Anxiety is often triggered by stress: the longer a stressful situation lasts, the more anxious you become. It also increases stress: the more anxious you become, the more stress you feel. Anxiety skyrocketed during the pandemic, rising 643% in just eight months as people reacted to the constant stress of isolation, fear for their own…

Visualization is a mental exercise to prepare you for what you want to achieve. The Russian Olympic team divided into four, with each group spending more and more of their time on mental training rather than physical training. The results were staggering: during visualization, the athletes stimulated the same brain areas that were activated during…

Wellness and happiness are more than the opposite of illness, stress, burnout, fear, and mistrust. They are the foundations of fulfillment in your intellectual, emotional, physical, social, financial, and community life. Well-being is the state of being comfortable, happy, and healthy; with well-being, you find life satisfying, enjoy what you do, and find opportunities to…

Mindfulness has been defined as the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. While decisions may be made and judgments eventually drawn, mindfulness is rooted in acceptance: acceptance of the situation, one’s own limitations, and the limitations of others.  One expert in mindful leadership believes the path to…

Worst case: you try to communicate with someone who is dismissive of your ideas, unfamiliar with your area of expertise, distracted by stress and constant interruptions, and intolerant of obstacles. Best case: this person is open-minded, respects your knowledge, gives you full attention, and agrees wholeheartedly with your solution. In either case, your own stress…

Most entrepreneurs have thoughts of owning their own business.  They are looking for the freedom of working their own hours, autonomy for doing work they’re passionate about, and ideals of collecting 100% of the revenue they produce.   What is often overlooked or under-estimated, are the pressures and stresses of building a business. Most entreprenuers go…

The role of leadership in a crisis is to balance the needs of the company with the needs of the people affected by the crisis, both internally and externally. As one study put it, “Leadership during a crisis is no longer a tangential leadership competency.” Global finances, the pandemic, terrorism, and major changes in US…

You may be meeting your internal and external customers in person or electronically, through video conferences, telephone calls, webinars, and virtual website experiences. How do you establish trust under all those conditions? A study in Taiwan looked for the connection between website quality and trust. They found that website quality influenced trust in the first…

As Covid-19 confirmed for us, we live in a time of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). As a leader, you and your team will face and probably have already faced changes in your work environment, processes, procedures, goals, and expectations related to everything from diversity to safety and from robotics to training. VUCA refers…

A toxic work culture is easy to discover but more difficult to overturn. For example, according to an article in Wired, a bathroom manufacturer who wanted to encourage shorter bathroom breaks by employees recommended an extremely uncomfortable toilet. As one commentator pointed out, this approach ignores the reasons why employees feel that a bathroom is…