Thinking Out Loud

Maintaining a balance between your work and outside life is a popular topic these days. HR professionals, bloggers, health care professionals, counselors, and others constantly discuss the importance of and how to achieve a balance. Much of the discussion has to do with the accumulated stress and subsequent fallout without balance. Balance, however, is a tricky word in this context. The dictionary definition for the balance tool provides a clear image that can help us visualize the problem: “an instrument for weighing: as a beam that is supported freely in the center and has two pans of equal weight suspended from its ends.” Theoretically, then, if we pile all the stress on one side of the beam, we should be able to pile a whole bunch of other stuff on the other side of that beam to create balance.  This implies that we can achieve equilibrium if we find the right counterbalancing stuff.  Read More

The Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development is sponsoring a workshop on Aligning Leadership and Communication Styles. This is the second program I’ve done at MCED. Don Gooding is the Executive Director, a true visionary and hardworking guy. The education and support they give to entrepreneurs is exceptional–real hands on involvement. The program that I’m presenting will help leaders understand their communication strengths, how best to use those strengths, and explore the obstacles they encounter that interfere with effective communication.  Visit the MCED website (click here) to learn more about them and the workshop.

Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development offers a range of programs for businesses and entrepreneurs.  Their Top Gun Program is top flight, offering knowledge, insight, and resources to get business ideas focused and launched.

I’ll be offering a program (click here) to leaders through MCED on  October 10th, “Aligning Leadership & Communication Styles.” The goal of this workshop is to help leaders work more skillfully with their communication style strengths and challenges, recognizing the impact they have on others and developing tools best suited to their goals.

It’s past time to rename “soft skills.” Soft skills, as we all know, are people skills: getting along, communicating well, exhibiting interpersonal finesse.  Calling them soft skills has been a way of differentiating them from hard skills, although no one really uses that term. Hard skills are those associated with numbers: quantitative analysis, efficiency and making hard decisions “based on the numbers,” while you set aside your feelings. Read More