The focus of the book was the importance of compassion and authenticity, while this new chapter is all about implementation, with specific advice on how to be compassionate and authentic in your day-to-day life. The twenty-minute podcast is a simple, practical guide to building better relationships at work and at home, with answers to these reader questions:
What can I do to deepen relationships?
How can I feel comfortable with people of different backgrounds, tastes, and values?
How do I help others feel safe to share their lives with me?
What habits might I establish to reduce loneliness and build community?
Tony recommends these resources for further study and practice.
Are you a business owner thinking about whether coaching might improve the performance of your COO or another key executive? My answer is, “Yes,” in most cases, but only if the CEO is being coached. I’ve learned the hard way over the years that I can have a major, enduring impact with a COO or other direct report only when I am also coaching the CEO. I believe this is generally the case with true executive coaches.1
Any growth or development on the part of a subordinate that is not shared by the boss is likely to have two unwanted effects. First, the boss’s unchanged behavior will undermine and thwart the direct report’s new behavior. Second, the developing key executive will either abandon the changes or judge the boss to be the bigger problem and leave. As one blunt coach said to a prospect, “If I fix your VP without you moving in the same direction, you will become the problem.”
Stay away from inspiring stores of genius leaders such as Steve Jobs, Harold Geneen, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc. They are unique, lucky, and extraordinarily difficult to work with. They certainly were not copying anyone. Anyone attempting to copy them is likely to cause disasters both financial and personal.
These recommendations for management training, as with executive coaching, require the ultimate leader and influencer (you, the CEO/Owner) to learn and practice the same techniques.
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1 I say true executive coaches because, these days, every consultant, trainer, and even many salespeople now call themselves coaches. That’s a topic for another post.
In Chapter 15, Who Has the Helm, the main character learns about the childish tactics that persist into adulthood and sometimes take control of our actions. His wife also shares the counterintuitive response that takes away their power over us.
Click here to download the free .pdf. No registration, no pitch, just a gift. Read it and reap.
If you took a business or economics course in the past quarter-century, you were probably taught that the sole purpose of a corporation is to return cash to its shareholders. This widely accepted and seldom challenged idea is a dangerous innovation from the 1960s that radically departs from the centuries-long social contract under which corporations were invented, created, and proliferated. This relatively recent change is responsible for many harmful corporate decisions and disastrous government policies. It is well past time voters and shareholders got our corporations back on their more beneficial and benevolent track.
I could lay out all the historical details and legal arguments here, but I’ve already made the case in a much more accessible and entertaining form. Chapter eight of my first novel, Crimes of Cunning, covers it thoroughly. To help inform the public, I am making that chapter available for free, right here.
I love this interview with professional athlete and philosophy professor Nick Riggle.
The high five is actually a recognition of the achievement of mutual appreciation. It’s a symbol of, “Hey, I recognize you as an individual, and you recognize me.”
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Awesomeness is about creating communities of mutually appreciative individuals … It’s not a community where we all have to share the same values, or we all have to be Christian, or we all have to support a certain political candidate. It’s a more forgiving and appreciative community…. [it] allows us to stand out but stand together.
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The badass just owns shit, right? What they choose to do with their life, they do it with expertise and confidence. … tackling what you set out to do with your life, and doing it with confidence and a kind of presentational verve.
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The other category [of non-starter] is the fake-ass person. They’re someone who seems to take up the social opening, seems to be presenting their individuality… But in fact, they’re faking it. They’re not actually presenting who they are. This relation of mutual appreciation, what I call co-personhood, can’t be formed, because they’re presenting a fake persona.
Don’t just find a mentor. Allow yourself to be mentored.
Be humble enough to listen.
You don’t have to ship everything.
Feel free to dabble & play. Not everything you make needs to ship. Some things you do for you.
Chaos is okay.
Time is the soil in which great ideas grow.
Stick with it & be willing to put it to the side now and then.
Be mindful of with whom you spend time & at what activity.
Money is a means not the end.
Good to have. Bad to chase.
Fancy is easy. Simple is hard.
Simplification is an art form: it requires a knack for excising everything from a problem except what makes it interesting.
The less marketing you need, the better your idea or product probably is.
Don’t oversell to the doubts and indifferent; put your energy into making something you find interesting.
Value freedom over status.
Shannon, pursued projects that might have caused others embarrassment, engaged questions that seemed trivial or minor, then managed to wring the breakthroughs out of them.
Don’t look for inspiration. Look for irritation. Then, do the work.
Crimes of Cunning exposes the roots of the worst practices common in today’s big company cultures. Enjoy the ride as his characters cope, complain, and —ultimately— grow.
We sought out our executive coach, Tony, to show us the most strategic, effective way to design our success. A business coach will help you make the right moves at that right times consistently; it’s a precise recipe for getting ahead. Our decision to partner with an executive coach has been a very fruitful investment. By working with Tony, we were able to meet our ten-year business goal in three years. That’s the power of having an expert help you structure your decisions and career movements on a regular basis. Having a career coach isn’t a luxury; it’s smart business and smart living.
Does your job trigger primitive survival instincts? My book presents alternatives.
Those best equipped to compete mercilessly for food, ward off any threat, dominate territory, and seek safety naturally passed along their genes, so these self-centered impulses could only intensify. But sometime after mammals appeared, they evolved what neuroscientists call the limbic system, perhaps about 120 million years ago. Formed over the core brain derived from the reptiles, the limbic system motivated all sorts of new behaviors, including the protection and nurture of young as well as the formation of alliances with other individuals that were invaluable in the struggle to survive. And so, for the first time, sentient beings possessed the capacity to cherish and care for creatures other than themselves.
Although these limbic emotions would never be as strong as the ‘me first’ drives still issuing from our reptilian core, we humans have evolved a substantial hard-wiring for empathy for other creatures, and especially for our fellow humans.
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