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Building Trust: Get Personal, Let Go of Assumptions, Be Curious, Listen, Follow-Through

How often have you walked a meeting with a set of planned outcomes, got into the meat of the discussion and received negativity and defensiveness in return? What’s going on?

Tell Me About Yourself: 3 Ways to Impress Interviewers and Anyone You Meet

Tell me about yourself.  At cocktail parties, an interview, or when meeting a new colleague for the first time, that question or one like it is the most common opening lines to a conversation.  How do most people answer it?  How would you answer it? Did talking about your current job and career path come to […]

It’s About Choice, Not Balance: Three Ways To Have More

I left my corporate job seeking something more. Something more exciting, more challenging, more me, more balanced. I thought that if I didn’t have to go into an office everyday, I would find myself with that highly desired work/life balance and would spend more time with my family and less time on work. That’s what […]

Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Heart

What do you want? No, don’t keep reading yet.  Really, I mean it. I want you to take some time to answer the question.  You can think about it from a personal perspective or a professional one.  Go ahead.  Think. I’m guessing that whether you chose to consider your personal or professional desires, a super clear answer […]

Executive Presence and I’m 4’8″ (and a half)

People say I have presence.  That I fill a room.  Funny because I’m 3.5″ shy of 5 feet.  Yes, there’s a “four” before the “feet” in my height.  When someone gets up the nerve to ask me how tall I am, they are almost always surprised at my answer.  “Really?  No way!  I never would have […]

Listening is Hard And Oh So Important

“Blah, blah, blah” goes on in the background while I sit and think about exactly what it is I want to say. Except that the person talking isn’t at the front of a large room or lecture hall, and it’s not a person running a conference call with 30 people. The person talking is sitting […]

Put on Your Oxygen Mask First

How many times have we heard the spiel at the beginning of any domestic US flight? You probably ignore it at this point as most do. The airlines know that you aren’t listening, so they have gotten really creative about their messaging with videos of dancing flight attendants and singing pilots. It does make the […]

360 Feedback: What goes around…

I worked at a company, two actually, where 360 degree feedback was a significant part of the performance management process. Twice a year it was up to my manager to parse through the feedback, think through his/her own perspective and write up my review. That 360 feedback featured prominently in my raise, my bonus, what […]

Networking: Make the Ask

  I walked into my last networking breakfast muttering under my breath, “I really don’t want to be here. Why did I say yes to this thing?” I’m fairly comfortable around people and people think of me as extroverted, but being extremely petite, I find walking into a room of (taller) strangers, quite uncomfortable. I […]

Be Your Intentional Self, Everyday

Authentic Self is a common theme these days. There are a stream of books you can read to help you discover who you are. I believe in it. You can only be the person that you are and it’s really hard to try to be someone else. That being said, how you show up every […]