experience, I watch how they respond to this new way of communicating with their colleagues. Often, when I ask them to reflect upon the experience afterward, at least one person will describe the conversation as ‘unnatural.’

What they usually mean by this is that they feel frustrated by a protocol’s restrictions on when and how they may speak, and/or that they find it extremely difficult and uncomfortable when they are directed to listen carefully in order to truly understand their colleagues before speaking.  

Looking for a new job can be a daunting prospect for anyone, but if you’ve been out of the workforce for quite a while, the idea of seeking employment can be downright terrifying.

 

Many people find themselves in exactly this position, however, as they attempt to re-enter the working world after years away to care for children, deal with a personal or family health crisis, pursue additional education, or follow a dream.

Fortunately, you can take a few simple steps to get back into the swing of things.

More and more companies want to lessen gender bias in the workplace, but I contend they may be overlooking one of the most obvious, everyday breeding grounds for sexism: meetings.  In my just-released TEDx talk, I offer 3 ways that men and women can reduce gender bias through better meeting culture.

While life lasts, let us live it, not pass through as zombies, and let us find in art a glorious passageway to a deeper understanding of our essential humanity.

- Sister Wendy Beckett (1930-2018)

Sister Wendy, a cloistered nun whose passion for art led her to wander out into the world, where she became a star of global proportions, entertained the television masses with her frank humanist assessments.