Why Opening Up Helps You and Your Team Soar Vulnerability is a great leader’s superpower. It ties together elements of risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure — personally I lean more towards the idea of just exposure, and the requirement of being open. Why is vulnerability so important for a leader? Being vulnerable allows you to make real and solid connections with the people around you. Success comes when people WANT to work with you, that they choose to be part of what you are doing. If you want someone to lower their guard and take their armour off, you have to take yours off first. You cannot expect someone from your team to come to you with a problem, with something they are struggling with and lay it all out on the table for to “manage” them and have a one way conversation. This doesn’t work. It’s not effective. And what ends up happening is that you don’t make the right connection and will most likely not actually get to the root of the problem — let alone really solving it. ...

 Use This Activity To Develop The Most Crucial Habits for Lifelong Success It’s a cool October night. One of those nights where the sun starts going down, coaxing people back into their houses. The type of night that is actually perfect when you are going to exercise and sweat. Moving through the subdivision is easy enough. You can chart a rectangular course to meet the distance requirement you have. In my case, I’m able to do one big loop to get in 5k of activity. Little did I know that the distance was going to be the easiest part of the night. Most people outside of the military have never heard of rucking. It seems absurd when someone explains it to you. Rucking, is a low-intensity exercise in which you add weight to your back while walking or hiking. But what makes this the best exercise you have never heard of? It creates a unique set of conditions and variables to play with. It challenges you mentally as well as physically. The Physical This part is easy to understand. It’s ...

 The Lost Art That Changed The World   People hear the word philosopher and this is what jumps to mind. Icons of the past that changed the world thousands of years ago. Brilliant thinkers that changed how everything was understood. Ideas that changed the course of history. This isn’t you. So you aren’t a philosopher. That statement is wrong. Completely wrong. Philosophy isn’t about a few brilliant thinkers. Philosophy is something that we can all do. Most of us DO do it when we aren’t drowning in the busyness we have built our lives around.     Philosophy is our ability to wonder. About life and everything in it The goal isn’t to come up with answers. The real intent is this: It’s about the process of trying to find answers versus accepting without questioning. The most important ideas in your life will come from your own individual reasoning. They will not come from what has been forced upon you by society.     The beginning of thought is in disa...

 Building Habits In One Area of Your Life to Improve Others     Everyone knows that exercise is good for you. We are meant to move. The lifestyles that many of us lead today keep us glued to our chairs, in front of screens. I’m not sharing benefits for your body. This quick hit will share 6 qualities that will improve ALL areas of your life. The experiences we have, the habits we build, are not locked into the activity you developed them in. How you train yourself to behave or react in one situation will carry over to others. Running alone will allow you to build personally and triumph professionally.  [1] DISCIPLINE In order to achieve any goal, you have to take action. The biggest challenge people face is keeping themselves accountable. All too often we quit at the wrong time.  The world is full of distractions. Our mind is loaded with resistance.  Build your inner strength by sticking to a routine not giving up when things are hard. [2] CONSISTENCY...

 How My Focus on Writing is Influencing Everything For every year that has gone by, I have written more. You meet more people, attend more meetings, work on more projects and balance more commitments. To juggle all of those different activities, we communicate with each other more than we did in the past.  A lot more. It does people a huge disservice. And they don’t even know it. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. Jump-starting 2022 It’s cliche, but I decided that I was going to get back into writing. I had first picked it up when I left my job in 2019 and dove headfirst into the professional world of networking. My weapons of choice? LinkedIn and a personal blog. To step outside of my comfort zone and showcase my business prowess, I took to writing. I developed a strong habit of posting 1–3x a day on various industry news. My network was growing. Eventually, I let it drop off. I got busy with a new job and didn’t prioritize it. One day turned into ...

 Using Small “P” projects To Get Smarter Do you feel like there is too much to learn? I do. All the time. I cannot believe what people are doing, what they have created or how simple things have been re-invented. New products are being created to replace products that they had already replaced. What inspired my thinking this morning is note taking. Exciting stuff, I know. Note taking isn’t the point though. It highlights how much things are changing, and more importantly, how people’s understanding and perceptions are changing. This is what’s important, because it’s happening — everywhere. The more that you can learn, the more exposure you get to shifting paradigms, to better you will be equipped to manage your own needs and keep pace. What is a Small “P” Project? I’m introducing you to this idea to tear down how you might think about projects. People hear the word project, and they think boardrooms, budgets and big deliverables. Small “p” projects comes back to an idea that David ...

  People hate to fail. We drive ourselves crazy trying to avoid it. The irony however, is that we are natural experimenters. Our ancestors started roaming the planet about 6 million years ago, modern form humans back 300,000 or so, with civilization starting about 6,000 years ago. The constant through all of that has been trying out new ideas, methods or activities. Do you know what happens when we experiment? We get things wrong. If We’re Built for Experimentation, Why Do We Hate It? While failure comes with experimentation, it has an unfortunate connection to our fundamental needs. Originally developed in the 1940s, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps us identify and rank core human requirements. Level one being were most of our trouble resides when thinking of failure. Biological and physiological needs — air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc. Our earliest memories set the stage for our future. We go to pre-school to succeed in kindergarten. From there we move through...

There was a point in my life when I prided myself on how much stress I could take. No matter what I was dealing with, I would take on more. It destroyed me. I have never been able to tolerate the same stress level since. I’m extremely thankful for that. Feedback is as gift that most people undervalue . No matter what you are doing, there is always a way to assess what is happening. Focusing on those cues, and developing my self-awareness has been vital to dealing everything in front of me. Cues These are personal. The patterns that I fall into are mine. We may share some, maybe even all of them, the point however is to identify the behaviours that are your response. These are some of my reactions to overload: Binge Eating This might seem obvious for you, it is for me as well. It is perhaps “more serious” for me. I used to be a lot bigger. Six years ago I lost a lot of weight and have been able to maintain my form.  I was successful because it came with a lot of understanding, a shi...

 The Lost Art of Observation, Experimentation & Debate It’s 7:17pm on a Saturday night. You have had a brutal week. You’re behind on your project, your boss asked you to create a new report, an employee is out sick and you got nothing done because you attended 23 meetings in the last 5 days. You’re gassed. Sitting with a friend, having a beer, you start talking about how stressed you are wouldn’t be surprised if you were teetering on the brink of collapse. Instinctively, your friend reaches into their pocket pulls out their phone and jumps on Google. “What are the physical signs of burn out” Let’s go through the list and see how if you check the boxes. Rinse and repeat. For everything. All the time. The Value of Wonder Have you ever thought about what we have lost having the world’s knowledge at our fingertips? That question is the inspiration for this article, and quite possibly an ongoing series. I was out earlier today rucking, and that question dominated my thinki...

Content Creation and the Persistent Pressure to Perform   32, 083. T hat’s the number of posts being made to social media platforms every minute — of every day. The scary part? That number is ultra-conservative. I say that because it’s my own math.  4.62 Billion Active Social Media Users 1% of those users = Content Creators Each Content Creator posting 1x / day I’m comfortable that my opening number is too low. It better illustrates the point however, when even your minimum value overwhelms your capacity. The Frame I’ve been writing a lot in 2022. The other day I noticed that I have written more blog posts this year than I did in all of 2020 when I first started. A fun fact about 2020, I didn’t work a day job for half the year.  I’m not a professional writer. I don’t make money from this. I write because I enjoy sharing ideas. Add to this writing tied to my professional field on LinkedIn and my current Twitter experiment and I am writing a lot. The Lure of Likes...

 How Sales Techniques Make You More Effective at Any Job Do you ever get frustrated trying to get your point across? Struggle with great ideas stuck in your head? Answered yes to one of those?  Start learning about copywriting. Copywriting is the strategy of creating persuasive content for Marketing and Sales with the goal of generating conversions and sales. How does learning about marketing and sales techniques make you better at your job? We are all selling. All the time. Sales isn’t just transacting a product or service for money. In the simplest form, sales is the transfer of belief. You believe that you have the right answer, know how to fix something, have a better tool for the job. You want to get others to buy in —  re-framed, you want them to believe what you believe. People struggle in their lives, both professionally and personally because they don’t accept that we are always selling. Accepting this idea and using it to shape your interactions increases y...

  I love how Rita McGrath shares her frame on blind spots, seeing around corners. It's a great way to think of these types of opportunities. In business there is always that point when something new is starting to take hold. It could be a new technology, a new service or a dramatic shift in consumer or market expectations. We can get stuck in the trap of what we are doing and how we have been doing it. This limits our ability to properly assess the situation. It is not always a lack of ideas that leaves us caught off guard, rather inadequately addressing the problem. This is one of the reasons I love working with younger teams.  People that are new to the workforce, new to a new company or industry see things as they are. They don't have years of experience that is guiding their thinking or altering their perceptions; they are free from the workplace biases we create and support by having to execute day in and day out. Because of this gap in knowledge or understanding of the c...

Have you ever felt that the universe is screaming at you? I’m not a spiritual person. I’m not a person of faith of any kind. The idea of some higher power may make you uncomfortable, it does for me. How do you explain then what people label as “signs”? You know what I mean. You keep seeing a name. You keep coming across a pattern. You start seeing representations of a ‘problem’ that has been on your mind everywhere you go. This is wildly unsettling for most people.  What you start to wonder is if it’s real. Are you being told something, or are you projecting you own frame to what you’re seeing. From my experience both can happen, the difference — and the importance — comes from if you are being active of passive at the time. Did you know? Scientists have measured the amount of data that enter the brain and found that an average person living today processes as much as 74 GB in information a day (that is as much as watching 16 movies) Active v. Passive This is a straight ...

If you have a problem and you can't solve it, it's time to reframe it. Reframing a problem is simple. You force yourself to look at it from another perspective. Why would this help? Because most of the time the problem is a result of how you are seeing or understanding the problem. You are using your own assumptions and experience to solve what's in front of you, however these are often the same things that created the environment where the problem is thriving. People will often confuse problems, causes and effects. We take for granted our own default node network and the role it plays in everything we perceive.  The best approach to reframing a problem has two elements. First you need to understand how something got to the way it is today. Second, you have to drop everything you already know about the situation and start with a beginner's mind. Innovative solutions are a result of thinking about a problem differently than you (or other people) already have been. You ha...

  You may not have heard of the term "dysfunctional beliefs", I can guarantee you though that you have them. Dysfunctional beliefs are things that you tell yourself that are generally untrue and uncooperative. You can also label these as negative or limiting beliefs. No matter what you call them, they are ideas that influence your thinking, which means that they are influencing your actions. These types of beliefs will impact your career, keeping you stuck in the same place or role for too long. They will make you more risk averse and will limit the opportunities that are presented to you. Negative beliefs will tax your mental health, making you judge yourself harshly while constantly comparing your achievements to others.   Dysfunctional beliefs grow. As we get older, and the longer we hold onto them, the more dominant they become in our mind. We latch onto this type of thinking because it provides us with an easy answer to explain why something happened; as a general rule, ...

  Desirability Feasibility Viability Simple right? These three things are what make up the Balanced Breakthrough Model. The model highlights the core requirements to become a successful innovation. Here is a quick breakdown of each element: Desirability - Is there an actual need for this idea? What specifically is the problem you are solving for people? Feasibility - Can you actually build / implement the solution? How hard is it with your current context? Viability -  What is the investment required to create the solution? Is it really worth it? Can you derive long term value from the product or service you develop? A lot of this may seem obvious, however so many people look to invent or innovate something and then start looking for the problem. Trying to create the context or need for your product to be required is never a good place to be in. What gets interesting here is when you factor in timing, and this is something that A LOT of people miss. The three elements above ...

  There is such a shift happening with new world thinking. How we approach problems and where we need to apply focus and effort. Provoke is a great read that helps push your strategic thinking. What you will see from this book is the major differentiator that separates start-ups from established brands, and why some brands are able to adapt while others seem to fall off the cliff. Provoke is all about how you as a leader, need to embrace taking action versus the slow burn that is so prevalent in our organizations as leadership is focused on year over year results and protecting the bonus. Here are some key takeaways for me that will help you and your team have more success. Accepting a Trend and Properly Understanding How Mature it is Evaluate the trend that you are seeing and label as "if" or "when". Leaders often miss an opportunity because they either miss it, deny it, over analyze it or respond poorly A correctly labelled "if" vs "when" trend...

  Have you ever been scrolling your feed, listening to a friend or what to shout out "EXACTLY!" during a presentation?  That happened to me earlier as I saw a post on Twitter, and some how I found the quote that I had save quite some time ago (synchronicity, who knew).   There is a lot of confusion in the world. In almost every area we interact, there is a gap in perspective, understanding or breadth. We have expectations that the other party should be the one explaining, and breaking it down, surely it is their reason why we don't understand. This can be the answer. Sometimes it is for the other person or party to explain. They need to build out their idea, their solution, their value proposition. Here's the challenge however. What is on you? If you are not looking to see things completely with other eyes, if you are not willing to let go of what you hold onto, it is often extremely difficult for someone to explain an opposing thought or position to you because they ...

    I'm writing today inspired by a post I saw by Chris Walker - on LinkedIn . It resonated with me personally and professionally. There is a dichotomy between having a vision and seeing what others don't while also needing their approval and trying fit in. We are often asked to solve problems and come up with new and innovating solutions to what we see in front of us. Rarely are you asked to implement a dated and by the book strategy, everyone wants to be on the cutting edge. Oddly enough, the more your ideas or approach differ from the status quo, from what the people within the organization has succeeded on, the harder it gets to take those new roads. It feels like most of time, people want you to take the same path and miraculously see something that no one else before you saw, hang a right and boom ... you are at your perfect oasis. Ridiculous.   Here's a fun list for you: Apple Tesla AirBnB FedEx KFC Evernote Blogger Amazon   Wondering what the list is about? A...