How Stress Makes Us Stupid

Over the past few years, I’ve become more and more of an advocate for decent strategic planning in the lead up to the December break and the flip over of the calendar to the next year.  Strategic planning that allows us to consider, download and offload the year we’ve had – processing the lessons, assessing…

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But First, Self-Management #1

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking about some of the keys to our own self-management.  Last week, I wrote about one of the central premises of stress awareness and self-management – that of our ability to control what we focus on.  I also noted that self-management will always trump leadership – that before…

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How To Navigate the Disorienting Monotony of Uncertainty

There is a phenomenon responsible for many aircraft accidents over the decades known as Visual Illusion.  It’s long been recognised that visual illusions can disorientate pilots or give rise to them not recognising their proximity to the ground, and it’s therefore a subject well covered in our training and guarded against by the consistent cross-checking of…

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How Do You Handle Challenge?

As human beings, we can be a little sensitive to challenge.  Challenge instantly requires us to defend or change our stance which is something we handle with varying degrees of grace.  To handle challenge with grace requires flexibility that comes with such multifaceted assets as self-worth, confidence, wisdom and humility.  Acquiring and actively using these…

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Self-Leadership & Handling Depletion

At a point where the world has been in crisis for a year, the psychology of leadership has changed.  Even the leaders and team members most practised at declaring their energy and readiness are sounding less convinced, which is not really surprising when we’ve been making it up as we go along for an extended…

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The Beauty of Accountability

When I look at the teams and individuals I’ve worked with this year, the successes and stumblings, the decisions, the timelines and outcomes; one of the most pivotal and influential ingredients in their progress has been accountability.  Accountability is the expectation of having to account for your part in something.  For your actions, behaviours, performance…

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Manage Yourself To Be Primed & Ready

We’ve known for a long time that prolonged periods of stress and uncertainty produce certain results in us as humans, but seldom in recent history have we seen so many people succumbing to those effects.  The underlying process is worth identifying, and it’s also worth reminding ourselves of some of the basics of self-management. While…

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For Us or Against Us?

There is one massive problem with achieving teamwork and that’s our human inclination to look after Number One. We all have an ego, and our ego has one distinct and very important job – to protect us.  It sits there all day looking for moments when we might be under threat and activating our fight…

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