Blog

I’ve been hanging out recently with two types of people: 1) exhausted corporate workers whose jobs/lives feel like constant firefighting, and 2) actual firefighters. Based on my purely anecdotal observations, it seems like the latter group has a lower #burnout rate than the former. Which is insane.  Here are some things I’ve learned about how […]

Confrontation is the worst. Who’s with me? If I had a nickel for every difficult personal conversation I’ve avoided, I’d have *almost* enough nickels to fund all the therapy that not-having-the-difficult-conversations necessitates. On the plus side, the sheer terror of initiating confrontation led me to spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to […]

I like to think I’m decent at integrating difficult feedback from other people. (That comes easily when you’re your own harshest critic, and constantly assume you’re in the wrong.) What’s more challenging, I’ve found, is taking feedback from myself. Signals from my body and my emotions are things I long tried to suppress, deny, and […]

Imagine you’re sitting in a car, wanting to take a road trip to the destination of your dreams. But the following things are true: You’re sitting in the passenger seat You don’t know how a car works You don’t know where you want to end up You don’t know how to read road signs You […]

Once, stuck in a crazy-making role early in my career, my best work friend and I invented a game I called the “margarita clock.” We sat down at our desks at 8 am sharp every morning, and we’d see how long we could make it before we felt the intense urge to drink a margarita […]

You don’t owe anyone your story. We are living in an unprecedented period that incentivizes hyper-personal, nonstop sharing about ourselves. Vulnerability, with its many benefits, is finally having its moment – and thank goodness for that. It also, though, creates pressure for some folks to feel like they have to disclose every painful detail of […]

I used to think my job was to protect people from difficult feelings and take away their discomfort by any means possible. I was the sponge, the buffer, the mediator, the anticipator and pre-emptor of awkwardness and pain. It took too many years to realize that, not only was that approach robbing me of my […]

“I know my anxiety is taking a toll on me, but it’s what makes me more productive than everyone else. It’s the reason I’ve gotten so far in my career.” – Every client I’ve ever had Yes, anxiety can produce some results very quickly, but it’s not sustainable. The truth is, anxiety is a really […]

For most of my life, I was so afraid of making a mistake that I wouldn’t even attempt things I knew I wouldn’t be great at on the first try. I did an A+ job of insulating myself from any situations that would expose me to embarrassment or lack of control. I may have looked […]

Uncovering the roots of conflict in the workplace Imagine for a moment that you were sitting down with a group of people to play a new board game. It’s a somewhat complex game. It looks similar to others you’ve played in the past and everyone knows the objective goal, but the players, the cards, and […]