Chip Conley’s new book, Emotional Equations, is an interesting look at how you make the case for EQ being a quantifiable predictor of personal happiness and business success rather than just a loose, “touchy feeley” concept that might or might not help you. Mostly what I love about it so far (I’m not done reading yet) is that he delves into the nuances of specific emotions in such a way that I now question whether I ever had a very good handle on the self-awareness piece of EQ. I’ve always thought I struggled with self-regulation but was pretty solid when it came to accurately labeling my emotions and being aware of having them. Now I think I just didn’t have a very in-depth emotional vocabulary. This week I’m thinking about one equation in particular: Happiness = Wanting What You Have\Having What You Want Or another way of putting it: Happiness…
Damn, I thought I was pretty good on rollerblades. Evidently that was a naïve opinion derived from rollerblading the smooth bike paths of Washington DC. The potholed, uneven…
Crack! I was on the ground, startled and confused. I sat up and peered fuzzily up at four concerned male faces. My biking buddies were already off their…
I heard a great story one day while teaching Emotional Intelligence (EQ). A young man in my class said he had recently had a terrible all-day fight with…
I’ve written often about how we need to stop talking smack about Generation Y, and how important it is for complaining Baby Boomers to recognize the contributions the…
As a “retired” recreational adventure racer, I could not resist when I heard that my friends Steve and Murph were coming from Colorado to do the Death Race…
So much gets written about the overload of an average person’s life—information overload, email overload, “to-do” list overload. And most time management experts seem to have the same…
As a trainer and facilitator, one of my recurring themes is the importance of questioning one’s assumptions. I teach people to understand how Chris Argyris’ ladder of inference…
What is employee engagement, really? Zappos, an online shoe retailer best known for outstanding customer service, has a simple and intuitive definition: employee engagement is “employee happiness.” And…
For New England Crane School, Tango Training’s sister company, the season is now winding down. Crane operators don’t want to go to classes during the busy construction season…
I’m in the middle of reading Micah Solomon’s and Leonardo Inghilleri’s book Exceptional Service Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization. For a…
In a team building session I have almost always focused on improving communication skills, no matter what type of team building session it is or what the identified…
A couple weeks ago I attended a reunion for a hotel company I used to work for, 12 years ago. It was kind of like a high school…
Peter Bregman, one of my favorite bloggers, had an interesting post on Harvard Business Review recently called Diversity Training Doesn’t Work. He cites dismal statistics on the ineffectiveness…
When I came home last Friday night I made the mistake of leaving my suitcase half packed and open on the floor, because I was leaving again on…
I worked with a group of individuals recently who were about to be reorganized into a new team structure. We were doing a team building class; not a…
Living in New Hampshire in a primary year is not an easy thing. I don’t have a traditional landline myself, but my mother, whom I live with, does. …
My family doesn’t do Christmas (or Hanukkah, or anything remotely similar). We dropped it about 20 years ago, when some of us began complaining about crowded shopping malls…
Many people have already reviewed this great book, but for reasons different than my own. The focus is usually on Don Mann’s experience in Seal Team Six,…
Yesterday I went for my usual afternoon hike with my dog in an unfamiliar area of the Green Mountain National Forest. I wanted to hike all the way…