Being honest about what we’re thinking

One of the toughest parts of coming to grips with how we communicate is being really honest with ourselves about our default intentions. Default intention is that immediate, reflexive reaction that occurs in response to a stimulus. It’s a short-term, unproductive comment or response that doesn’t further relationships or results.  I’ll give you an example. ... Continue Reading

Having a productive conversation isn’t all on you

A recent topic with several of my clients is: “This is all great stuff about deliberate intention, but what happens when I do all this work to show up positively and the person I’m talking to is their regular old default intention self?” Obviously, you can only work on yourself. And when you prepare and ... Continue Reading

“Right?”

In the past couple of years, I noticed two things, almost simultaneously. It bugs me when people say “right?” at the end of their sentence, as if they are assuming I agree with them without actually asking me if I do. I use “right?” in exactly this way. It’s a verbal tic I picked up ... Continue Reading

How we make ourselves do things we don’t want to do

One of my favorite nonfiction books is Daniel Pink’s “Drive.” In it, he discusses what research tells us about the best ways to truly motivate people. Spoiler: extrinsic incentives like money and benefits are less powerful than intrinsic ones, like purpose, mastery, and autonomy. I’m bringing this up because a good friend said to me ... Continue Reading

When fear gets in the way, think about other people

I can’t help with fear of death, or apocalypse, or zombies. But the fear many of us experience when we have a high-stakes presentation or meeting coming up? I have a suggestion. Most of us can describe an interpersonal situation we don’t want to be in. The three situations we hear about most often from ... Continue Reading

The urge to prove that you were right all along…

The impulse to prove our rightness always backfires. If your intention is “to show I was right,” what will the outcome be? How will the person you’ve “proven” this to feel as a result? Are they likely to say, “Oh, gosh, yes, I am amazed by your rightness and will never make the mistake of ... Continue Reading

Other people’s names

As someone with a tricky last name, I’ve had a lot of experience with choosing when and how to correct mispronunciations. However, as a middle-class white person in the United States, I’ve never worried that someone saying my last name wrong meant that they were glossing over or ignoring my culture.  The people in this ... Continue Reading

Everything is a habit, and what to do about it

The way we communicate is a collection of habits.  We’ve constructed these habits over the course of our lifetimes, so, like other habits, they start to feel like they’re the only way that thing can be done. We don’t think at all about the pace of our speech, or whether we use long or short ... Continue Reading

A message in a bottle

A client recently said this: “I just have to make sure I don’t take on anything else.” The way she phrased this clued me in to the fact that maybe, just maybe, she has a history of overcommitting. I asked if she had a tendency to take on a lot of projects, and she said ... Continue Reading

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to hybrid workplaces we go

Another timely link! More and more companies are heading into the brave new world of the hybrid workplace, with some people in person and some remote, not necessarily all at the same time. This article explores some of the challenges that are going to face us in the hybrid world, and how we cant make ... Continue Reading