Category: Uncategorized
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Running Toward the Burning Building
You are the one people bring their problems to. Someone walks in stuck, and before they have even finished the sentence, you can see the way out. You feel that familiar pull. Jump in. Fix it. Be the one who makes it better. That pull has a name. Save-the-day energy. It is the instinct to…
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The Same Stories Show Up Everywhere
After nearly two decades of working with high-achieving people from all walks of life, I’ve learned that the same stories show up everywhere. The perfectionism that delays a project also slows progress on a passion. The fear of judgment that keeps someone quiet in meetings also keeps them from expressing their creativity. The inner voice…
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The Reason You’re Still Solving Everyone’s Problems
I work with leaders every day who are frustrated because they keep asking or telling members of their team to do the same things over and over, and they’re not seeing any substantive change. They’re exhausted from being the ones who have to solve everyone’s problems all the time, only to have the same people…
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Is This Person Coachable Right Now?
“This person is amazing, BUT…” I call this the big “BUT.” It comes up so often in conversations with leaders that I could finish the sentence for them. The BUT is a list of behaviors they want changed in someone on their team. The ones I hear most often: micromanaging, talking over people in meetings,…
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The Conversation You’re Having With Yourself
I wrote Make Them Think to help people show up better in the conversations they have with others. What I didn’t anticipate was how many readers would tell me it changed the conversation they’re having with themselves. In her Amazon review, a reader named Erin wrote: “I picked up Make Them Think to become a…
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The Patience Game
I wrote Make Them Think for leaders of all kinds whose job, by trade or by nature, is to help people learn, grow and change their lives for the better. What a lot of people don’t know about the book is that it was born out of a corporate training I used to give for…
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The Hardest Leadership Habit to Break (Because It’s What Got You Here)
You got where you are because you did all the things and had all the answers. Then you became a leader. And your job became empowering other people to do all the things and find all the answers. Nobody tells you that transition is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. You’re sitting with…
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The Conversation Move that Gets People Unstuck Fast
A client once stopped me mid-session and asked: “What are you doing?” He’d noticed a pattern. Every time he brought me a problem, I wasn’t asking him to explain it further. I was asking him something else entirely. I told him: “Every time you talk in problem terms, I ask about the solution.” He looked…
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The 90/10 Rule: What great coaching actually sounds like
A few weeks ago I received this review from Rachel M., a Lead Counsel who read Make Them Think: “I’ve always been most impressed by leaders who ask thoughtful, well-timed questions that seem to change the direction of a project. This book helped me understand why those questions work and how to start using them…
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The Most Natural Question in the World (And Why it’s the Wrong One)
A reader named Layne, a CMO with 20+ years in startup tech, wrote something in her review that I keep coming back to: “I thought good coaching meant having better answers. This book showed me it means asking better questions.” That one sentence is the whole paradigm shift. Most of us were trained, implicitly or…
