Look, I get it. January rolls around and suddenly everyone’s a different person (or wants to be). You’re going to connect with all those contacts you always say you will, finally get organized personally and professionally, and go to the gym five days a week – and this time it’s all going to stick. The problem is that by February, maybe March if you’re stubborn, you’re right back where you started, on the same treadmill of life and nothing has really changed. The issue is that a New Year’s resolution and actual sustainable change are two completely different things.

A…
Continue Reading Resolution vs. Reality: Building Change That Actually Sticks

Look, I’ve seen it a so many times. A client sits across from me, eager to close a deal or settle a dispute, convinced that this deal is the only way or is that breakthrough they’ve been chasing. The terms are terrible. The other side is asking for everything and giving nothing. But they’re ready to sign anyway because walking away feels like failure. But walking away from a bad deal isn’t failure, it’s good business sense. No deal is almost always better than a bad deal, and if you don’t internalize this principle, at some point in your career you’re going…
Continue Reading No deal is better than a bad deal

The fastest way to lose credibility is to treat your first thought as your final answer. You’re in a meeting, someone asks a complex question, and your brain immediately serves up a response. It feels right. It sounds confident. And it’s probably wrong. The nightmare isn’t that you had the thought—it’s that you believed it without scrutiny and shared it. Professionals who confuse thinking with knowing make decisions on hunches, give advice based on assumptions, and wonder why things blow up later.

Your initial reaction to a problem is rarely your best analysis. That gut feeling about what a contract…
Continue Reading Don’t believe everything you think

Beginning in 2014, many of you probably read my blog regarding having a checkup for you and, if you have one, your business. This does not involve the doctor, but it does involve all of the other professionals in your personal and business life. Based on the positive feedback, I have made this an annual tradition. I originally made this post the week between Christmas and New Year’s but that’s too late, which is why I now share this a few weeks prior to the end of the year to give you time to take action and look into possible…
Continue Reading The 2025 version of why it’s time for an annual check up for you and your company

Almost nobody hears too many sincere compliments. We’re all walking around with positive thoughts about colleagues, clients, and people in our professional circles, but we keep most of them to ourselves. It’s as if there’s some invisible force field that stops us from just saying what we’re thinking when we appreciate someone.

The solution is simple. Compliment people to their face, and then compliment them behind their back. When you think something nice about someone’s work, their judgment, or just their presence, say it right then. “It’s always fun to see you” or “You handled that situation really well” or…
Continue Reading What We Think But Don’t Say

We’ve all heard countless times that listening is a lost art, an undervalued skill that could transform our businesses and relationships if only we’d slow down and truly hear what others are saying. Management books devote chapters to the practice of being present and attentive. And they’re right to do so—listening matters enormously. But while we’ve been busy diagnosing one side of the communication equation, we’ve completely overlooked its equally essential counterpart, which is candor.

We worry about hurting feelings, damaging relationships, or creating legal exposure. We’ve built entire industries around softening our words, from HR compliance training that teaches…
Continue Reading Candor is the other half of communication that is often forgotten

Confidence is the most valuable currency in business, but most people trade in counterfeit bills. It’s easy to mistake volume for conviction and swagger for certainty, and later watch that same person crater when the pressure actually arrives. Real confidence isn’t about never showing weakness. It’s about knowing your value so thoroughly that you don’t need to perform it every minute of every meeting or day.

People with confidence show themselves in how someone handles status. I’m talking about people who can laugh when they’re the punchline, who can take a younger co-worker’s criticism of their strategy without getting defensive,…
Continue Reading The Currency of Confidence in Real Leaders

Many people secretly believe that other people should just know what we’re thinking. When your co-worker doesn’t acknowledge your contribution in a meeting or when your client appears to be ignoring your carefully crafted advice, it’s natural to feel slighted. The narrative that forms in your head is compelling and feels true: they don’t care about you, they don’t respect you, or worse, they’re deliberately undermining you. But in these situations, your focus is on the wrong participant in the meeting or conversation.

The narrative focusing on others is almost always wrong. The fact is that they simply have no…
Continue Reading Nobody Can Read Your Mind (And That’s Okay)

One lesson that separates the truly successful from the perpetually frustrated is the understanding that your ego is the biggest obstacle standing between you and your goals. Harry Truman supposedly said, “You can get anywhere you want in life as long as you don’t care who gets the credit,” and nowhere is this more true than in the world of business.

Most professionals have been in a situation where someone they work for took credit for their work. For most, the first instinct is outrage. To pour everything into a project and watch someone else bask in the praise is…
Continue Reading The power of letting go and why giving credit where credit is due matters

Professionals who achieve lasting professional success all share something fundamental: they’ve learned to embrace discomfort as a constant companion rather than an obstacle to avoid. Every meaningful career milestone I’ve witnessed has required someone to lean into uncertainty and stay there long enough to see it through.

The uncomfortable truth about building a career worth having is that comfort and growth occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. When you’re comfortable, you’re maintaining. When you’re growing, you’re stretching beyond what feels natural and manageable. It’s moments of acute discomfort that are precisely where professional transformation happens. Those who plateaued aren’t less…
Continue Reading Discomfort is the Price of Admission to a Meaningful Life

Two people can look at the exact same contract, the same set of facts, the same business opportunity, and come away with completely different interpretations. It’s not that one person is right and the other is wrong. It’s that we’re all viewing the world through the unique filter of our own experiences, biases, and beliefs. The old saying holds true: we don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.

Think about the last time you sat across the table from someone you were negotiating with such as opposing counsel, a potential business partner, or…
Continue Reading Through the Lens of Experience: Why Your Worldview Shapes Your Professional Reality

The most expensive problems my clients face aren’t complex or sophisticated contract disputes. They’re the conversations that never happened. The partner who should have been confronted about their underperformance three years ago. The vendor relationship that limped along burning money because nobody wanted the discomfort of renegotiating terms. The employee whose problematic behavior metastasized into a toxic workplace because management kept hoping it would resolve itself. These situations started small and could have been manageable, and fixable with a single uncomfortable conversation.

Conflict avoidance in professional settings doesn’t keep the peace. It creates a slowly spreading rot that corrupts every…
Continue Reading The Eight Conversations Between You and Success

John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach, once observed that “It’s the things that you learn after you know it all that count.” This profound insight strikes at the heart of a dangerous trap that ensnares countless professionals and business leaders: the illusion of complete knowledge. In offices and boardrooms across America, executives often reach a point where they believe their experience has taught them everything they need to know about their industry, their market, or their craft. This moment of perceived mastery becomes the very threshold where real learning begins—and where many careers either flourish or stagnate.

The business…
Continue Reading The Wisdom After Certainty: A Lesson for Modern Business