Articles

Storms Reveal Our True Values

Over the past couple of months, I’ve found myself saying things that at any other time would have sounded ridiculous… “Are masks required to go into the stores?” “Have all of the shopping carts already been disinfected?” “Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to stay six feet away from you.” “I would typically shake your hand…but you know…” To say that…

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A Morbid Way to Increase Your Focus

I turned 40 last week and this milestone, as it does for many, caused me to spend even more time than usual processing “the big questions of life.” Reaching mid-life causes many people to wrestle over their finiteness. In other words….they think more about the reality that they are going to die someday. haha! This is scary and/or depressing for…

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How do you process change?

5 Steps to Process Change

There are quotes that seem to state the obvious, and make you think…well, duh. For example: “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” But sometimes, the simplest ideas are the hardest ones to apply. This quote implies that we must add something or change what we’re doing if we want to get different results. Seems simple enough,…

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3 Things I Learned about Strengths by Hanging Out with Yogis in the Desert

Helping teams embrace and articulate their strengths is one of the great joys of my work. The owners of Ra Yoga, one of Orange County’s premier yoga studios, invited me to their offsite meeting in Joshua Tree to lead a StrengthsFinder engagement for their operations leaders. We spent 5 hours…   Leaning into ‘strengths philosophy’ Exploring Talents using ThemeScore sheets Practicing a…

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3 Types of Leaders I Meet

I seem to meet three (or four) different leadership responses when it comes to investing in culture: 1. The Party Star This leader believes in investing in their teams and employees. However, they implement strategies which simply band-aid bigger problems and never address the core needs of their teams. Even though they ‘do fun stuff’, they still experience costly churn,…

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Failure, Passion, and the Risk of Leading

The World Cup kicked off in Russia last week and I’ve enjoyed having the games on every day and watching them with my kids. I love the clash of footballing styles, the support of the fans, and the passion of the players representing their countries. Even though I grew up playing soccer, I didn’t really ‘get it’ until 2006 when…

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I wish I could go back in time and tell myself these five leadership lessons…

I turned 39 last week and realized something: I’ve spent more than half of my life in leadership roles. I’ve been fortunate to learn from a variety of leaders in many contexts each lead our teams to different degrees of success….some lead with excellence and others struggled with the demands of the role. As a leader myself, I lead well…

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Are you as self-aware as you think you are?

grow in Self awareness with StrengthsFinder

Self-awareness has become a trendy issue in business with many books, articles, and videos being created to help leaders navigate this complex issue. To further complicate matters, how do we know when we are self-aware or self-deceived? I read a study where a control group of 50 leaders who had proven signs of growth in self-awareness was compared to 5,000…

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Coaching Towards Engagement

Coaching Engagement, Employee Engagement, Improve Team Morale

I love coaching kids’ soccer…most of the time. On each of the 8 teams I’ve coached, I see the same breakdown: There are about 2-3 players who really love the game and want to compete. There are 5-8 players who may show up one game ready to play, but other weeks want to talk about video games, school, the clouds,…

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Top 3 Misapplications of the StrengthsFinder

Ways to Misapply the StrengthsFinder, StrengthsFinder Orange County, StrengthsFinder Domains, StrengthsFinder Themes

As of today, over 18 Million people have taken the StrengthsFinder assessment (18,107,618 to be exact). Many of the world’s leading businesses and non-profits have adopted the StrengthsFinder language to help them see what is right about every person as well as help teams work together more effectively. Because the StrengthsFinder assessment is only $18.00, many people take it, read…

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