Have you ever given a presentation and when it was over you said to yourself . . .  “I should have been better prepared.”? Have you vowed in that moment of stress, frustration and with the sense of lost opportunity that “I’ll be better prepared next time.”? Then, as the next presentation came up like

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It doesn’t matter where I go, or what I do, whether coaching, consulting, or training, the topic of communication always plays a part.  It makes sense – we are all dealing with other people and communication is not only critical, but unavoidable. So when I came across this quotation from George Bernard Shaw, I thought it would be worth

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During last night’s Republican National Convention, New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, gave the keynote address.  During his speech, he made a point worthy of our consideration as leaders. Relatively early in the speech, Governor Christie said: The greatest lesson Mom ever taught me, though, was this one: she told me there would be times in your life

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Engagement is a very trendy word, and while it is so powerful, because of its (over)use, people are making it harder to understand and think about than is necessary.  In fact, it is writers, speakers and consultants (yep, people like me) who are adding to the confusion by injecting complexity where it isn’t needed. So

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Yesterday I was facilitating  a working session for a leadership team at the Red Rock Casino and Resort outside of Las Vegas. I took the picture from the balcony outside of our meeting room at lunch.  As is often the case, the photo doesn’t do justice to reality, yet I hope you can see that

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Workshops and lectures about decision making center around tools, data and processes. The thinking goes that to make the best decisions, the best data must be available and properly used.  And since we often have lots of data, we need tools for parsing, analyzing, understanding and displaying that data. These tools and approaches are important

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Decisions are all around us. Right now you are making a decision whether to keep reading this or not, but the decisions we need to make as leaders go far beyond that, don’t they? It wouldn’t be hard to argue that being decisive, and doing it in an effective way, is one of the most

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Practice is an idea that gets mixed reviews in most of our heads . . .  we know it is important, yet sometimes we’d rather get on with the real thing.  Today, I share a quotation that I read from my favorite martial arts expert, Dwight Woods, in his morning email  (here is a link

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If you are a parent, you are familiar with this thoughts and feelings . . . Who is my child hanging out with?  Do I know the parents of those kids? What kinds of influences are they subject to? These are natural considerations of a loving parent.  After all, we know that children are influenced

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“I made a mistake.” “I was wrong.” “I’m sorry.” “I’m not sure.” “I don’t know.” “Would you help me?” “Could you help me understand? I’m not sure I get it.” “What do you think?” “What do you suggest?” “What would you do?” No one likes to show their ignorance, or admit they are wrong.  When

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