Having Better Conversations
Because communities are stronger when they possess diversity of thought, culture and ability. Building healthier workplaces, neighbourhoods and social media spaces begins with having better conversations.
How to Talk About Death at Work
For the last decade I’ve worked for two of Canada’s leaders in financial services (Vancity Credit Union) and pension administration (BC Pension Corporation). Through activities like estate planning and benefits changes many of my colleagues are required to talk about...
Why Conflict is a Good Thing
The Potential of Dialogue Meaningful dialogue is an elusive thing in our communities. Having a respectful conversation with someone about something on which we do not agree isn’t common. Yelling opinions overtop of someone else or building a newsfeed that reinforces...
Six Professional Game Changers from Improv
I’m part of a team that is delivering a big piece of work using agile methodology, which I’ve written about before. With our project moving and changing so quickly we find ourselves reacting to new circumstances and having to improvise on the spot a lot. So it made...
Say No to Meetings
That have no agenda. That are not organized. When you have no control over the outcome, content, and/or dialogue. That overlap with existing commitments. When you know they will suck your energy and wellbeing. That have the phrase "pick your brain" in the invite. When...
Cormac McCarthy and creativity and influence
Cormac McCarthy has passed from this world at the age of 89 and he was an icon of American literature and his real and violent words and stark sentences unabashedly embraced the run-on sentence to paint a real and brutal picture of the world. From my perspective,...
Five Ways to Cultivate Dissent on Your Team
Creating a culture of dissent on your team will enhance performance and effectiveness.
Five Things That Being Allergic to the Sun Teaches me About Inclusiveness
Spring is arriving in the Northern Hemisphere. For many folks – especially those of us on the dreary West Coast – the long, sunny days generate plenty of positive vibes. For me, the sunnyness makes me feel quite the opposite because I’m allergic to the sun. This...
The Value of Interdisciplinary and Cross-functional Thinking
Nearly a decade ago I wrote this book review for Active History (reposted below). The idea was for academic books to be reviewed by non academics. While my review holds up okay, I want to underscore the idea that interdisciplinary and cross-functional thinking brings...
Five Ways to be a Better Career Influencer
Last week I joined my fellow CERIC board members in a planning session that focused on the future of our charity, which is purposed with advancing career development in Canada. We fund and publish research, share learning and build community at our annual Cannexus...
Five Ways to Connect Your Workplace
The purpose of so many organizational teams, like innovation labs, and startup ecosystems, like Silicon Valley, is to disrupt the status quo. I’ve written about why we need to disrupt our workplaces and how to do it. The thing is that when the status quo is disrupted...
Three Professional Lessons from Barber Shops
I go to Uptown Barbers in Vancouver’s (Mt. Pleasant ‘hood to get my hair cut every six weeks or so. Marco and Ben – the two barbers who I most often visit – deliver haircuts as good as the banter in their shop. Being able to start and sustain great conversations while...
Why Connected Neighbourhoods Solve Loneliness
Amidst all the crises we’re facing, folks are understandably overlooking the epidemic that nobody is talking about: loneliness. This problem has been plaguing humanity for decades and the pandemic is only making things worse, as some country’s are reporting that one...
Five Ways to be a Human Being at Work
Work puts too much emphasis on process, transactions, technology, outcomes, outputs, and the bottom line. Even though we work with people we really like and respect, we often treat our colleagues differently on the job than we do our friends. Somewhere along the way...
Five Ways to Create Positive Community Collisions
I think that we need to disrupt our social networks by thinking of and engaging with other people. Wharton super-professor Adam Grant recently tweeted that what actually drives prejudice is “in-group love, not out-group hate”. We need to engage and connect with...
How to Find Your Flow
We are a society that is addicted to distra- [checks phone] … what was I writing about? To say the least, we need to find our flow so that we can focus on the most important things in our worklife and create the most value for our communities. According to Cal...
Three Ways to Realize the Potential of Dialogue
THE POTENTIAL OF DIALOGUE Meaningful dialogue is an elusive thing in our communities. Having a respectful conversation with someone about something on which we do not agree isn’t common. Yelling opinions over someone else or building a newsfeed that reinforces your...
Late
Being late is forever. Once we're late for a meeting or a deadline (like a blog post) it can't be undone. Being early lasts for hours and being on time only exists for a few moments. It's tough to always be right on time. So, if being early is pretty easy (we have...
The Usual
Being asked "the usual?" in your favourite coffee shop or restaurant, I think, represents an achievement unlocked. The barista (and a co-owner) of a café near my office used this phrase yesterday and my response was "we did it!" Earning "the usual" combines knowing...
Five Ways to Maximize the Potential of Small Talk
Most of us don’t like small talk because it kinda sucks. For introverts it can be terrifying. For people with big ideas it can be frustrating. For intellectuals it can be boring. During my undergraduate experience I made a friend named Andrew. He was – and still is –...
Why You Should Invest in Boredom
Seth Godin, as he often does, captured our relationship with boredom perfectly in a recent blog post: “…the market has figured out that we simply don’t like to be bored. And so there’s more stimulation, more options and more noise than ever before.” Whether we...
How to Give a Proper Apology
Saying sorry is hard and most of us suck at it. Apologies are uncomfortable, difficult and they can be embarrassing. They can also be healing, transformative and satisfying. They help us have better conversations in our worklife, too. Great apologies are authentic and...
10 Things we Need to Make Work From Anywhere Happen
This Wall Street Journal article was bouncing around the Internet earlier this week. CEOs and Executive Directors from Vancouver to Nairobi to Singapore are evaluating the impact of Covid-19 on work, particularly the emerging reality of our “work from anywhere”...
Finding a Job is Just Like Dating
Around the world, career practitioners continually search for meaningful, engaging and inspiring metaphors that will, among other things, drive clients their way. Powerful metaphors also help people better understand their work search, too. (Friend and colleague)...
Bold Goals for 2022
A new year brings opportunity for reflection and intention-setting. 2021 was one of the most disruptive years in modern memory. 2022 looks poised to get up out of its seat, look 2021 in the face, and say: “hold my beer.” Most of what the year ahead throws at us will...
Three Ideas for Celebrating the Holiday Season
If I’m being honest, there isn’t much to celebrate on the West Coast of Canada these days. The pandemic/endemic is here, restrictions are being implemented, and lockdowns are looming. I feel for everyone who is enthusiastically looking forward to social connections...
Where We Work Should Be Beautiful
When I was in Italy as a member of Vancity’s Co-operative Study Tour we visited a worker co-op called Kilowatt and I fell in love with the space and its people. The organization focuses on consulting, communication and education that serves social innovation, the...
Gratitude
Expressing gratitude reduces stress, elevates wellbeing, and enhances relationships. Our family practices gratitude pretty much every night at the dinner table (we like the "star and a wish" method). Every day I take stock of good things that happened and jot them...
Returning to the Office Will Be Weird
As I wiped down my chair and a nearby desk that I may or may not have touched with various cleaning supplies, I looked up at my colleague, Deanna, and said “okay…returning to the office will be weird for everyone.” We had just finished a walking meeting and were...
Five Ways to Build a Hybrid Mindset
The pandemic has changed work forever. Organizations around the world are adopting hybrid work practices, advancing “work from anywhere” policies, or asking employees to return to the office full-time and, consequently, losing their workforce. We need to reimagine...
Three Ways to Write Your Professional Journal
Writing makes your life better. Fast Company’s Drake Baer has his reasons for why writing cultivates knowledge, wisdom and a powerful personal narrative. For me, writing is the thing that slows down my thinking, sorts out my ideas and goals, and sets clear context for...
Self-Assessment
Self-awareness, which means deeply knowing your values, abilities, style, areas to grow, and impact on others, is a critical capability for work life. Seeing ourselves clearly enhances learning, improves decision making, enables stronger relationships, and makes...
Aspirational Self-Awareness
“You are the way that others see you” is, according to the Gikomba Market vendor who sold me a sarong in 2006, a Maasai proverb. When we seek to understand how others perceive our actions and absorb the impact of our intentions we develop stronger self-awareness. When...
Kindness
Kindness is in all of us. We need more of it in the world today. When I observe fans at sporting events combined social trolls spewing garbage content at everyone from public health officials to women of colour who have opinions/talents, I notice a deficit in...
What a Woodpecker Taught Me About Rethinking Work Life
Recently, I learned a lot about what it means to think again. First, I read Adam Grant’s latest book, Think Again, and it presented compelling arguments for thinking like a scientist. Second, I engaged in a fiasco of problem solving with my neighbours that, in my...
15 Positive Self-Talk Phrases that Will Build Your Confidence
The global pandemic is approximately one year old. Arguably the next few months will be the hardest because we are heading into the final stretch of this hellish marathon. So many of us are hitting walls in our work and life right now. On a recent episode of The Tim...
How to Suspend Judgment
The potential of dialogue Meaningful dialogue is an elusive thing in our communities. Having a respectful conversation with someone about something on which we do not agree isn’t common. Yelling opinions over someone else or building a newsfeed that reinforces your...
Six Coaching Streams that Your Organization Needs
Coaching unlocks potential in people and, when applied effectively at scale in an organization, across communities. Not all managers are naturally great coaches (though they can learn) and not every organization is setup to achieve the desired results from investments...
Three Ways to Evaluate Your Resilience in 2020
Well, it’s been a year. As 2020 winds down, many of us are united in our view that this year can go straight to hell. The global pandemic has taken nearly two million lives and disrupted countless others with unemployment, food insecurity, civil unrest, and sprawling...
Nine Books that Enhanced My Range
Generalists will lead the future of work (it’s already starting). According to pioneers of the movement, Kenneth Mikkelsen and Richard Martin, the generalist “brings together diverse people, synthesizing ideas and practices, addressing the big issues that confront us...
How to have Better Year End Conversations
Performance reviews and year end conversations are ramping up around the world, which makes a lot of us uneasy because the experience can be clunky (HR systems aren’t slick like apps), emotional (money and personal identity are on the line!), and one-sided (managers...
10 Better Things to Say than “Be a Man”
“Be a Man”. We’ve heard the phrase jabbed at a dude caught in a circle of dudes (sometimes women are there, too) who are using peer pressure tactics. Or it’s a classic movie line aimed at motivating male protagonists to realize their potential. Some of us might’ve...
The Potentiality Playlist vol. 1
Music is – and always has been – the fabric of everyday life. Daniel J. Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music argues that, “music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational...
A Personal Reflection on Racism and Anti-Racist Allyship
Sometimes I see an event occur and I marvel at the humanity of people. Other times, I see events occur and I wonder, where is our humanity? The last couple of weeks have been more of the latter. It has been a very difficult time, internalizing and processing all the...
Black Lives Matter
I want to be on the record – on this side of history – as someone who stands against systemic racism and who believes that Black lives matter. This is also a time for guys who look like me to listen and learn. This said, there are some things that I know right now. I...
What I’m Learning from Using Gender-Neutral Pronouns for My Bike
Last year I joined several of my Vancity colleagues in a gender identity workshop delivered by Adrienne Smith, a transgender human rights activist and drug policy lawyer. Adrienne shared simple tips for fostering inclusive communities, especially for folks who...
Three Things I’m Doing to Lead a Remote Team
So there’s this global pandemic happening. While the far-reaching economic and social impacts of COVID-19 are still unknown, the return to normal will take a long time and, when it’s over, we probably won’t live and work the way we did six weeks ago. Like many people...
Five Places to Find Wisdom and Ideation in Your Community
Communities are full of knowledge and creativity. When we take out our earbuds, look up from our phones and deeply listen to our neighbours, baristas and Lyft drivers we can gather information and insights that just might enhance our work and lives. Here are five...
7 Ways to Make Meetings More Awesome
The purpose of meetings is for people to come together to create shared value – this could mean discussing ideas for organizational changes, improving communications or creating family rules. I have a hunch that, a few times in your career, you’ve attended a bad...
Three Ways the 5AM Club is Making Me a Better Parent
Waking up early has long been a tenet of leadership guru Robin Sharma. In his recent book, The 5AM Club, he outlines tactics for making mornings active, focused and super productive – “own your morning, elevate your life” is a much repeated phrase in the book. Over...
Five Questions to Ask Yourself About Minimalism
Minimalism means elevating the things that matter most in our lives and removing what distracts us from our true purpose. Yesterday was Christmas and many of us are probably reflecting on over indulgences and, perhaps, trying to find some quiet time after all the...
Why You Should Embrace Boredom
Many of us are addicted to distraction. We click between multiple screens with multiple apps with multiple tabs while our mobile device streams a podcast in the background. Every few minutes we will pick up our phone to text a friend and then snap a photo and blast a...
Three Ways to Relate to Fundamentally Different People
Last month our book club tackled Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The book gave us an illuminating look at moral and evolutionary psychology, exploring the moral pillars that underpin the morality of people...
Five Ways to Support a Partner in Professional Trouble
It happens from time to time. Your partner comes home from work defeated. A project went off the rails, they failed to hit their annual target, or were fired after making a big mistake that cost their organization big bucks. In situations like these, being empathetic...
Five Simple Recovery Tactics for Your Wellness Plan
It’s mental health week. If you’re like me, you definitely need more hours in the day, probably use the word “busy” to answer the “how’s it going?” small-talk-question, and there’s a strong possibility that you feel overwhelmed. All leaders need self-care. When people...
Five Energizer Activities for Introverts
I share an office with an awesome colleague named Kristin who is an introverted human being. That means that she gets most of her energy from internal feelings as opposed to external sources of stimulation. At times, “energizer” or “icebreaker” activities leave her...
Seven Strategies for Creating an Awesome Vision
Sharing a compelling vision for your organization’s year ahead, your team’s work priorities or your family’s vacation is a differentiator. When a community clearly understands why something is happening and how it will unfold, shit gets done and people have fun doing...
Five More Tips For Asking Great Questions
Great questions inspire better conversations. My book club recently read Basketball (and Other Things) by Shea Serrano, which seeks to ask and answer approximately 33 questions about, you guessed it, basketball and other topics, such as action movies and...
Three Ways to Break Your Bias
Vancity Credit Union is completing a month of learning about unconscious bias. Partnering with the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI), all employees are completing online learning and discussing bias within teams. A quick Google search will reveal dozens of articles...
Three Ways to Sustain Thanksgiving Gratitude
Thanksgiving is my favourite holiday and it just happened. In addition to the spectacular food and drink (thanks, Auntie Sharon and Uncle John!), I love spending time reflecting with my community about what makes us thankful. Expressing gratitude enhances human...
Why You Should Spend Less Time on Social Media
Social media is a wonderful medium for connecting and informing communities. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, however, ask for too much of our time, erode our relationships, and often cause us to be addicted to the distraction of push notifications and...
Three Things You Can Say to Enhance Collaboration
Language is an amazing thing. What we say and how we say it reflects who we are and what we value. Whether you are speaking out of habit or stepping out of your comfort zone to make a point, the words that you use matter. In the past few months I've noticed some...
The Potentiality’s Summer Reading List
Summer time means reading time. Some folks dig into books at the beach while soaking up sunshine and others soak in literature under a blanket in a dark, air conditioned basement. Others enjoy audiobooks during long or meandering road trips. My favourite place to read...
How to Give Feedback
A focus of this blog is to help you have better conversations. Enhancing dialogue at work, in classrooms and throughout neighbourhoods makes our communities more engaged, diverse and healthier. Accepting and offering feedback are essential elements of great...
How to Ask for Feedback
A focus of this blog is to help you have better conversations. Enhancing dialogue makes our communities more engaged, diverse and healthier. Accepting and offering feedback are essential elements of great conversations. Giving and receiving praise or criticism isn’t...
Five Professional Lessons from a Negative Customer Experience
For my family, 2016 ended with a less-than-pleasant travel experience with BC Ferries to my family home in Merville on Vancouver Island. We encountered poor customer service a lot and, as we consider the service that we deliver in our work every day, there is a lot...
Four Tips for Dealing with Awkward Holiday Conversations
Holidays bring families from all over the country and world together. This can sometimes be recipes for awkwardness when your gun-toting, freedom loving, conservative uncle breaks bread with your gay, socialist brother. The inevitable train wreck of a...
How to Compromise
Meaningful dialogue is an elusive thing in our communities. Having a respectful conversation with someone about something on which we do not agree isn’t common. Yelling opinions over someone else or building a newsfeed that reinforces your worldview are common in a...
How to be a Good Listener
THE POTENTIAL OF DIALOGUE Meaningful dialogue is an elusive thing in our communities. Having a respectful conversation with someone about something on which we do not agree isn’t common. Yelling opinions over someone else or building a newsfeed that reinforces your...
What I am Learning from Dinner Conversations about Gratitude
Having dinner together as a family is one of the simplest things that you can do to build a healthy community at home. Whether you share a meal with one person or twenty, taking time together to reflect on our experiences enhances everything from happiness to...
Four Tips For Asking Great Questions
Asking good questions is an important quality of a friend, a partner and a co-worker. It’s also particularly helpful in a work setting. Whether you are meeting with colleagues or attending your monthly board meeting, asking good and insightful questions without fear...
In Praise of Silence and “Stillness”
We are bombarded by media and noise all the time. On the bus, many of us are plugged in like zombies, imbibing a steady stream of google music and podcasts in a desperate last ditch effort to battle back the silence (and accompanying boredom) of a long ride home. At...
Five Ways to Achieve Focus Through Listening
I’m on a journey to become a better listener. This journey will make me a better leader, dad and partner/friend. For the most part, my listening skills are fine; this said, I am an enthusiastic talker who loves to fill silences with questions, anecdotes and...
Five Steps for Becoming a Great Listener
You and your partner are locked in verbal battle. No matter how you express it, they don’t seem to get it. Instead they seem to be waiting for the last word to come out of your mouth so that they can jump in with their counterpoint. It pisses you off. You aren’t able...
How Talking to Strangers will Enrich Your Career
On Saturday I celebrated the life of my grandmother, Virginia. One of the themes from her memorial service was how my grandma loved having conversations with anyone and everyone about anything and everything. So, I thought it fitting to write about how talking to...
How to Maximize the Art of Reflection
Yesterday was Remembrance Day in Canada. It’s specifically designed for people to reflect on conflict, specifically the First World War, and make meaning of the events of 1914-1918 in the context of our lives today. While somber, I love Remembrance Day because, at its...
Five Tips for Having Difficult Conversations
The difficult conversations in our work and personal lives are challenging. Sometimes it is easier to veil the truth of what you want to say in generalizations to soften the blow and sometimes people outright avoid a conversation altogether. Being able to directly...
Building Community with #theGoodMoneytalks
Today is Vancity Member Day at The Fair at the PNE and I’m excited to focus this article on building community with #theGoodMoneytalks because you can experience them at the PNE today! Inspired by dinner table conversations, #theGoodMoneytalks are focused on sharing...
Three Better Questions than “So what do you do?”
"So what do you do?" Recently, I read an article by 99u’s Sarah Kathleen Peck called, “Answering the Dreaded ‘So what do you do?’ Question.” Amazing. For nearly a decade, Kurt Heinrich and I have pioneered a micro-social-engineering initiative designed to eliminate...
Three Tips for Engaging Elevator Conversations
Engaging Elevator Conversations Conversations in elevators can be some of the most uncomfortable and awkward examples of human communication. This article will provide you with three tips for engaging elevator conversations. Three months ago I joined the legions of...
Five Tips for Engaging Online Communities
After a month of intense campaigning, The Potentiality earned the third most votes in CERIC’s National Career Challenge. Our submission, Career Swap, finished ahead of a university, several college career centres as well as a number of community-based organizations....
How to Give an Awesome Compliment
People often tell me that I’m generous with praise. Hey, you’re doing an absolutely fantastic job of reading this blog post, by the way. See, I know how to give an awesome compliment! People’s assessment of my complimenting nature is either meant as critical feedback...
Kick it Old School with Phone Calls, Not Email
We live in a world of emails and text messages. And frequently our electronic correspondence can ignite conflict due to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of linguistic and non-verbal signs that have evolved in cultures over thousands of years. It’s an issue that,...
bazinga! How Technology Creates a Sense of Community in Condos
Case Study – bazinga! Helps Condo Communities Reach Their Potential
What to Say When You Just Don’t Know
You’d be surprised by the number of people who show up to a meeting without reading the agenda, minutes or considering the possible topics of discussion.
Pitching a News Story: The Phone is Your Best Friend
In this email saturated world, it’s difficult to penetrate the din and connect with a journalist about your story idea. Granted, you probably have a great idea that includes many news elements or is a perfect fit for the media you’re pitching, but if you aren’t able to communicate it effectively to your targeted audience, your idea will sit by itself on your blog and/or be discussed amongst your colleagues around the water cooler.
Developing Successful Storytellers
This is a story about stories and storytelling. Its purpose is to inspire you to, first, give a copy of your favourite children’s book to a kid and, second, support A Good Book Drive if you live in Vancouver. Why? Because stories are the most powerful communications tool that we, as humans, have at our disposal.
Communicating to Different Media
There are many stories out there. Some are so important that every media outlet in your area, region or country will want to cover them. Other stories are of more limited interest to particular media groups. Identifying which stories will be attractive to which media will save you a great deal of time when it comes to communicating your idea. It can also significantly aid you in the development of your story pitch and allow you to be much more convincing when you are on the phone speaking with a journalist or producer. Here are some simple things to consider when you are deciding what, and for whom, is newsworthy.