Make the furniture work for you. A lot of people take the arrangement of furniture in a conference room or office for granted, like it put itself there. More than likely, it was either left that way by the people in the room before you, or a team of people arranged it according to a …

Why intention matters (part 512)—   Because we can see it on your face, read it in your body, and hear it in your voice. You tell us what is really going on with you, and boy is it fascinating!   I was coaching a woman recently, let’s call her Laura,  who had been asked …

Typically my coaching philosophy begins with the inside—what’s going on that is resulting in this behavior or symptom?   But sometimes outside-in works better. By standing up straighter, you can feel more confident. By making eye contact, you can generate connection.   It doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all. Try it on and see what works …

Last week, in the U.S., we had an election.  So much of what I write about and what we coach centers around intention—making a choice to show up in a certain way, to affect people, to move them or make a change.   Nothing is more intentional than voting—that is, if you want it to …

Most of the people I coach have a horror of failure. They set up their lives to avoid failing, to insulate themselves from any possibility that they might be seen being less than terrific at something.   Now, if you asked them, “what are some uses of failure? what’s it good for? why do we …

My team got to lead one of our favorite workshops today—Better Communication Through Improvisation. We were working with leaders from a hospital, department heads from all over the organization.   As so often happens with this particular workshop, when we were introduced and the word “improvisation” came up, a variety of interesting faces and body …

On my way to work this morning, I stopped at a street blocked off by emergency vehicles, and saw first responders giving CPR to someone in the small park nearby. I turned off my radio as I sat at the light, next to yet quite part of this scene taking place. I was struck by …

It’s Election Day in the United States, and that calls for some good old fashioned deep breaths. Fortunately, Neela has your back–

There’s a big misconception about what actors do. It’s this: some people think that the actor’s job is to feel feelings, when the actor’s job is actually to do something that makes the audience feel feelings. What can actors do? Aren’t they just saying lines someone else wrote? Yes. This is why acting is so …

I’ve borrowed this maxim from Seth Godin (https://seths.blog/.)   The tricky bit about this is that the “hard part” is really good at misdirection. Have you ever needed to work on a big project for work, but instead you clean out your garage? It’s easy to make the argument that cleaning out the garage is …