A leader who is confused or confusing causes too much anxiety, and a leader who is too controlling is revealing more insecurity and a lack of leadership.
Mark Goulston
Being alone with fear can rapidly turn into panic. Being alone with frustration can rapidly turn into anger. Being alone with disappointment can rapid turn into discouragement and, even worse, despair.
Few things detract more from your credibility and the respect of your colleagues and peers than being called on the carpet to deflect accusations and defend an untruth.
Do what you say you're going to do. Follow through means never having to say you're sorry.
Show people a positive path that enables them to make progress on their own terms. Give them options and alternatives that empower them.
Speak the truth. People will forgive an honest mistake; they won't forgive you if you lie.
When you ask someone a question, you trigger an unconscious flashback of their having been put on the spot earlier in life by a teacher, parent, or coach, and you create a syntactical 'you versus me' disconnect.
Know what's important and what isn't. Have the wisdom to know the right thing to do, the integrity to do it, the character to stand up to those who don't, and the courage to stop those who won't.
Leadership is more about clarity than it is about control.
If you look for things your partner does wrong, you can always find something. If you look for what he or she does right, you can always find something, too. It all depends on what you want to look for. Happy couples accentuate the positive.
There is something calming and emotionally restoring when you focus on gratitude for a known deed that helped you, instead of fear of the unknown.
I can still remember my first experience of standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and looking into it. It was so awesome, it took a fair amount of restraint to prevent me from jumping into it, because I was certain I could fly.
The crux is this: you can't be sincerely empathic towards and angry at someone at the same moment. In other words, you can't walk in someone else's shoes and step on their toes at the same time.
Denial is not always a bad thing. Without it, you couldn't function. For instance, if you were hyperaware and hypervigilant regarding all the dangers in the world - from driving your car to crossing the street to eating food that might have contaminants in it to taking medications that have many side effects, etc. - you would become frozen.
Be it terrorists or 'blinded by greed' capitalists or 'deaf and dumb and siloed' officials, special interests will always tyrannize the common good.
President Reagan preached 'trickle down economics' but naively did not reckon on the fact that the wealthy would only care about getting more for themselves instead of caring about helping those with less.
I am blessed to count among my friends and colleagues people who are very thoughtful and who deeply care about our country.
Connecting is always better than disconnecting.
Given the choice between instant gratification and the lasting satisfaction of earning the esteem of someone you respect and admire, all but the most small-minded would choose the latter.
Over time, many CEOs realize that being able to quickly and effectively confront conflict in their company is a leadership opportunity because people's respect often rises and falls on whether their leader deals with conflict head on or avoids dealing with it.
I have heard it said that the measure of a civilization is how it treats those who have hurt it. I think a further measure is how it treats those who deeply disappoint it.
Feeling alone makes negative feelings worse. When you feel alone, frustration quickly can become anger, fear quickly can become panic.
One reason some people are long-winded is because they're trying to impress their conversational counterpart with how smart they are, often because they don't actually feel that way underneath. If this is the case for you, realize that continuing to talk will only cause the other person to be less impressed.
Braggarts are insecure and need attention, and bragging often has the opposite effect on most people when you're trying to gain their respect and increase your influence.
When you know you haven't been connecting with, persuading, or getting through to someone, consciously pause before meeting them and say to yourself, 'During this conversation, I am committing to being present and to connecting.'
Self-esteem should not be confused with self-confidence. Self-confidence is believing in your competence and your ability to do something, whereas self-esteem is believing in your goodness.
When men act up by being degrading, dismissive, condescending, shut off, or sullen, that can often dumbfound you as a woman and get you off balance. At that point, you can feel and look like a deer in the headlights, which makes you even more vulnerable to such a man's next volley of vitriol.
When winning is everything and everyone does whatever they need to win and to not lose, including lying, you have a world in which 'basic trust' is lost.
One of the best ways to see how critical being present is to effective leadership is to notice what being absent, distracted, hiding something, and/or agenda-driven does to people's ability to trust, respect, and have confidence in you.
Without the ambition to raise oneself to life's challenges, growth and innovation would never happen.
You may have heard the saying, 'When you're in love, smoke gets in your eyes.' Well when you're talking, smoke gets in your eyes and ears. Once you're on a roll, it's very easy to not notice that you've worn out your welcome.
Gen X entrepreneurs are frequently smart, tough, tenacious, and self-made. That said, to succeed in their companies, they often have sacrificed being emotionally involved in their marriages and with their children.
Every business needs to get out of their own mindset and into the aspirational mindsets of their customers and clients and create services and products that are beyond their customers' imagination but will be what they 'gotta have' in the future.
When as smart as you think you are is as wrong as you turn out to be, your life can fall out from under you.
Just like the athlete who has mapped out a plan to become one of the best athletes in the world by putting together a training program and executing it, he too should map out a financial plan from the beginning of his athletic career throughout every stage of his career.
One of the most important keys to getting through to anyone and then influencing them is to realize that inside everyone's mind, they listen to someone or something.
Self-esteem is crucial to how much or how little contentment you feel at the end of your life.
One of the most important aspects of an athlete's financial life is that he needs to be personally responsible for his own finances.
Despair - or as I like to call it, des-pair - means feeling unpaired in a world in which it feels like everyone else is paired with a good job, a happy marriage, loving family, caring, and hope - and you're not.
Be comfortable in your own skin. Comfort and discomfort are contagious.
When someone is complimenting you, they are sharing how your actions or behaviors impacted them. They are not asking if you agree.
In my life, I think I have had more than two hundred significant breakthroughs that exponentially accelerated my life forward. However, each and every one of them was preceded by a breakdown that was not pretty, was often scary, and often felt like something I would not get past.
In the first 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your listener is liking you as long as your statement is relevant to the conversation and, hopefully, in service of the other person. But unless you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for more than roughly half a minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too chatty.
If you're fortunate, you'll meet people over the course of your career who exceed your expectations in every way. When you work or spend time with them, you find yourself wanting to be a better person.
If there was one key to happiness in love and life and possibly even success, it would be to go into each conversation you have with this commandment to yourself front and foremost in your mind, 'Just Listen' and be more interested than interesting, more fascinated than fascinating, and more adoring than adorable.
Presence is in the eye and ear and gut of the beholder. When you are totally present in a conversation or in a meeting, others around you perceive you as totally focused on the matter at hand and on being of value to them.
As a general rule, when your child, or anyone in the work force, doesn't know what he/she wants to do, they should instead always be developing skills and competencies that will qualify them for the jobs that companies are most looking to fill and increase their hireability.
It really takes something for someone to get up the nerve to share the impact you have had on them, and to them, giving you that recognition is liking giving a gift.
One word that seems to connect both leaders and employees is: 'outcomes.' Built into that word is the implicit and explicit understanding and agreement that effective actions lead to good outcomes; ineffective actions lead to poor outcomes.
Something I had learned from 30 years as a psychotherapist turned Fortune 500 executive coach when helping people to calm down is that it is much less important what you tell others than what you enable them to tell you and, in the process, tell themselves that results in them calming themselves down.
