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...

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 ...

  We all have an ego, that’s not the same as being egotistical. When people are labelled with an ego, they are usually exhibiting egotistical behaviour. This is the difference between the two: EGO — a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance EGOTISTICAL — excessively conceited or absorbed in oneself; self-centered Ryan Holiday defines the problem of ego in “Ego is the Enemy” and how it impacts our lives by saying that it’s  “an unhealthy belief in your own importance”. I would add to this that not only is it an unhealthy belief in your own importance, but also an inability to challenge your beliefs. You are not you without your ego. You are the sum of your experiences, an ever evolving story. We all use what happened yesterday to help us navigate tomorrow. The lenses you wear, that default node network you have built in your brain, that is you. Not to say we all haven’t developed bad habits along the way, we have. Everyone has things they want to ‘fix’ within themselv...

  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, ...

  I'm worried I was a downer last week. I spent time writing about working, this idea of "make work your passion". I blew that up a little bit (especially if you followed more of my daily posts on LinkedIn), maybe I left a few people sad, depressed and disillusioned. This post will approach things from a different way, I'll also highlight my personal challenge with the whole dream of making your work and your passion the same. From my previous post last week, I much prefer the concept of optimizing your work around your interests. Here is the biggest part of the challenge for me when talking about work being your passion: pas·sion /ˈpaSHən/ Learn to pronounce noun 1. strong and barely controllable emotion. "a man of impetuous passion" Yes ... that's the dictionary definition, I didn't have to fall too far from the tree to find the problem. A strong and barely controllable emotion. Wow. If you step back and think about it for a second, anything that w...

There is so much talk with respect to COVID and how it has 'changed everything forever'. That's hard to accept. From a professional side, I get it. New restrictions, new concerns and trying to figure out how you can effectively put in place, manage and communicate that it is 'safe' to return to normal. Within a business, changing the culture or the structure of your organization is extremely hard. Businesses have grown and evolved their culture to where it is today. There is a huge amount of shared beliefs, norms and expectations that allow you to operate how you do. You can't just flip the switch and have a totally different picture tomorrow. From a personal side however, I am still waiting to see it. Having been the one who has been going to stores and doing the shopping all throughout this pandemic, I can see that people are done. In the beginning, a lot of people, if not everyone was adhering to whatever guidelines where given. We waited patiently in lines, ...

Do you think that complicated and complex mean the same thing? It's probably a bit of an unfair question, considering the dictionary basically tells you they are! Complicated: Composed of elaborately interconnected parts; complex Complex: Characterized by a very complicated or involved arrangement of parts, units, etc. This idea however, that these two things mean the same, is one of the biggest challenges we face in the business world today. Why? Because it allows business leaders to use the wrong type of approach to 'solve' the type of problem identified (assuming of course that they have correctly identified the problem). Rick Nason, an associate professor of finance at Dalhousie University’s Rowe School of Business, explains the differences between these two types of problems clearly. Complicated problems may be hard to solve (or may even seem unsolvable at a particular point in time) however they are addressable with a systemic or process ...

I wanted to share some thoughts today with respect to Experience and Relevance that was, in part, inspired by this quote from Leo Tolstoy “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” That resonated with me and I thought it would resonate with a lot of you as well right now. Pretty much everyone is talking about what changes the coronavirus will being to our societies and businesses. There’s a lot of discussion with respect to change and doing things differently; so that got me thinking about the ideas of experience and relevance. Humans make thousands of decisions every day; but, our brains don’t give each decision one of those decisions equal attention, our brains take all kinds of mental shortcuts. These shortcuts are known as “biases.” They’re not necessarily good nor bad; they just are. When I was younger and closer to the start of my career, I always struggled with having “experience” thrown at me as a way to just...

This idea has been on my mind a lot recently. Why is it that people say they want team members who are creative, innovative, disruptive, will do things differently and then yet, never want to seriously look at bringing those candidates onto the team? Why do organizations continually seem to make the "safe" choice? Square pegs for square holes. Now more than ever, companies are looking for innovation from their employees. Three quarters of CEOs in a recent survey said that innovation was a critical top three priority why hiring; yet they also stated that they don't feel like they are getting it. Often, this is because they are hiring the wrong people! If the problem seems so simple to fix (just hire differently), why then do people don't do it? Recruiters & HR: What's in it for them? No honestly, what is in it for the HR partner / manager to speak to enough "outlier" candidates, to be able to understand them, to get where th...

These ideas might be a bit jumbled as they are crashing together in my head right now. I am currently reading Originals by Adam Grant (which I am enjoying much more than I expected based on some peer feedback). One of the chapters in the book addresses the concept of Groupthink which is quite relevant for the times we are currently experiencing. The CoronaVirus has, in my opinion, created a really challenge within our communities when it comes to Groupthink, Social Influence and those wanting to be different. Here are my thoughts. Groupthink I feel as though a lot of businesses are being dominated by Groupthink at this time. From my experience, when times are stressful and uncertain, people are quite happy to let someone else make the decisions, no one really wants to be the person who takes responsibility for owning the solution. There is a focus on harmony and conformity, that no one wants to rock the boat or challenge the person making the decisions. The reas...

Change Management is a pretty hot topic these days. You can't seem to be involved in any type of larger project without the discussion around change being put onto the table (and rightly so). Our organizations are made up of large numbers of individuals, and when we look to make transformative change, we are impacting many different processes and workflows which in turn impact larger and larger numbers of employees. Trending approaches today are heavily focused on communication. Basically get top level buy in, have that pushed down through each level of management, communicate changes, be transparent and try to make people feel "included" in the change (it is more complex then than that, feel free to Google to your heart's content for more information). The challenge or question for me however, sits more on the initial assumption that people will accept change once they understand it and see the value of the change for the organization. So then why is it s...