Category Archives: Stress & Pressure

Communication Skills for People Under Pressure

By Daniel Robin "There comes a time ... when we must grab the bull by the tail and face the situation." - W.C. Fields You walk into a meeting with your agenda brandished on your frontal lobes, ready to get the team's unwavering commitment and blast into action. The last time you had an assignment with this group, some joker disagreed, it threw you off, and it took forever to get it done. This time Continue Reading ...

Leadership in Action Series: Part 3

False Responsibility and Its Remedies By Daniel Robin This installment looks at the pattern of "false responsibility" – when we take charge of things that don’t belong to us, such as other people’s feelings, mistaken assumptions about who is responsible for shared outcomes, or when circumstances change but we don’t. Most adults have a natural ability to decide what’s in and what’s Continue Reading ...

Giving Workplace Negativity a Sustainable Lift: Part 2

Gripe to Grip --  part 2 of 3 By Daniel Robin Most of the workplaces I’ve known are in a state of perpetual chaos and disrepair … they are immense and never-ending exercises in surfacing dramatic problems and (in some cases) actually solving them. By contrast, highly bureaucratic or rigid organizations simply do not allow problems (denial anyone?). However, allowing personal attacks, emotional Continue Reading ...

Giving Workplace Negativity a Sustainable Lift: Part 1

Containment -- part 1 of 3 By Daniel Robin "You can forget about that project … it will fail like all the rest." "Yeah, our morale has been down so long, even bottom is starting to look like up!" A colleague just got told to "get off it" by his boss. What’s the "it", exactly? He doesn’t really know, oddly enough, because the problem has been undiscussable and undefined from the start. Something Continue Reading ...