Business Team Success Coaching

Thursday Thoughts on Thriving: Are Your Eyes Aligned with Thriving? 2

Do you understand the messages you are sending with your eyes and how they impact your thriving? You may undermine your influence by focusing more on your electronic device or by looking down when you are forming your answer. If you hold direct eye contact you will come across as confident in your position (or whatever you are discussing), while if you pause and shift your gaze downward you will communicate weakness or disinterest. Also, if you continually focus […]

Thursday Thoughts on Thriving: How to Trade Words for More Thriving 2

One of the areas that I talk about in my coaching and negotiations workshops is the power of language and how switching a few words in your communications or thoughts can have a big impact on thriving. Here are some of my favorites: Instead of saying, “I don’t care” say, “I am not attached (to that opinion, that idea, etc…)” Shift your thinking from, “I have to….” to “I get to….” Rather than say, “You should do….” say, “What […]

Thursday Thoughts on Thriving: Oops! How Do I Recover & Thrive After That?

You know when it happens, you get that icky sinking feeling. Or for a really big one, you feel the slime of shame moving over you. The dreaded mistake, embarrassing oversight or error in judgement. It is bad enough in the moment, even worse is that it can come back again and again just by thinking about it, weeks, months or even years later! Yikes! How do you thrive through such horrible mistakes? Here are some tips. Shift to […]

Thursday Thoughts on Thriving: Simplicity 4

I was reminded this week of a term we used in my prior corporate days: “KISS-Keep It Simple Stupid!” “It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” – Bruce Lee In my Coach training I went through a process of looking at all the things during my day (both personal and work time) that I “tolerated.” The challenge was to come up with 100 of these things that did not add to my […]

Thursday Thoughts on Thriving: Negotiating with Escaping Elephants

In my prior “Hearts and Minds” post I explained the importance of understanding the emotional motivations for change along with the logical. In John Haidt’s book,” The Happiness Hypothesis” and he uses the great metaphor of an elephant for our emotional mind and the rider as the logical mind. Chip and Dan Heath  borrowed this metaphor from Haidt (with his permission) for their great book, “Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard.” I am referring to these resources […]

Thursday Thoughts on Thriving: Epiphanies & Shifting Habits

In his book, “The Happiness Hypothesis” Jonatahan Haidt explains the challenge with an epiphany that shifts your outlook or even changes your life. After the light bulb goes off, you are often right back in your prior habits three months later. In order to make lasting change you need to retrain your emotional mind and this takes prolonged practice over time to make the shift. This is also the challenge with news years resolutions or a short term diet; […]

Thursday Thoughts On Thriving: Hearts & Minds 2

Our culture is full of “mind over matter” messages that lead you to believe that you can think and rationalize and use brute force or will power to make things happen. Contrary to this belief, there is a lot of interesting research supporting that you need the emotional side of your motivation even more than the logical side and that your level of willpower or energy is limited. So if you do use sheer will power then you can only […]

Thursday Thoughts On Thriving: Habits of Excellence

“Excellence is not an act, its a habit.” – Aristotle The summer Olympic games are in full swing and it is inspiring to see the athletes give their best.  It makes me think about the day after day discipline and training they put in to qualify for these elite games. They have the same amount of time in a day as the rest of us and they have made choices in their daily habits that have resulted in a […]

Thursday Thoughts on Thriving: Play 2

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” – Plato In the Team Advantage coaching process that I use with teams and have seen transform teams in just the short 2-day kick off meeting (that is only the start), we set it up for play from the moment they walk in the room. There are brightly colored toys on the tables, fun music is playing, and there are only […]

Thursday Thoughts on Thriving: Ideas From Kindergarten

We can learn a lot from Kindergartners, I found this out a when I facilitated a fun team building game called “The Marshmallow Challenge.” (TED talk linked about this game) Teams of recent Kindergartner graduates are some of the best performers, they are only second to teams of Engineers/Architects when it comes to building the highest free-standing towers made out of 20 sticks of dry spaghetti, 1 yard of string, 1 yard of tape, and a jumbo marshmallow that must […]