Manage to Engage

Last week’s episode brought up a big question: What is your one thing? Or what’s the question that you will dedicate your life to? But don’t worry if you don’t have a definitive answer to those questions yet. Even just thinking about the question with intention puts you closer to the right path. And today, I’m going to give you some questions and tools you can use to continuously re-orient yoursel...

Management is a constant exercise in shepherding change, internally or externally. But most people don’t like change, internally or externally. It makes most of us feel uncomfortable, and maybe even a little icky. Which leads me to what may be bad news for some of you: whatever it is you want in life will require you to change. But how do you even know what change is necessary or what steps you’ll...

Being an adult means never having to say, “I have to.” At the end of the last episode, I shared why this idea that you have to do anything is just one of the most commonly shared delusions — a delusion encouraged by the structures of capitalism, sure, but a delusion nonetheless.  What does the alternative look like, then? What does it look like to practice adulthood as a verb and embrace sayi...

In the last episode, we started a dialectic to investigate the truth about adulthood. When does it start? What does it mean to be an adult? The answers to those questions aren’t so simple, though, and the definitions seem to keep shifting over time, both for us as individuals and for society as a whole. This week, we’re going to move past the logistics and legal considerations for adulthood a...

Do you consider yourself an adult? If you’re 18 or older, you probably answered to yourself, “Yes.” You might even have thought it was a stupid question to ask. And by the way, if you’re not 18 yet, kudos for listening — you’re way ahead of the curve. Now, especially if you rolled your eyes at that first question, consider the answer to this: What is the definition of an adult? The answer isn’t qu...

To close out our first guest series, Matt Niblock shares how to identify the best candidates for the long haul in a high-pressure job and how hiring managers can create a good candidate experience — which doesn’t always mean making the candidate comfortable, although any good job interview should still be a safe space for truth. I’d love your feedback. Click here to leave a rating & review for the...

Matt Niblock returns with more hiring and recruiting insight. We’ll walk through the early stages of the hiring process, touching on some common mistakes that people make along the way, when the hiring manager should push back against applicants, and how the idea of “gut meets data” that we discussed last week can be applied in practice. I’d love your feedback. Click here to leave a rating & revie...

Every organization has to deal with hiring and recruiting. So it’s funny that so many of the people who are responsible for hiring have little to no idea what they’re doing — even though there are experts out there who are happy to tell you exactly what works. Experts like Matt Niblock, VP of Employee Experience at Phase2, who has been working as a recruiter since you had to mail or fax in your ré...

In the final episode of this series looking at the five stages of engagement through the lens of accountability, you’ll learn what keeps most people from achieving flow for more than a few fleeting moments of their life and how you can get closer to achieving flow — if you’re willing to put in the work (or, paradoxically, stop working so damn hard to get there).   Take the course: The Accountabili...

In the last episode, we reviewed the first three stages of engagement: crisis, survival, and security. Most people get stuck in those first two stages, engaging with a chronic stress response that makes upward momentum seem insurmountable for most of their lives. And if they eventually reach the stage of security, it can feel so comfortable that they settle in. But for those of us that don’t want...

In this series, we will be revisiting the five stages of engagement — but this time, we’re going to examine the model through the lens of accountability. If this is a new concept for you, you won’t be lost starting with this episode, but you can find a more foundational introduction to the model back in episodes 90 to 95. Links below.   Take the course: The Accountability Path 2.0   Learn more abo...

A fair warning before going into this episode: it starts on a pretty emotional beat, and it might be a little triggering for anyone who is currently being overwhelmed by feelings of grief or loss. However, if you can listen through that, I think hearing the participant on this coaching call walk through her feelings can also be a healing experience that helps you process those emotions, as we disc...

Over the last two episodes, we’ve clarified the content of our reaction to COVID-19 and the context of that reaction — the content being our egoic emotional reaction and the context being the perpetual state of not knowing. But getting to the point where you can hold both of those simultaneously is difficult. It doesn’t feel natural because it’s not common in our society, but our minds are actuall...

In the last episode, I asked a question: What happens if you experience your experience from something other than ego? If you think about all of the things we don’t know about what the future holds, about how things will (or, unfortunately, won’t) change as parts of the world re-open amid still-growing COVID-19 cases, and you experience that through our egoic reaction, then you will probably exper...

We’re doing something a little bit different for this series of episodes. While the format won’t change, we’ll be directly addressing some recent events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent worldwide economic shutdowns. The effects of the pandemic are ubiquitous and — as you’ve likely read many, many times already — unprecedented. Economically and emotionally, relatively few people will come...

When you strip everything else away, accountability boils down to abiding with truth.  The truth, however, can be a bitter pill to swallow... at least at first. When you start to experience the benefits, though, you grow accustomed to the flavor. You even come to like it, to seek it out, as you develop a true sense of self-mastery. So, to finish this series on accountability as a teacher, I’m goin...

Over the last two episodes, we’ve established that the cause of all human suffering is resisting change. Life is kind enough to tell us when something needs to change, often gently at first, but it is persistent. If you ignore the letter, it’ll leave you a call. If you ignore the voicemail, it’ll come to your door. Accountability will make itself known. And any act of resistance is just childish....

When you experience pain, when you repeatedly endure the same suffering, that’s reality asking you to participate. That’s the highest form of accountability. Some of us will just wait for the acute pain to pass and move on without doing anything. Some will actively seek out a distraction, which is abundantly easy in this world of ours. Others will change superficially, change what they’re doing in...

Before you get into this episode, I encourage you to pause for a moment and consider the answer to this question: What do you want and how is life telling you to change to get it? Really, take a couple of minutes and think about your answer. Interrogate yourself. This will help you actively engage in the discussion and get the most out of not just this episode but this entire series on accountabil...

Over the last few weeks, we’ve established the value of engaging with life through a curious lens and how people show up differently as managers when they express curiosity. We also established that the main obstacle between you and a more curious life is fear. In this episode, I offer you some tools you can use to start overcoming the obstacle of fear and deconstructing the egoic conditioning tha...

How many times have you heard someone say, “curiosity kills the cat?” That is the way our society depicts curiosity — it’s a risk. So, even though we’re born innately curious, society quickly teaches us to stop. As a result, we tend to overcorrect and we transition from curious beings to fearful beings. That’s how most adults operate — chances are that’s how you, reading this right now, operate. B...

Last week, we started a conversation about curiosity, real listening, and asking questions, and we established that good managers don’t just look at the content of the questions they’re asked — good managers also consider the context in which a question is asked. This is an expression of real curiosity. And in this episode, we are going to look at how people express both fear and curiosity in thei...

This is the first episode in a four-part series exploring the critical importance of curiosity, how you can start approaching life with real curiosity, and how you can help the people you manage do the same. This conversation is an excerpt from the final session of the CLEAR Thinking course . If you want to take this extra time at home as an opportunity to start living more intentionally, you can...

In the last two episodes, we discussed how your identity consists of your conditioning — and why the conditioning that most of us received was inadequate. So, why do we cling so tightly to this conditioning, even institutionalizing it? Because, deep down, we’re afraid of losing who we are. This is a reasonable response from your lizard brain, but it’s holding you back from evolving your consciousn...

We’re all trained that, if we can learn to hold and process information better, we can become a more intelligent human being and, as a result, become successful. This conditioning puts us in the situation where we perpetually feel that, if we can just get one more piece of information, we can solve our problems. But this has no reference in reality — and this shared delusion is causing way more pr...