Blog

Like many of you, my wife and I enjoy watching series on one of the many available streaming services. Getting involved in a story with interesting characters that develops over time is an enjoyable distraction from life's daily challenges. While we have seen many good series over the last five years, what has become apparent to me is that even though we are sitting on the same couch in front of the same screen, we are watching different shows.

This past February, I celebrated my 70th birthday. During our family gathering, the term “New Norm” became center stage of our conversation. I observed the fact that the term “New Norm,” while absent from my previous 69 years in this world, now appears to be something that should be very important to me, judging from the number of articles on the subject.

For over 12 months now, we’ve lived with global change due to COVID-19, and we have all responded to it with the typical human response to change.

“Life is a journey, not a destination.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Heraclitus said, “There is nothing permanent except change.”

During my consulting career in corporate America, one of the services I frequently provided was the creation of a Position Portrait. This document contained a list of the behavioral skills that a person needed to be able to perform to be successful in the employment position described.

We love New Year’s Resolutions, making them, breaking them, and making fun of them (it’s the number one subject of the first Sunday comic section of the New Year). Anything but keeping them! Research suggests that about 45% of people in the United States make New Year’s resolutions and 75% of them keep them going through the first week of January (that would get you a C in school!) 46% make it six months, which is pretty impressive given that first week failure rate, but only 8% last the whole year. Not a very good showing.

It is not surprising that meetings have a bad name among business partners and in businesses in general.  Much too often, not a lot gets accomplished.  They are boring, time consuming and sometimes emotions take over when disagreements come up.  And yet, as a coach to businesses I insist that partners meet on a regular schedule and also with their teams.

I have always been fascinated by the intersection of science and spirituality. Not in the way the two clash as in the vitriolic, polarizing, and often political right/wrong arguments over evolution v. creationism, but in the way they come together like in Deepak Chopra’s book The Tao of Physics or the popular film from 2004 What The Bleep Do We Know? I recently had another experience that brought these two seemingly different worlds more closely together.

A question that we usually get during most of our seminars deals with the applicability of the Perceptual Styles Theory to finding the "perfect mate".  While there is no one factor or theory that can fully explain why, how, and with whom we fall in love, but the Perceptual Styles Theory (PST) can help individuals understand the challenges we’re likely to face in different types of relationships. This perspective can be invaluable in predicting communication issues, and in smoothing out issues when they do arise.