Learning how to say no is one of the best ways to reduce your stress level. Use it to protect your personal time and resources, and to avoid the resentment you feel when you allow yourself to be pushed into saying yes. Learn it and use it.
Think how you feel when you agree to do [...]

Speaking up to anyone in authority can be difficult and high risk. If you get it wrong, it could be career limiting. But it may be the only way to remove feelings of frustration and dis-empowerment at work and can be a powerful way to increase your resilience.
One of the conversations that most people avoid is asking [...]

The best time to hold a difficult conversation is now! The only reason to delay is so you have time to defuse your emotions and make a plan for what you will say. Then it’s time to talk.
When we don’t speak up, problems don’t go away. People continue to perform poorly and behave badly. Relationships [...]

People often say they make difficult conversations even more difficult by becoming emotional; and later regretting, deeply, what they have said. Expressing our feelings is not easy, and most of us have learned to be very cautious, scared even, about doing it: scared of the negative reaction we might cause, scared that we’ll look foolish [...]

Anytime is a good time to think about how straight you talk and how you typically handle difficult conversations. Many of us say we talk straight, and we genuinely think we talk straight. But how straight do you really talk?
Check yourself out by scoring each item on a 10 point scale.
I am confident in my [...]

Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, there’s one thing you can do to sway things in your favour. You can speak up when others are driving you crazy.
People drive you crazy even when you are on holiday.
Your mother in law has been critical of you all through the holidays.
A partner [...]

In every relationship there are issues that are difficult to talk about; his mother, her ex-husband, money, how to raise children. At work it is difficult to talk about poor performance or to confront issues of disrespect or insubordination. Sometimes we don’t talk about these things at all because they are too sensitive, we’re too [...]

There’s scarcely a family that, at one time or another, has not had to deal with a squabble between family members. As the holiday season approaches and more family gatherings take place, there is a danger that these squabbles can become full scale wars.
The classical problems with in-laws are probably the most well known, and [...]

That’s the question we would all like an honest answer to!
But how many of us feel that we get it; and how many of us as supervisors and managers can say that we truly and without exception, give our people honest answers?
Managers dread the annual performance appraisal interview. It’s time consuming. It can involve conflict. [...]