Question: How do you know if you can push your people further? Answer: They will tell you, if you know how to listen. Recently I was messaging with a Clear and Open member, let’s call him Andy. It went like this. This is a good example of the power of asking questions. Josef: “Relook at…
I grew up in the historic town of Concord, Massachusetts, a couple miles from Thoreau’s Walden pond, the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War, and a dozen other things that would probably bore you as much as they did me as a kid. In third grade, my class took an intrepid field…
“I’m working on the mustard on my chin. It used to be way worse.” I helped a CEO (let’s call her Jane) of a financial services company identify her over-responsible tendencies and how she caused herself overwhelm. She was spread incredibly thin and wasn’t making time for what was most important. I discovered she had…
I’m not joking when I say what I’m most proud of is not killing myself. I lost everything in my life that mattered to me over the course of about 18 months. Just one piece of that was the 1,500 square foot home I owned in Oregon. Following some bad advice, I sold it at…
There are scores of strategies to manage yourself, and I want to talk about the one most often forgotten: self-love. Anyone who has raised children knows that love doesn’t mean giving a person whatever they want. Self-love is no exception. One of the reasons I don’t like the term self-discipline is because it connotes forcing…
The second time I got fired, it was for corporate espionage. I’ve never told anyone this. In my mid-twenties, a few years before I became a coach, I recruited for high-tech companies in the Bay Area. I mostly hated it. It’s not uncommon practice in that world to “poach” employees from one company and move…
Last week in Part One, I discussed how I realized in the middle of having drinks with a friend that the lack of engagement I’ve been frustrated with in working with some of my clients pretty much exactly mirrors the disengagement levels shown in Gallup’s ongoing study. I’ve been coaching for seventeen years, and I’m…
When I re-launched my practice in 2016 as Clear and Open, it was in part to focus on engagement. I saw that all business problems come down to this. It’s the deepest root issue that my clients struggle with, and it’s what I’m most passionate about. Since then I’ve noticed I do a lot of…
“In an ideal world, there’d be no mustard on my chin. I agree with you, but we have to deal with the practical realities of the real world.” A client I’d worked with for years was moving a lot of meetings. That’s often a red flag. She was busy, but she was always busy. Something…
I recently asked a group of my members to define in two sentences what they got out of our work together last year and declare what they want to get out of 2019. Here was one participant’s response: Member: “In 2018, the group taught me how to notice and question behaviors I’d like to change…