Tag: self-evaluation

Photo by aitoff, CC0

Seven Essential Qualities of Leadership

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.” —Laurel Thatcher Ulrich In 1982, my dear friend Dr. Mark Edwards introduced a fair, impartial and objective tool to measure leadership effectiveness. He called it 360 feedback, which is now ubiquitous in organizations throughout the world. The idea is to give leaders the gift of multi-source feedback on critical leadership competencies so that they can understand more clearly how they are perceived by direct reports, peers, and more senior executives. Read More

Title: Balance | Author: Sarah Horrigan | Source: Own work | License: CC BY-NC 2.0

Possibilists and Pragmatists

For me, dreaming is simply being pragmatic. —Shimon Peres There are probably a lot of things I do to drive my family crazy. Two behaviors high on the list, though, are surely my habit of rushing people to stay on my agenda and my constant attraction to whatever seems new and exciting—whether that’s pursuing a new idea or purchasing a new house. I guess I could best be described as an impatient possibilist. For me, Read More

_MG_8647 | Author: Pulpolux !!! | Source: pulpolux on Flickr | License: CC BY-NC 2.0

The Best Use of Our Time

Thirty years ago my wife threw a pan at me.  We had just finished our first year of living in Toronto, Canada after I had accepted a big job with Northern Telecom. While I was traveling all over the world attending business meetings, she was stuck at home with the kids knowing no one and dealing with an unhappily deported teenager and a happily dependent four-year-old. She had taken a leave of absence from a Read More

Left: Wassily Kandinsky | Right: Radomil

Measuring Meaning in the New Year

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.” —Thomas Merton OK, here’s the problem. When I searched the internet for “how to measure meaning,” the first item that popped up (the most popular Yahoo answer) was how to measure your penis. Apparently, a lot of men are still finding the greatest source of meaning in their life to be the size Read More

Artwork by Do-Ho Suh | Photographer: Carol M. Highsmith | Source: Library of Congress

The Masses and the Margins

“And the soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no intelligence.” —Plato, Republic, VI, 508 I worked in inmate rehabilitation for eight years in Read More

"A Humument p190: Silence & Stars" | Artist: Tom Phillips| Source: www.humument.com | License: © Tom Phillips

Nouns and Norms

I have always loved new ideas and embraced them enthusiastically. I have read an enormous amount about a ton of concepts, and I have accumulated a large repertoire of nouns in my vocabulary. But nouns require action verbs to make them real.

As Bucky Fuller said, God is a verb.

Author: Insomnia Cured Here on Flickr | License: CC BY-SA 2.0 | Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tom-margie/3087375315

Gauging Gurus

As Lao Tzu suggests, “when a person crowns himself as a guru, he is not.”

We should always be able to ask and answer: At what level are the people we entrust with power operating? In this post, I share my guide to evaluating leaders, gurus, and practitioners.

"Moon Chest," from Ai Weiwei's exhibition "According To What" | Photographer: CarrieLu

Nietzsche, Nazis, and Now

“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.” ―Henry A. Wallace When I ride the subway, I often take out my kindle and open up Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. It transports me immediately from the hustle, Read More

Title: one size – fits all | Author: Cees Wouda | Source: ceesjw on Flickr | License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Labels, Limits, and Levels

Dr. Bill Anthony, the highly respected, world-renowned, executive director of the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center at Boston University, initiated classes with new students by throwing the DSM into the waste basket. This dramatic statement was intended to communicate to people entering the mental health field that labels limit our ability to see the potential and possibilities of another human being.

Full Rainbow | Credit: Jakob Owens | License: CC0

Step Back

In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In became a massive cultural phenomenon, and its title became an instant catchphrase for empowering women. The book soared to the top of best-seller lists both nationally and internationally, igniting global conversations about women and ambition. Sandberg packed theaters, dominated op-ed pages, appeared on every major television show and on the cover of Time magazine, and sparked ferocious debate about women and leadership.

"Stools," by Ai Weiwei | Photo Credit: Daniel Silliman

Stages and States

I just completed an on-line course through MindValley Institute entitled “Beyond Seeking” taught by Ken Wilber, whom I mentioned in my last post. The course triggered so many ideas that I wanted to filter them through my lens and write a post. So here it is. As the title of this post indicates, throughout our lives, we can experience many stages and many states. In my last post, Spiritual Awakening, I constructed scales for Wilber’s Read More

Title: June 24, 2016 | Author: David Gabriel Fischer | www.thezendiary.com

Free Will . . . or not

Copernicus destroyed the myth that we are central. Darwin destroyed the myth that we are special. Now, Crick and the neuroscientists want to destroy the myth that we are conscious. They suggest that all behaviors are simply manifestations of a conditioned brain – when the brain dies, we die. They posit that we operate simply out of habit. Essentially, they conclude that we are automatons with no free choice. Quite simply, our brain sends out Read More

Title: Interconnect | Author: Samuel

How AND Why

We hear a lot of either/or options in our lives. Either you can do this or you can do that. And how often is an acknowledgement of a different point of view accompanied, by a “but…?” Ya, but I think…! This post addresses the need to see the complementarity of differences and the need to ask “how” AND “why.” As the eastern philosophers would say, “there is a yin is in every yang, and a Read More

Photo by Danny Scales

Positivity

In Shirzad Chamine’s book, Positive Intelligence, he refers to  Sages, Saboteurs, and PQ, or positive intelligence. It’s a fascinating entreaty on the battle between our higher and lower selves and posits that PQ is the tipping force in winning the battle. It should be noted, though, that the ideas of Sage and Saboteur have been elucidated very substantively, in other terms, by others. Chamine suggests that a sage needs to empathize, explore, innovate, navigate, and Read More

Title: Accommodating the Newcomers | Author: Joel Penner

Building Trust

Trust is the foundational building block for organizational health.  Just as diet and exercise are the key starting points for physical health, trust is the “must have” for building a healthy, productive, and innovative work environment.  Without trust, you have no chance of creating the kind of organizational culture you may want to build. Trust has two components: indvidual and institutional. Individual trust is defined as a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or Read More

Yosemite National Park | Credit: Erol Ahmed

Attitude

Randomness is. We can’t control the events that happen in life. We can find meaning in what’s not meant to be. There is not always a reason. External causes bombard us from multiple sources. We can only look inward for our own truth. External forces pull us out. There are always compelling reasons to get caught in the flow. We can only shift our attention inward. Internal forces keep us down. We can’t break free Read More

Credit: Pablo Garcia Saldaña | License: CC0

The Questions we Live in

It seems like we are always desperately seeking answers in our life. “If only I could be certain about this,” or “I sure wish I knew the answer to that.” Unfortunately, when the total quantity of information in the world is doubling twice a day, it’s going to be increasingly impossible to keep up with all the “answers” that are literally available at our fingertips. It doesn’t necessarily mean the answers are getting better, they are just Read More