Leading with Empathy
Theodore Roosevelt once stated, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” While you certainly need to demonstrate a threshold of competence in your field, it’s your capacity for caring that will set you apart from mediocre leaders. What’s the key? Leading with empathy. Imagine if you could reduce […]
The Overview Effect
The Overview Effect is a term coined by author Frank White more than 30 years ago. It refers to the cognitive shift in awareness that astronauts experience when they see Earth in its entirety for the first time. What he found was that this experience profoundly affects space traveler’s worldviews. What most of us know […]
Fighting the Fear of Feedback
Feedback. It’s a term that can fill many with trepidation. If you’re the one giving it, the thought of being critical to someone may make you extremely uncomfortable. If you’re the one receiving it, you may interpret the feedback as a criticism or a personal attack on your character. The result? Maybe you bear the […]
Working in a Multinational Setting
Multinational environments can be a rich place of work. The imagery it can evoke is a tapestry where cultural learning and sharing of ideas and thriving. Yet it can also be an environment of cultural friction, tension, and frustration. Throughout my time in the Canadian Armed Forces I have worked alongside other nations in training, […]
Dropping the Rope
There was a time in my life when I held an unnecessary amount of tension. My natural set-point was stress. I enjoyed being busy and felt lost whenever I had downtime. This was not sustainable and I realized that this way of living was doing more harm than good. “Sometimes holding on does more damage […]
What I Learned Getting Blown Up
During my six-month tour in Kandahar, I lost 6 of my 9 lives. Some brushes with death were closer than others—the closest was being blown up. In the immediate aftermath of major combat with the Taliban, my squadron was tasked to build a road linking two coalition forward operating bases in what was just an […]
Speak Less and Think More
I believe we should speak less and think more. Speaking less and thinking more demands vulnerability, which is perhaps why many of us fail in this regard. Instead of dialogue, we engage in duelling monologues. We eagerly wait for a break in the conversation so that we can insert our own brilliance—solicited or unsolicited. We […]
Here be Dragons!
Here be dragons! When making maritime maps, ancient cartographers would use this phrase to describe the areas beyond the known world. Perhaps some actually believed that dragons inhabited these unexplored frontiers. Perhaps others were fearful of these uncharted waters and simply chose to represent them using the most dreadful metaphor they could muster. Like a […]