July 19, 2019

Reflections on the "Busy" Trap

The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts. BERTRAND RUSSELL, Conquest of Happiness Way…back in 2012 Tim Kreiders’ New York Times article, The Busy Trap,  generated a lot […]
July 8, 2019

What Do You REALLY Want? 9 Steps to Achieving Better Outcomes

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where -” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat Working with clients we often find the question – what do you really […]
May 20, 2019

The Power of Beliefs at Work

“The voice in the head tells a story that the body believes in and reacts to. Those reactions are the emotions. The emotions, in turn, feed the energy back to the thoughts that created the emotion in the first place. This is the vicious circle between unexamined thoughts and emotions, giving rise to emotional thinking and emotional story-making.”     Eckhart […]
October 10, 2018

Mindful Work – AM to PM

This article was inspired by the work of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn’s book, Work: How to Find Joy and Meaning Each Hour of the Day.  For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Thich Nhat Hanh (affectionately known as Thay) the Zen master, poet, peace and human rights activist was exiled from his homeland of Vietnam in 1966. […]
October 7, 2018

Why is Conflict So Hard? How to Manage it More Productively

Despite the worn-out demands that the workplace is no place for “”personal feelings,” people bring all of their unresolved emotional baggage to work – and there is little we can do about that. Outmoded collective beliefs that endure like – work life and personal life should be separate – speak to a lack of knowledge about the new science  of emotions […]
January 13, 2018

The Language We Use in the Workplace

         What role does the language we use to describe our work play in our emotional life and behavior?  Words are not experience, but words shape experience.  The language we use is a reflection of our dominant thinking patterns, as individuals and as a culture.  Language frames our structure for experience. How much of the language we […]
December 12, 2017

Communicating Intentionally ~ the Basics

  Photo by Ali Kazal on Unsplash The Intentional Workplace blog began with this post. What could be more basic than to understand the nature of communication? But more important, how we communicate and why. The message was simple but seems to grow more important every day  – everything comes down to how we communicate.  All the things that we want and need start […]
December 6, 2017

Resolving Conflict: Going Beyond "Who Started It?"

“When patterns are broken new worlds emerge” Tuli Kuperberg What does a “who dunnit” in a work team have to do with a global conflict, or for that matter, any conflict? Looking at any major conflict one easily sees that they are usually convoluted, long-standing and seemingly intractable. Too often, most attempts at dealing with conflict boil down to these “strategies” […]
January 21, 2017

You are Hard-Wired for Altruism

Through the tragic events and natural disasters of the past decades we’ve seen  extraordinary outpourings of help and compassion for neighbors – and most important, strangers. Tragic events seem to galvanize our empathy and evoke great acts of kindness in response. In the past decade we have also been the beneficiaries of valuable findings from research to better understand the motives […]