Welcome to my blog!

I'm thrilled to have you here.

This is a place where I share my thoughts, insights, and experiences on a variety of topics.

From negotiation to personal development, I write about the things that I'm passionate about and that

I think will interest and inspire my readers.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the read.

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The Ripple Effect of Gratitude: Small Gestures, Big Impact

I love the holiday season. Why does it sometimes
give us license to be kind to the people around us? In our world, which often seems consumed by the daily rush and chaos, it's easy to overlook the power of gratitude and the positive impact small gestures can have. Even when I hear stories from others, I become inspired.

Added Responsibilities: Where Stress Ends and Success Begins

This week, I had a client call for an urgent consultation. Her peer resigned, and her boss told her she would take on his responsibility and keep her current role and responsibilities. At the moment, it felt like a vote of confidence, and she was reluctant to say no.

Rethinking High-Stakes Situations: A Dance, Not A Fight

We often encounter high-stakes situations that demand our attention and require careful navigation. We believe these occasions are limited encounters but integral to our lives. When considering a situation high stakes, we can create a plan that decreases the risks and allows us to move through with a confident approach to find mutually beneficial outcomes.

How Simple Comments Can Shape Careers

Traci unwittingly set me on the path to writing my book. I had coached her as she was trying to land a senior executive role. It was a stressful negotiation. We had only met via phone, and on our third and final call, she said, "You say a lot so quickly. You should write a book."

Unlocking Your Abundance:

Daily Habits for Professional Success by Giving

Having an abundance mindset sounds easy on paper, but it is a challenge in practice. In our fast-paced, competitive world, it's natural to slip into a scarcity mindset when uncertainty and our confidence is shaken.

Silence: A Leadership Tool for Delegation and Self-Sufficiency

Silence is an overlooked yet remarkably potent resource for exceptional leadership and negotiation. It is a tool that can propel your team toward greater self-sufficiency and creativity.
Silence as a form of delegation transforms leaders from mere bosses into inspiring coaches, creating an environment where ideas flourish and growth becomes self-generating.

4 Mind-Blowing Shifts: My Best Friend's Secrets to Epic Success!

Dawn let slip something that caught my attention: "Your book, I didn't expect much since I'm not a 'business person'. But I've made a few tweaks that have surprisingly made a big difference."

Is Your But Getting in Your Way?

Our buts get in the way. And sometimes, we don't even notice them because they become a way of rationalizing how we should challenge ourselves or become a more effective leader.

Secrets of Negotiation Success

When you take the time to prepare, you increase your chances of achieving your desired outcome and boost your confidence in navigating unexpected situations.

Four Cornerstones to Becoming your Extraordinary Leader

Gallup outlines four areas of focus that we need to use when supporting and inspiring our teams. I wanted to share the Gallup insights and how they landed for me.

Leverage Goggles

Having leverage goggles makes a person superhuman. When we anticipate all of the aspects of leverage, we give ourselves an additional dimension to help us see the moves to make.

Why You Need to Stop "Should-ing" Yourself

85% of us experience self-doubt daily. We tend to compare ourselves to others who seem confident without realizing that they, too, experience self-doubt.

Unlocking Success: The Power

of Asking Open-Ended Questions

In coaching, asking seven-word or less open-ended questions can help individuals solidify their responses, gather information, and arrive at a solution for their circumstances.

Career Level-Up Dilemma:

Plain, Frosting or Sprinkles

It is great to be a cupcake, but if you want to push yourself to see what is possible, pick a frosting, and put the sprinkles on top to press to your potential. Take your career into your own hands. If you don't, who will?

The Art of Leveraging the Meeting Before the Meeting

It is essential to consider all individuals, their interests, and what is important to them politically. Being strategic when working with a collection of individuals is especially important.

Leverage has a Bad Rap

Leverage is misunderstood and commonly gets a bad rap. Leverage can be a weapon, but it can also be a tool to uncover additional values that are important to the other party or us. Leverage creates options for all parties

Practice Negotiation - For Your Mom

On Monday, my Mom had a stroke. She is doing well and recovering. It made me once again see how important feeling comfortable with negotiation is so I thought I would share a story that is a part of my world.

Susie with a Microphone

Negotiation strategies help us every day as we are constantly facing high-stakes situations. We may need to realize it because we often assume that high stakes are associated with specific conditions.

Negotiate like an Egyptian

Egypt is where negotiation is expected and normalized in every transaction for goods with the vendors. It made me uncomfortable to know that any item I would purchase would take negotiation. But when I passed the vendor outside the ancient temple selling hats, I decided to try.

3 Ways to be a Better Human

by Leveraging Silence

Practicing silence makes us better humans. That may seem a bit overstated, but it is true. I learned to stay silent during an intense negotiation by focusing in my head and repeating,

“the first one who talks loses.”

7 Power Skills that will

Catapult your Career

Based on 30 years of executive experience, I realized that in addition to competency in one’s area of expertise, there are seven skills that rising leaders need to master for career success.

Quick Prep is a Quick Tip

I learned that preparation for every meeting was essential. Preparation can create a sort of negotiating-with-yourself phenomenon. You can convince yourself that the problem you are solving has changed. The path to the solution then changes.

Your Business Card, your

Source of Confidence?

We can borrow confidence from the people and circumstances around us. But we also need to shift our internal dialog to stoke our own confidence. We seem to be great at providing this for others, but why don’t we do it for ourselves?

Don’t Listen to Feedback

Feedback and growth are directly related. But all feedback is not equal. Sometimes you should make note of it so that you can hear it at the right time when you can take from it the most impactful insights for you.

10 Networking Essentials that

will Put you in the Driver's Seat!

Networking can be remarkably frustrating but it can also open doors, create connections, increase career confidence and provide insights for future career decisions.

Finding Purpose

Finding your purpose should not be a check-the-goal box toward a purpose statement. It is noticing the way you live in doing what brings passion and energy. Your purpose encapsulates the things that bring you energy, passion, and meaning.

Wake Up! Wake Up!

It's FINALS Week!

Finals week is a marker, a point where we can look at what we have accomplished, get a gauge to tell us where we stand, and a chance to evaluate which new courses are the best for the upcoming semester.

Workplace Politics,

like Driving on a Highway

Typically, workplace politics are defined as negative because they can cause petty game playing and behaviors that you might label as passive-aggressive. But the truth is that politics can be

incredibly positive and productive.

Struggle Inspires Growth

I have plenty of stories of struggle and situations that I wish I could relive. I sometimes want to go back and change my actions to get through without the battle. But then I realized I wouldn’t be in the place I am today. I somehow feel like the other path that I could have taken still exists, but in fact, it ended when the new path began.

It is Everywhere -

Always Leverage it

There is always leverage. We may not even realize it until we are out of it. But to make those situations less common, we need to anticipate leverage - obvious, possible, and even unexpected.

The Target Strategy

I wrote about the Target strategy in my book and I get people constantly commenting about how it helped them start to understand how negotiation happens even when you don’t know it. When you accept that leverage plays in every conversation, you unlock another dimension to consider.

Opt in First,

Figure it Out Later

As I look back on my career, the only regret is not opting in more often. Who knows the countless opportunities I missed just because I was not paying attention to what was happening around me.

How a Thank You Note can

Ruin your Weekend

I lifted this story from my book, The Art of Everyday Negotiation without Manipulation because it illustrates how easy and nuanced it is when we negotiate with ourselves.

Create Standing Room Only Meetings

Negotiation is essential for any leader, any professional, for us all. Negotiation, at its core, is finding common ground between people. It is not being afraid to offer different solutions, seeing the other person's perspective to find the best way to achieve outcomes even during stressful situations.

I was in a Vegas Show!

We are constantly uncovering new angles on the pandemic's silver linings. Who knew that random connection was something to miss or even need. The way we tactically handled the pandemic was the same, but the experience was unique for all of us. Even if random connection was not identified as a missing factor during the pandemic, when we experience it brings to light the importance.

Work-Life Integration

As I think back on my experience of living my best self as a working parent, it felt messy. Sometimes incredible and other times stressful. Even the high points at those moments or working up to them didn’t feel that joyful. Instead, many times it was anxiety, fear, or trepidation. We imagine that it will be glorious, but not so much.

When you Score for the Other Team, you Never Forget

It seems like yesterday, even though it has been decades. It was the state semi-finals for our high school basketball team, and I was a senior. Since my sophomore year, I had been on Varsity, so I was one of the team's veterans. This was our first state championship so the gym was packed.

Don't be the Path of

Least Resistance

The path of least resistance is not where your opportunities lie. I learned this lesson the hard way, but it taught me a lot. If you simply take what is given to you, you are teaching the people above you and around you that they don't need to anticipate your needs or response.

I Lost the ESPN Deal because

I didn't Ask for Help

When we remain objective and have trusted advisors around us, we can anticipate all possible moves for us or the other party. This is true in our everyday life. We can get triggered by a comment or be influenced by the relationship and miss an opportunity.

Shift Happens

We plan, struggle, and progress but don't always notice. So looking back to see progress and recognize how far we have come is good. It can propel and catapult our development to the next level. Yet we don't appreciate the adjacent skills we sharpen as we go from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

Seriously, Thanks for the Feedback

Our blindspots are just that - blindspots. We are not able to see ourselves from another's perspective. Even if they provide abundant examples and feedback, we can only understand from our interpretation. So, it is a journey to understand, and it isn't about resolving the issue.

What-what? Get Excited about Feedback?

It is beyond the art of giving feedback. It is about knowing how to give it and how to receive it. Most importantly, is to make the commitment to give feedback with a more dimensional approach.

Suffer in Silence

In our Torino station wagon going across country, my Dad would say, “Suffer in Silence.” As a kid I knew that meant to keep my complaints to myself, we are all hot, tired and thirsty. But who knew silence was such a power strategy? Thanks Dad!