Mantras to Try If You’re Feeling Overwhelmed

Rachel Ament suggests positive affirmations and traditional Sanskrit mantras for anxiety as a daily practice: Mantras—repeated phrases meant to steady your mind—allow you to steer your thoughts toward a single, focused point. If your mind tends to hover in the past or future (a common thread in anxious thoughts and stress-fueled overthinking,) using mantras for […]

The Right Way to Respond to Failure

Leadership coach Peter Bregman writes in Harvard Business Review, All of us except Mimi missed what Dana needed. We tried to make her feel better by helping her see the advantage of failure, putting the defeat in context, teaching her to draw a lesson from it, and motivating her to work harder and get better […]

Let Them Be

American psychologist Carl Rogers writes in A Way of Being (1980,) People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, “Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.” I don’t try to control a sunset, I just watch with […]

Truly Seeing The World As It Is

In The Prepared Mind of a Leader (2005,) Bill Welter and Jean Egmon write about the difficulty on truly seeing the world as it is: Paradigms are wonderful shortcuts as we think about the world, but they are deadly if they are not attuned with reality. All of us are bombarded with increasing waves of […]

Managers: Less of You is Probably Enough

Leadership coach Art Petty on micromanagement: As managers and leaders, we often fall victim to the belief that our teams need us to survive and thrive. In reality, if we’ve done our jobs right in selecting, developing, and placing people in the right positions, and worked hard to create a healthy environment, what they need […]

Quirky Minor Accidents, Major Consequences: Double-Helix Structure of DNA

The Guardian’s obituary of biophysicist Maurice Wilkins (the Nobel prizewinner (with Francis Crick and James Watson,) for his x-ray images to reveal the double-helix structure of DNA) notes, The history of science is full of quirky minor accidents with major consequences. In 1951, Wilkins’s boss, Professor Randall, was invited to a conference on macromolecules in […]

Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean in’: What’s Beyond work and motherhood

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In(2013) initiated a counter-dispute focusing on women who choose to withdraw from the professional world altogether. Writer Lisa Belkin says at The Huffington Post, Looking back over 10 years and a lot of reporting, I have come to see my mistake when writing “The Opt-Out Revolution.” I confused being pulled toward home […]

Born on Friday the 13th

Famous people born on Friday the 13th: Don Adams Samuel Beckett Steve Buscemi Fidel Castro Julia Louis-Dreyfus Thomas Jefferson Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen Georges Simenon The fear of this date is called paraskavedekatriaphobia.

“Innovation Theater” versus Actual Innovation

Why companies do “innovation theater” instead of actual innovation: People who manage processes are not the same people as those who create product. Product people are often messy, hate paperwork, and prefer to spend their time creating stuff rather than documenting it. Over time as organizations grow, they become risk averse. The process people dominate […]

Learning to Be Kind

Buddhist author Jack Kornfield writes in Meditation for Beginners (1998,) As he was dying, someone asked Aldous Huxley if he would say what he had learned in all of his work with many spiritual teachers and gurus on his own spiritual journey. Huxley’s answer was, “It is embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems […]