Long ago and far away – back when I was still an academic – I once took a long drive home from a conference with a colleague. It was a two- or three-hour drive, the kind where you start off talking about work and end up talking about your childhood…

There’s an old expression that seasoned college professors like to invoke about teaching: “The first year you get it wrong. The second year you fix it. And the third year you’re bored.” As I settle into my third year running my…

I’ve written before about my recurring dreams. From the proverbial math test that you haven’t studied for – to the play you’re in where you don’t know your lines – I regularly experience some of the most common dreams in adulthood…

My son called me recently to share an observation he’s had at college. While his older professors are wise and erudite, they aren’t necessarily as open to new ideas as some of his younger professors. He’s onto something. It’s generally accepted…

It’s always gratifying when the book you happen to pick up off the shelf is *exactly* the book you need to be reading. So it was with Dorie Clark’s The Long Game: How to be a Long Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. Allow me to set the scene…

I was working with a client recently on his public speaking. As part of an exercise, I asked him to recount a sad memory. He paused. And then he paused again. And then he paused some more. After a minute or two like this, I finally interrupted him…

Lockdown has afforded all of us an opportunity to reflect on who we are, what our priorities are, and what we’d like to change in our lives. I have some good friends here in London, for example, who just got married after being together for 32 years…

My mother passed away during the pandemic. She didn’t die from Covid-19. But because she died during the height of last year’s lockdown, we could not pay proper tribute to her life in the days and weeks following her death. One year on, we are finally…

I broke up with a friend earlier this year. I’d been supporting this person through a tough time over the past couple of years. Ultimately, however, I came to see that I couldn’t help them. And I was destroying my own mental health in trying. So I stepped away…

When I open my online workshops these days, I often put the following directive on the screen: “In chat, tell us something you’ll do differently in 2021.” It’s meant to be a conversation starter before we begin the business of the day. Lately, however, I’ve been…