Integrate!

Most people don't like to think about how they communicate because it's both scary and awkward. On the one hand, they feel unclear and not effective. On the other, they feel like they are pitching all the time in an effort to manipulate people into thinking or doing something. What they want is to be authentic and collaborative and also clear and compelling. And they'd like it all to be effortless, because evaluating one's communication is like staring too long at the mirror. Of course, all this concern with being authentic instead of thinking through how we want to communicate comes with a price. When we are authentic, we are more likely to say something that stops our message from reaching the people we want to reach. We let ourselves get away with being unclear; we make it hard to imagine the things we describe; and when it goes wrong, we say, "I did my best." @canstockphoto.ca/nejron Your best communication is not authentic; it doesn't ju...

©CanStockPhoto/Nickolya This is a wish for you as the year ends and everyone is happy and crazy and angry and sad, all at the same time. This is a wish that you are happy even when the people you care about are absent or angry or distracted or depressed. This is a wish that you look ahead and see good things, even if you are not sure you know what resolutions to make or goals to set or plans to hope for --beyond just one really good night's sleep. This is a wish that no matter what other people are doing, or who they are electing or protesting, you find some joy - if not in a stocking, then in something that you choose or make. This is a wish that you find yourself sitting with things that have troubled you for years and be surprised that now you can own what you have done or said or felt - or what you did not do or say or feel - and you're okay. This is a wish for a tiny, nurturing breeze over that spark of a dream that you hardly ever let yourself think about. ...

How many people do you think genuinely look forward to the season of endless small talk with people they haven't arranged to meet for months? If you would rather Netflix 'n chill than meet new people, you're not alone. It's really hard to have a good conversation with someone who is as uncomfortable as you are. Here are three ways you can do better and feel better, whether your holiday includes parties with extended family and friends or endless work socials. If you wouldn't want to meet someone who feels the way you do, change the way you feel. You can't become a different person but you can be a person in a different state. Listen to music, go for a walk or take a moment to remember just one time you met someone and it worked out beautifully. Repeat as often as necessary to find the self that people will look forward to meeting. Think about why you've shown up. If you're at a social you don't want to attend, there must be a pretty good r...

We like to put up barriers between our lives and our working lives as if we somehow become someone different when we are at work. We hope this is true when we become someone we don't like very much at work, someone who is unsafe and unhappy and unable to believe that the work they are doing matters. At the end of the day, we think, our real life begins. Now turn it around. Do you want to work with people who are unsafe and unhappy and unable to believe that the work they are doing matters? Do you expect those people to rise to the top of your organization and keep your job safe during rapid change in the world and the competition? © Can Stock Photo / Mattkusb I recently had the opportunity to do some work with people who work for an organization that does really important work. They told me that they liked working there. But when I asked them what they wanted to improve in their own skills, they drew a blank. They looked to me like people who were insecure about what they ...

There are lots of experts who will tell you what to do once you know what you want. They will give you motivational tips (which means they are not based on emotion, not evidence) and they will give you evidence-based tips (often the result of social science research). What they don't do is tell you what to do when you don't know what you want. After all, if you don't know what you want, what's the point? People think that you must know what you want. And that's probably accurate on some level, but your conscious awareness might be out of the loop. I spent a large part of this week asking people to grow their influence by knowing what they want other people to do. I kept asking people what they wanted. The answer that no one wanted to give out loud was something like "I would like people to be impressed by me just as I am, and I'd like them to figure how to use the information I give them. I don't want to have to think it through, because I'm not...

We often invest a huge amount of time and effort in planning our message. We want it to be clear and strong and motivating and bullet proof. We argue and support, find more evidence, and rehearse. We work hard to make the message as strong as it could possibly be. And when we fail to be heard as we want to be heard, we blame ourselves for delivering it the wrong way. This makes it harder the next time we have to walk into a conversation or a presentation and deliver a strong, clear message. What if our delivery was fine and the problem was that the audience was not ready to hear us? The most powerful messages all begin with the same thing: the speaker finds a way to say to the audience, "I see you." © Can Stock Photo / ueuaphoto The one thing that you can be sure every audience wants is a mirror. Before they care about how you see your subject matter, they want to know how you see them. When you reflect what you see in your audience, you do two things: 1) help them...

There's a power problem in self development circles. The problem is this: powerful experiences (experiences that make a strong impact on you) are not always experiences that give you power (the ability to do something or to influence others to do something). In the heat of an experience, it is too easy to believe that feeling power is the same as having power. It's not. What does give you power? It begins with purpose. People who know what they are trying to accomplish have more power than people who don't know what they want. That seems obvious. What is less obvious is that people may know what they want in a given situation without necessarily knowing what they want in other situations. Purpose is less a thing and more a process of continually evaluating your situation against your values and deciding on how your big-picture goals guide your behaviour over and over again. © Can Stock Photo / alphaspirit Next, power requires skill: people who have developed a skill ...