There are two key, almost secret, psychological ingredients involved in building strong, trusting relationships based in research on childhood bonding. Whether we’re talking about coworkers, clients, or prospective clients, the ability to establish strong trusting relationships is one of those keys to success and satisfaction if life.

I Sense a Disturbance in The Force.

How to Trust and Act on Your Intuition in Real Time When an Interaction Takes a Turn You Didn’t Expect.

Developing your ability to pay attention to, trust, and act on your intuition in real time is one of the absolute most powerful communication skills you can learn. By doing so you move yourself away from reacting without full awareness to people and events, which usually leads to a need to clean up messes that you’ve inadvertently created, to responding in a mindful manner, which enables you to be more successful in all your communications. There is something magical about being able to communicate your intuition or what you sense and call out an issue in real time that’s not being spoken about, but that everyone senses. If you’d like to learn how to do this just give a listen.

Centering is a technique for grounding and calming yourself and regaining your composure and sense of control once your emotions or stress have driven you off course and started to consume you. It can help you be in the present moment to bring your full focus and critical thinking to bear, and it can improve your self-awareness, but it’s much more than that.

Building Your Self-Awareness is the Absolute Best Skill You Can Develop to Ensure Your Career (and Life) Success.

If the reality of our actions and how others perceive us don’t match how we see ourselves we risk coming across as phony, out of touch, and not to be trusted. It’s relatively easy and common for people to get into a mindset of believing that they are self-aware when that’s not the case as that belief can exist on a purely conceptual or intellectual level only. Believing that you are self-aware when you’re not is itself evidence of a lack of self-awareness. If you’ve not done the work to build self-awareness you’ll have blind spots that only others can see about who you are and this will seriously diminish your leadership potential. Listen in to learn about the two key steps you can take to build your self-awareness.

As Weird as it Sounds, Applying Principles From Quantum Physics Can Help You Vastly Improve Your Relationships

In the world of quantum physics you can never factor out the impact that your actions have on the experimental results you get. Set up an experiment to investigate light in one way and light reveals itself to be a wave phenomena. Set up a different experiment and it shows itself to be a particle phenomena such that light can never be defined outside of the relationship that one establishes with it in an experiment. Thus, we don’t create reality, but rather depending on how we interact with the world we evoke the reality that we get. In the same fashion, the behaviors, attitudes, and feelings you get from other people are connected to how you interact with them and what your behavior evokes from them. I know it sounds a bit out there, but listen in and we’ll show you how it can help you improve your relationships and ultimately your success.

It’s Time to Scrap the Idea of Balance and Instead Strive For Integration

With the many changes Covid 19 is bringing to the way we work there's one idea in particular that the pandemic has shown us was never going to work. That is, the concept of work/life balance is both unrealistic and potentially harmful.

Instead of balance, we recommend work/life integration, which means that employers take a wholistic view of staff and recognize that they have a role to play in helping them integrate the different parts of their lives into one whole life. It means organizations understand that the stress of managing both home and work realms can have a negative effect on staff morale, productivity, and engagement, and that they can’t leave this challenge on the shoulders of staff alone to manage.

Empathetic Understanding of Your Staff’s Psychological Needs Now Will Make Reopening Much More Successful.

In this podcast we talk about reopening workplaces during this Covid 19 pandemic. In particular, we look at the psychological state of your employees and the very nature of the relationship between you and your staff. We’re currently involved in a grand global social experiment and your employees are experiencing stressors like they’ve never faced before along with a completely different way of doing their jobs. When they return to the workplace they’ll have very different expectations of how their work and home lives fit together. Our main message to organizational leaders is this: If you want to increase the prospects of a successful reopening make it a priority now to address your staff’s psychological needs and do it in an empathetic manner.

Learn How to Consciously Deal With the Reality of a Dysfunctional Situation Instead of Simply Putting a Band Aid on It.

We’ve all been in those situations at work where someone’s dysfunctional behavior is having a negative impact on others, but no one is stepping up to call it out. Instead of dealing with the reality of the situation co-workers have learned to work around it. We call these band aid moments and unless you find an effective way to deal with the reality of the dysfunctional behavior it never gets resolved and can be a continuing source of tension if not outright conflict. Unresolved issues like this are a huge energy drain. Listen in to this cast to learn how to successfully call out and resolve that dysfunctional behavior that everyone knows is there, but no one is dealing with.

How To Gain Cooperation On a Project From That One Department That’s Resisting.

It’s quite easy for different functions to become silos within an organization and for people to think of their own silo and its survival first over the greater organization’s good. This is a common occurrence in organizations that anyone who works in an organization will face someday so it’s important to learn how to gain the cooperation of a function that looks to have fallen victim to pulling up the drawbridge and entering silo status. Want to learn how to do that? Give a listen and we’ll share some ideas that will help you gain the cooperation you need for your success.

What to do When Unspoken Emotions Drive a Conversation Off Course.

You’ve likely been in the situation where you're having what you think is just a straight ahead conversation about a work issue when you feel the conversation start to veer off course. You may feel thrown off balance and confused as to what’s happening. You also likely sense strong feelings coming from the other person. You’ve just run into the quicksand of the other person’s unexpressed emotions. In my experience this tends to happen a lot in interactions with other human people. Learning how to reach your goals while navigating through the unexpressed emotional blocks that life gives you is one of the top key life skills. Listen in to learn how to boost your conversational navigation skills.