Knowing your self-talk lets you change how you perceive and influence your world more than almost anything. That knowledge helps you understand and influence how your team members, peers, bosses, and so on perceive their worlds. It’s a powerful lever. Your beliefs affect how you perceive your world. Everything you observe gets filtered through your beliefs. If you think Bob is a jerk, you will filter everything you see about[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I posted a short passage of self-talk you might have come up with yourself doing the self-talk exercises I recommend as two of the best exercises I know to raise your self-awareness (exercise 1: write your self-talk; exercise 2: voice your self-talk). Let’s do another, this time in the context of walking into a crowded room in a social situation. First, have you noticed what people do when they[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written before about the value of raising awareness of your self-talk and two exercises to raise it. The first is to write out your self-talk. The second, and harder, is to voice it. I still consider the first — writing your self-talk a few times a day every day for a week — one of the best, if not the best, self-awareness raising exercises I know of. I start[…] Keep reading →

I had a leadership class at Columbia with a famous professor. He wrote a bestselling book after working as a high-level executive at one of the world’s most valuable companies. His class at Columbia was among the school’s most popular ones. People knew he taught well and cared about his students but he could be intimidating. You knew to do the work and never slack. Once I spoke to him[…] Keep reading →

When I met Jose Gaztelu, my business school classmate and friend who did the bulk of the organizing for this weekend’s INSEAD leadership seminar in Singapore, at the hotel Friday, he asked how many people I thought were signed up. When my flight had taken off that morning from Shanghai it was ten or twelve so I guessed about a dozen. “Thirty-two” So the attendees filled the room — a[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on Coaching Highlights from coaching Columbia Business School students. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] I’ve been posting a lot on personal development, so I’m going to focus on specific leadership and leadership development issues for several posts. I’ve had the privilege[…] Keep reading →

I ask people about their passions a lot. Many tell me they have no passions, which makes me sad for them. I don’t think passions are something you find lying around but something you create and build from small interests through self-awareness, effort, and dedication. It means they haven’t created something they could have. They either never invested enough to find out what it took to create a passion or,[…] Keep reading →