Category: Performance
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A Natural Public Speaker
No one was calling me this when my voice cracked, my face flushed, and I tried to hide my sweat and discomfort. I wasn’t afraid of public speaking, my body just refused to let me do it the way I wanted to. I have some unique perspectives, we all do. But those perspectives can’t affect…
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Fire Up Your Performance “Jets” with a Persona
When you hear him interviewed in his home, Justin Jefferson comes across as quiet and unassuming. He strikes you as someone who would be comfortable sipping an herbal tea while reading at a coffee shop. That’s not what you would expect from one of American Football’s elite wide receivers. Playing football in general requires a…
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In Defense of Coaching
A recent episode of the Best of Both Worlds podcast took a Q&A question about engaging with career coaches. The hosts took a very skeptical view of most coaches and recommended that the listener proceed with caution. Despite my title here, I wholeheartedly agree with this advice. It isn’t easy to differentiate before meeting between…
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Three things Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu can teach Business Leaders
You have probably seen that prominent tech leaders such as Mark Zuckerburg and Elon Musk are training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Maybe you wonder how fighting appeals to these titans of the tech industry. I won’t argue the efficacy of one martial art over another, but one thing that stands out for Jiu-Jitsu is that you…
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Transposition of Discomfort
Establishing new habits and routines is hard. It is common to feel some mental resistance when you try to take action on your new practice. When I talk with people about building a reading practice, they often comment that it is hard to focus and make progress on reading if they have not been doing…
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A Heuristic for Personal AI Use
When deciding if and how to leverage AI tools in my work, I find it helpful to think about a breakdown of the work’s value between the process and the output. The more biased the value distribution is towards the end result, the more we should utilize AI tools. When the value distribution is primarily…
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The No Project
When we say “yes” to something, we say “no” to something else. Oftentimes we are saying no to ourselves or taking time away from our priorities. With that in mind, I set myself a goal of saying “no” three times a week. I figured that was a manageable number and would help keep my focus…
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It’s ok to be the smartest person in the room.
The slogans we tell ourselves shape our actions and mindset. The common adage to surround yourself with smart people, aka “be the dumbest person in the room”, has some merit. You are prompting yourself to listen, to learn, to ask clarifying questions. These are all valuable actions. But this mindset can also hold you back…
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Eyes up. Breathe. Let’s Go!
This is a little mantra I put together before a recent presentation. 👀Eyes Up When I saw pictures of myself from a previous presentation, I noticed that my body language was very different at the beginning of the talk from the rest of it. Getting started is the hardest part of presenting for me. This…
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A Continuous Learning Organization
Growth Mindset has brought the transformation from know-it-alls to learn-it-alls. This was an incredibly powerful shift for individuals. We should ask ourselves, “what is the corresponding evolution for an organization?” When software was a “shipped” product, it made sense to train people on how the shipped version worked. You could reasonably expect that knowledge to…