If you want to support someone…you need to ASK them what actions they would actually find supportive. Well, duh, you might say. Isn’t this obvious? Perhaps not. I’ve seen a lot of faux support circulating on social media recently, starting with the whole “wear a safety pin to show you’re an ally” meme on Twitter […]
Comments Off on How to Show Support
At a conference a few years ago, a colleague of mine gave us an assignment: Prepare a list of fifty Declarations that we absolutely know to be true. As a marketing tool, each of these could then turn into a blog post, book chapter, or newsletter article. I add to my list regularly, and have […]
Comments Off on Declarations Part III
The beginning of a new year is a traditional time for self-reflection, often resulting in a list of habits to initiate, change, or break. Many of them revolve around health behaviors: stop smoking; eat more salad and less junk food; workout every day. Seth Godin’s blog post Angry Is a Habit suggests that our emotional […]
Comments Off on Emotional Habits
How Not to Say the Wrong Thing by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman is easily the most brilliant thing I’ve read all year. I will summarize it briefly but you owe it to yourself to go read the whole thing. Basically, when someone is in a sucky situation – their dog died, they have cancer, […]
Comments Off on Comfort IN, Dump OUT
I spent all day Saturday doing landscaping work with my cohousing neighbors. I actually don’t like gardening all that much. I have very little experience or knowledge, having lived all my adult life in trailers, apartments, and condos. But the foliage was threatening to take over and so the troops were assembled and armed with […]
Comments Off on Pruning the Roots of Conflict
I continue to think about the definition and use of this word safety, which we facilitators are charged with creating and maintaining. (See previous post here.) A family camping trip this past weekend gave me opportunities to consider the issue in a different context. We camped in the woods near a large lake; swimming, fishing […]
Comments Off on More on Safety
In a recent post I wrote about the role of discomfort in group dynamics. Trying something new is generally not comfortable. Trying to communicate in a different way is not comfortable. Finally digging in and dealing with hard stuff that you’ve been avoiding is not comfortable. A certain level of discomfort can be necessary for […]
Comments Off on Comfort Versus Safety
Human beings are hard-wired to read faces – our babies figure it out way before they can talk or walk. While there are facilitators out there who help groups in virtual meetings, I am not one of them. I find it hard to connect with people when our interaction is mediated by a screen – […]
Comments Off on Face to Face
Many of our resolutions, personal or professional, are about things that we’d like to DO. Some are about things we want to STOP doing. I rather like this little piece by Jeff Haden at Inc. on ten things to stop doing in order to be happier at work: blaming, impressing, clinging, interrupting, whining, controlling, criticizing, […]
Comments Off on More Resolutions: Happiness by Subtraction