Talking With Friends, Sharing the Load Podcast

I caught an interesting piece from CBC news recently, which described a new-ish trend amongst young women (and men) who have chosen to remain celibate and, in many cases, forgo dating and that whole hot mess of online match-ups. It’s called “boysober” which I thought was pretty darned clever so I’ve adapted it to suit what I hear from my own demographic, i.e. not 20s and 30s anymore. It’s more tha...

For the better part of a decade, I taught an executive development course in Persuasion, with the inimitable David McPhillips.  We searched the world for the latest research into the art and science that makes up the body of knowledge of how people make decisions, and what triggers us to say yes. And yet…. And yet knowing how it works doesn’t always prevent us from being worked!  To wit this encou...

When I was a kid, growing up in a small mountain town in the West Kootenays of BC, summer Sundays meant gardening and washing the concrete sidewalks. My dad was proud of the steps and sidewalks because they were the product of the combined efforts of the neighbourhood’s men, who used a hand mixer and countless wheelbarrows and spades to fill, smooth and edge the layouts. Like barn-raisings of old,...

Peter Drucker noted that what gets measured, gets managed. Other iterations evolved to suggest what gets measured gets done. My take is that what gets measured becomes addictive and compulsive. I received a FitBit many years ago, as a gift from a good friend, and used it slavishly for months until it stopped holding a charge. I never did replace it. I remember one summer when I was relaxing on the...

Did your social graces suffer a massive setback during the pandemic? Are you only now finding your way back to navigating dinner parties, networking events and conversations involving more than one person at a time? It’s not a trivial trend because, as we lost our opportunities to socialize, we also lost our comfort in communing with strangers and that’s bad for them and for us. To receive new pos...