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When I began my career as a psychologist, I was twenty-five years old, having completed my doctoral degree after twenty-two straight years of schooling (pre-K through to my Ph.D.). To say that I was a bit arrogant is probably understating the issue – I was convinced that I could “fix” any issue that any client presented.

We receive a lot of input from many sources in life that focus on who is better, richer, stronger, most beautiful, most talented, most athletic, etc. – which puts the emphasis on superlatives and its inherent competition. There are those who believe this contributes to people feeling isolated and ‘less than’.

After a wonderful vacation hiatus, I’m energized and excited to be back in the office.  I hope your holiday plans allowed you time to rest and rejuvenate! Gary and I have been focused on the topic of leadership the last few months in preparation for our all new Leadership program (more on that later this quarter!).  Today, I want to share some interesting items from some of my research.

I receive a lot of interesting and entertaining emails from friends of mine. Some I delete, and others I pass along. Every now and then, I get one that contains important public service information that should be passed along to everyone.

“Adjust your approach.” As a coach, you’re probably familiar with this concept, as different clients need different tools – and different types of communication – to achieve the results they’re looking for. But most often, these adjustments are based purely on intuition; sometimes they make a difference in the client relationship, and sometimes they don’t.

What do you do when you’re confronted with something you’re not good at?  Some people get discouraged and quit. Others keep doggedly working to get better at it, and in the process become more “well-rounded” human beings.  Conventional wisdom says that the second response is the healthy one. But the empirical evidence suggests that it’s people who specialize in an area of aptitude who are successful and happy, not those who focus their energies on becoming “well rounded.”

He said his name was Craig and he sounded very distraught because his business partners were having a meltdown. After 12 years of getting along well in a successful business, they were blindsided when they lost their biggest client.  Worse was that the 4 of them, usually friends, were blaming each other, getting into yelling matches and behaving in ways that until now had been totally foreign to this "ideal partnership".  Could they be rescued?

As one of the originators of a psychological assessment program (Your Talent Advantage), I’m often asked this question: How can an assessment that fits people into a finite number of “types” claim to reveal what’s truly unique about us?

Have you ever had the experience of being so deeply immersed in a project that you lost track of time? Research shows that those are the times when we’re happiest- when we’re engaging our natural skills and abilities. As a business coach with over thirty years of experience, I’ve seen it in action, over and over again: people succeed when they put themselves in a position to truly use their natural skills and abilities.

Why did you get into coaching? One of the most likely reasons is that you wanted to have a real, positive and lasting impact on the lives of your clients.  Unfortunately, many of the approaches that coaches currently use in their work don’t have this kind of lasting effect, for the simple reason that they focus on what clients currently don’t do well, as opposed to what they do.