You want engagement. But no one’s buying. If you want something done you have to spell it out in detail, or even give up and get to that ugly “I’ll just do it myself” place of the defeated manager. You feel like every time you turn your back, the wheels come off the bus again. You’ve got zero engagement.

So how do you fix that?

We all have ups and downs to life. How do you deal with the downs? Do you numb yourself and avoid them? Or do you find the hidden gift held within them?

Each time a painful emotion is felt, it provides an opportunity. Pain gives us the gift of growth in a hidden package. Something is shouting out for a change. If we pause and open this gift, a great secret of freedom and love can be revealed. Sometimes when the pain is large enough, we have no choice but to look at it anyway. My largest pains have helped to open the greatest growths in my life. Hey, it’s worth a shot, right? Check out these six ways to vent and clear out that frustration.

Creating a weekly retreat gives yourself a delightful space to reconnect, review, and readjust, where necessary. It is a big picture look in which you set up the blueprint for your week. This frees you up so that you can relax into it and trust that you have already implemented the wishes of your highest self. Everything works more beautifully as you get better at being more aware of what you want while setting up your time.

Every semester I get a handful of students who have settled on the idea that the more big words they use, the better. Regardless of whether they know what those words mean or not. So I get papers elucidating the patriarchal configuration of the social arrangement, rather than telling me about male-dominated societies. Or they pontificate…

A commenter on my blog sent me this little morsel: A project manager was running a piece of work with a geographically dispersed team. The team leader was tasked with communicating some bad news to the team members in another city, so he phoned them all and had a conversation with them. A couple of weeks later…

We managers can get ourselves into far too many situations where we unwittingly set others up for disappointment because we haven’t learned to finish our conversations well. Last week I encouraged you to add The Daily Five Minutes (D5M for short) to your management toolbox because it creates more workplace conversations. The intention of…