Do you have, get, make time to think?
Or is your head mainly a six-lane highway full of traffic and trucks trying to make their way through day in and day out?
The highway metaphor and the cultural components from the book More Time to Think by Nancy Kline.
Proverbial highways with trucks that create a constant noise always seem distracting, preventing you from focusing. … Read the rest
Over the past weeks, I’ve had three conversations where my conversation partner mentioned the phrase:
“We’ve set this person up for failure.”
Hiring manager
Otherwise said, we’ve failed ourselves to set this person up for success.
But that sentence you won’t hear very often. Both sentences imply the same, but only one puts the blame directly on the people responsible for this person’s success.… Read the rest
Last Friday, I started the day with a slight concern that it was going to be one of those days when you ask yourself at the end of the day:
“What did I actually accomplish today?”
I woke up a bit restless.
I knew I had set pretty aggressive goals for the day.… Read the rest
Have you found your talent yet?
If I learned one thing (there were more lessons) from my fellow TED talk speaker Luk de Wulf, it would be that we all have a talent for something.
Luk’s point is that you can’t start early enough in life finding, building, and enjoying your talents.… Read the rest
There’s a 40% rule.
It’s been out there already for a long time, but I only heard about the 40% rule last week.
It comes out of a book about navy seals. I’m not a fan of navy seals, so books about navy seals don’t interest me that much.
When I think about navy seals, I imagine tough guys in the army, and then I can’t help to think about Jack Nicholson.… Read the rest
Everyone is an alien somewhere.
And sometimes those aliens come together in a football stadium to be entertained for two + hours by a rock band.
That happened to my wife and me a few weeks ago in Frankfurt, Germany. A Santa gift that still needed to be redeemed.
The band is Coldplay, and the tour name is “Music of the Spheres.”… Read the rest
“If you don’t like how things are, change it. You are not a tree.”
Jim Rohn
I took a liking recently to the quotes from Jim Rohn. At the risk of offending someone, I had never heard of Jim until a few months ago.
Thanks to the algorithm of Instagram, one of his quotes showed up, which was enough reason to do a little more research.… Read the rest
Did you have a good night’s sleep last night?
Did anything that’s going on now prevent you from sleeping well? Are you generally sleeping well, or does mental chatter influence the quality of your sleep.
Some people always sleep well, no matter what’s going on in their life. I’m not that person.… Read the rest
Happy New Year!
A new year full of opportunity. I hope that you’ll be able to see the possibilities for you, and more importantly, you will be able to capitalize on them.
We, human beings, like the nature of (hard) transitions, such as the start of a new year.
It allows us to start all over again with a clean slate.… Read the rest
Sunday was a memorable day for Dutch sports.
Which doesn’t mean it was all positive. Memorable does not imply it’s always good news.
Max Verstappen won the Austrian F1 Grand Prix and extended his lead in the championship.
Yesterday the health minister in the Czech Republic got fired.
The official message was that he resigned, but everyone knows he was not aligned with the prime minister on the Covid vaccination strategy.
Up to the next health minister. Number four in one year’s time.
Number one ‘resigned’ because he didn’t handle the first wave well (lowest numbers in the EU).… Read the rest
Did you ever walk into a meeting with people you never met before, and you felt immediately something was off?
Nobody had said a word yet, and still, you knew what you were experiencing wasn’t right.
Then, well into the meeting, you suddenly realize what’s going on.
People are afraid to say what they’re thinking.… Read the rest
When we lived in Huntersville, North Carolina, I went to the gym twice per week before work. My schedule alternated from cardio to swimming to a good strength session with Mike, my fitness trainer.
Life was good.
Except in January.
I remember going to the gym on the first working day in January, and the place was packed.… Read the rest
When you give a TED talk, you get 18 minutes to share your message. You get on your red dot, and when you start your talk, a big clock you can’t miss starts counting down. The good news is that you know this so that you can prepare for it.
When I prepared for my TED talk, I had divided my text into eight blocks.… Read the rest
“Most people don’t dream anymore.”
A quote from the book ‘Good leaders ask great questions’ by John C. Maxwell. The author writes about the fact that many people have settled and gave up on the dreams they once had.
My question to you is whether you are still dreaming?
Are there any dreams you have not accomplished in your life that you would like to take on one day?… Read the rest
Yesterday evening Bayern Munich won the Champions League edition 2020. No worries, I’m not going to talk about football (soccer) in my blog. I’m just starting the blog of this week with a simple statement: the team that plays most like a TEAM wins.
You can build a team of stars, hoping that their quality, in the end, will prevail for the win, but more often than not, it’s the best team and not the group of best players going home with the trophy.… Read the rest
In my last two blog posts, I wrote about conditions that needed to be present for teams to maximize the potential for robust, sustainable, high performance.
First, a team needs to invest time to get to know each other well. Leaders need to build a foundation where team members trust each other.… Read the rest
Are you finding yourself in a healthy debate now and then? A fierce conversation between people who passionately fight for what they believe? Fierce to the extent that it may look to an outsider you’re fighting with your conversation partner. And when the conversation is over, you leave the room shoulder to shoulder as if nothing ever happened.… Read the rest
Mindset is a key differentiator between success or failure. Without the right mindset, it’s highly unlikely that we accomplish our dreams and ambitions. But mindset is not just a matter of ‘just do it’. We can influence our mindset and make it easier to achieve what we’ve set to achieve.
What will not change is that success always starts with a first step.… Read the rest
What will your future look like?
“Never waste a good crisis”, Winston Churchill once famously said. If COVID-19 has proven one thing to all of us, we need to be prepared for change at any point in time. Change always presents opportunities. The question is whether we’re open to it and ready to embrace and act on it.… Read the rest
