Making Sure Your Stress Isn’t Contagious

Category Personal Effectiveness
by CoachMatching
Thursday, 05 September 2019 11:16

Stress doesn’t feel good to have, nor does it feel good to be around. Eighty percent of Americans say they feel stress during their day. In many organizations, stress feels baked into the work culture, even as everyone wonders what to do about it. Like a contagion, stress spreads. We literally catch the…

stress

Why Talented People Fail Under Pressure

Category Personal Effectiveness
by CoachMatching
Thursday, 29 August 2019 10:25

When I was in high school, soccer was my life. I was one of the goalkeepers for the California state team, which was also part of the Olympic Development Program, and I knew the weight of my role. My ability to block a goal could make or break the game.…

3 Questions Hiring Managers Want You to Answer

Category Personal Effectiveness
by CoachMatching
Thursday, 15 August 2019 16:39

Interviews have an outsize influence on whether you land the job you want. Even though your application materials reflect your lifetime of experience, a few hours of interaction with a recruiting team often ends up being the determining factor in whether you actually get hired. So, clearly you need to…

How to Take Criticism Well

Category Personal Effectiveness
by CoachMatching
Monday, 12 August 2019 11:18

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to run an organization. I was excited about the possibilities ahead of us and the goals we could realize. However, instead of receiving unanimous enthusiasm for what I thought was an exciting vision, some team members found fault with my ideas and judged…

Preventing Busyness from Becoming Burnout

Category Personal Effectiveness
by CoachMatching
Tuesday, 02 July 2019 14:33

For most of my working life, I’ve felt way too busy. Sometimes heart-stoppingly, wildly so — working long hours, missing out on family time or fun, and stressed beyond belief. And yet, a few years ago, as I was cleaning out my file cabinet before leaving the Washington Post after nearly 20 years,…

The Financial Upside of Being an Optimist

Category Personal Effectiveness
by CoachMatching
Tuesday, 11 June 2019 11:13

Under the weight of chronic stress at work, optimists are winning. It’s hard to escape the fact that chronic stress is one of the greatest threats to well-being in modern times. In a report published by The National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health, 75% of workers say they are more stressed…

Want to Get That One Project Off Your Plate? Try This

Category Personal Effectiveness
by CoachMatching
Friday, 24 May 2019 11:56

Want to Get That One Project Off Your Plate? Try This All of us have tasks we don’t want to do. Maybe they’re boring or time-consuming or stressful — but we’ve still got to get them done. One way to push yourself is to involve other people. Delegate part of…

How to Stop Obsessing Over Your Mistakes

Category Personal Effectiveness
by CoachMatching
Wednesday, 10 April 2019 15:15

Do you ever find yourself endlessly mentally replaying situations in which you wish you’d performed differently? You wish you hadn’t said that dumb thing. You wish you’d volunteered for that project that’s now winning accolades. You wish you’d spoken up. You wish you hadn’t dropped the ball with that potential…

What to Do When a Work Friendship Becomes Emotionally Draining

Category Personal Effectiveness
by CoachMatching
Thursday, 07 March 2019 15:58

Having a close friend at work can make you happier, more productive, and less likely to quit. But office friendships can have downsides, too. What should you do if you’ve gotten too emotionally involved? How do you make sure that your relationship doesn’t impinge on your ability to get your…

How to Regain the Lost Art of Reflection

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Martin Reeves, Roselinde Torres & Fabien Hassan
Tuesday, 10 April 2018 09:52

Schedule Time for Reflective Thinking Every Week A famous but possibly apocryphal tale about Albert Einstein is that he dreamed up the theory of relativity when riding his bicycle. Warren Buffett is on record as saying that he reads for six hours per day and has very few scheduled meetings.…

Without Emotional Intelligence, Mindfulness Doesn’t Work

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Daniel Goleman & Matthew Lippincott
Thursday, 02 November 2017 10:58

Mindfulness has become the corporate fad du jour, a practice widely touted as a fast-track to better leadership. But we suspect that not all the benefits laid at its feet actually belong there. Our research and analysis has revealed a complicated relationship between mindfulness and executive performance—one that is important for…

Device-Free Time Is as Important as Work-Life Balance

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Charlotte Lieberman
Tuesday, 12 September 2017 11:31

The idea of “work-life balance” is an invention of the mid-19thcentury. The notion of cultivating awareness of one’s work versus one’s pleasure emerged when the word “leisure” caught on in Europe in the Industrial Era. Work became separate from “life” (at least for a certain class of men) and we’ve been…

Are You Outsourcing Your Stress Management?

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Peter Moss
Thursday, 24 August 2017 09:32

Are you stressed? Given that the World Health Organisation has called stress “the health epidemic of the 21st Century” your answer could well be in the affirmative. What do you do to manage down your stress? Asking clients yields: I go for a long weekend away to get my head…

The More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Dan Ciampa
Thursday, 17 August 2017 09:10

For leaders assuming the CEO title for the first time, taking time to learn and think translates into early successes. But the problem is there’s little time to do either. Information comes at them more quickly, more people than ever before demand their time, and they’re told that the myriad decisions piled in…

Pressure Doesn’t Have to Turn into Stress

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Nicholas Petrie
Tuesday, 15 August 2017 09:09

When I was in my late twenties, I was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Doctors operated and told me to hope for the best. I returned to Japan, where I was working, and tried to forget about it. The tumors returned a year later, this time in my liver. After a long search, the surgeons…

The Busier You Are, the More You Need Quiet Time

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Justin Talbot-Zorn & Leigh Marz
Friday, 28 July 2017 10:35

In a recent interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that serious thinkers and writers should get off Twitter. It wasn’t a critique of the 140-character medium or even the quality of the social media discourse in the age of fake news. It was a call to get beyond the…

Why You Should Make Time for Self-Reflection (Even If You Hate Doing It)

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Jennifer Porter
Tuesday, 18 July 2017 16:20

When people find out I’m an executive coach, they often ask who my toughest clients are. Inexperienced leaders? Senior leaders who think they know everything? Leaders who bully and belittle others? Leaders who shirk responsibility? The answer is none of the above. The hardest leaders to coach are those who won’t…

What to Do When Your Heart Isn’t in Your Work Anymore

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Andy Molinsky
Wednesday, 12 July 2017 09:52

In an ideal world, our work lives would be completely fulfilling, full of meaning, and intrinsically motivating. But what if they’re not? What if you’re stuck in a job or a career that you once loved, but your heart isn’t in it anymore? More people fit this profile than you’d…

Why Self-Improvement Should Be a Group Activity

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Ron Carucci
Wednesday, 21 June 2017 10:27

Continuous personal development is fundamental to career growth, professional satisfaction, and having a broader impact in the world. And while the self-help industry and leadership professions have made a fortune on our obsession with getting better, failure rates remain alarmingly high. In one survey, of more than 1,000 people who’d set…

The Ways Your Brain Manages Overload, and How to Improve Them

Category Personal Effectiveness
by Srini Pillay
Tuesday, 13 June 2017 16:41

Information overload is everywhere, from non-stop news to rat-a-tat email inboxes. At the receiving end of this deluge of verbiage is the human brain—your brain— metaphorically endowed with a vacuum cleaner that sucks up information; a container for short-term memory; a blender for integrating information; a memory bank for storing long-term information; a garbage disposal for getting rid of information; and a recycling machine extraordinaire.…

Personal Effectiveness