Here’s a bit of insight you can see in action every day. Do you ever feel the need to yawn, when somebody else yawns? Do you ever know exactly what somebody is going to say next? How about the situation where the the word is on the tip of your tongue, but neither of you can remember what it is, yet you both know exactly what you mean?

One of my mentors gave me a simple, but effective lens for analyzing effectiveness.  It’s motivation and technique. Motivation is whether you want to do something.  Technique is your method.  When you’re not achieving the results you want, you can ask whether it’s a motivation issue or a problem with the technique.  By knowing the issue, you can improve your results.
Here are examples of two ineffective scenarios:

You have lots of motivation, but the wrong technique.
You have the right technique, but lack motivation.

If you have motivation, but no technique, you end …

I’m a fan of lenses to help me get a better perspective or vantage point. If you’re looking for a job or thinking about your career, you can use Holland’s theory of career choice to help you find a better fit. John L. Holland identified 6 personality and work environment types. According to Holland, if you can match your personality type and your work environment, you can improve your success and satisfaction.

The best time management quotes at your fingertips. This collection of time management quotes includes wisdom from Emerson, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Thoreau, and more.

When your spider sense tingles, how do you know whether to trust it? Intuition is a wonderful thing and it can serve you well. It can also fail you. The key is to know when it helps you, and when it works against you. It’s taken me a while to connect some dots but now I have a much better sense of when my intuition is on, and when it is off. It comes down to whether I have relevant experience or patterns to draw from.

Here are 3 simple thinking techniques I tend to use each day. There are some more advanced thinking techniques, but here I’m boiling down to a set of 3 you can use today. In fact, you can even use them while you read this post.

A friend sent me an article about what gets us out of bed each day. It’s “Seeking.” According to Jaak Panksepp, “Seeking” is the granddaddy of our emotional systems. It goes beyond fulfilling our physical needs. We end up in a crazed state of foraging, curiosity and expectancy. The rewards we seek don’t have to actually solve our needs and they don’t need to be physical. Just exploring ideas or coming up with new “ah has” is enough to keep us going.

How long does it take to change a habit? You’ve probably heard ranges anywhere from 2 weeks or 21 days, up to 30 days or more. In my experience, it depends.

In this post, I summarize the key thing that changing a habit depends on. Once you know the keys to changing a habit, you can more effectively analyze your own habit changing attempts. Here are 10 keys that influence your ability to change an old habit or form a new one:

“3 take aways” is one of my favorite ways to chop information down to size.  I also use it to make the most of a meeting or training session.  All I do, is ask myself, "what are 3 take aways?"   Does it sound simple?  That’s the idea.  It helps you avoid becoming overwhelmed.  It also forces you to focus and prioritize.  It’s a great way to turn insight into action.
For example, from my Crucial Conversations training, my 3 take aways were:

1) Master my stories.
2) Learn to look. …

Knowing the source of conflict is one of the first steps to dealing with it effectively. It’s easy to blame communication as the source of conflict, but it’s not always the case. In fact, it usually isn’t. For example, communication is the source of conflict when styles get in the way, or there are misunderstandings about intent.

This post is an experiment on multiple levels. First, I’m testing how well I can get feedback on content for my book, by sharing content on my blog. Second, I’m testing how well I can share a techniques that’s easy for me to do live, but tough to write down. This is the same exercise I go through with my mentees at Microsoft to have more energy, have more fun, and get more done. It’s about spending more time in your strengths, and less time in your weaknesses.

I like learning the language around a given topic to build precision and depth. When you have a language for something, it helps you think, organize, and share knowledge more effectively. The same is true for strengths. Your strengths are among your greatest assets. Simply put, they help you give your best where you have your best to give. To find, study, and explore your strengths, you should know the language of strengths.

As I’ve been studying strengths and helping people find their super powers, I’ve realized that some of the strengths literature is very specific in describing strengths versus talents. What’s the difference between a strength and a talent? Simply put, a talent is your natural pattern for thinking, feeling or doing. It represents your potential. A strength, on the other hand, represents an ability that you’ve developed into a consistent, near-perfect performance.

During my Influencer training, one of the key concepts we drilled into was “clarify meaningful results.” What are meaningful results? Well, before you waste time on the “how”, clarify the “what” you want, the “why” you want it, and the “when” you want it.

I’ve noticed some conversations just go a lot easier with some people, but I wasn’t sure why. Recently, a colleague pointed me to an article, Dialogue: The Power of Understanding by Dr. Ann McGee-Cooper. The article has a nice way of framing types of conversations. Some conversations are about exploring ideas, while others are about a winning argument or a winning idea. Once you know the nature of the conversation, you can adapt the conversations, adjust yourself, or avoid it altogether.