Stay ConnectedIn difficult times, it’s easy to despair.
But all around us are experts who have proven tactics and strategies to stay strong: for ourselves, for our teams and for our organizations. This is a podcast asking the very best in the world how to stay resilient.
This is a podcast that shows us We Will Get Through This.
Copyright: © MBS.works @2020
For many years, I did five year plans. I'd sit there and do my best to map out what the next five years were going to be like. I would imagine great things: bold ambitions and brilliant outcomes.
The other day as I was sorting through old boxes of paper, I came across some of these plans. What was both hilarious and slightly depressing about them is just how little resemblance those plans bear to what actually happened.
Really understanding how to think and implement strategically is difficult. And while there are thousands of people who pontificate about it, only one of them is the #1 strategic thinker in the world.
Rita McGrath is that person. She is a popular speaker and author and a long time faculty member at Columbia Business School. Her latest book is Seeing Around Corners: How to spot inflection points in business before they happen. She's been on the Thinkers 50 ranking for global management thinkers for more than a decade, and recently was ranked the number one thinker in strategy.
In our conversation we look at the temptations and delusions of certainty; the power of Discovery Driven Planning; how to work back from the future; and why intelligent failure is a critical component of success.
You can meet Rita at www.RitaMcGrath.com, or say hello on LinkedIn. She’s on Twitter at @RGMcGrath
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free
We Will Get Through This returns next week with another intriguing series of episodes. We'll be exploring how to see around corners, how to build micro-resilience, how to be invincible and so much more.
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free.
It turns out, somewhat to my surprise, that the body isn’t just a nifty thing that carries around your head. There’s more to it than that.
When I want to understand the power of emotions in a way that someone who lives in his head might understand, the person I go to is Dr Robert Biswas-Diener.
Robert’s a psychologist, a researcher, and a coach, and he focuses on positive topics, such as happiness, courage, and social support. He’s also the author of a number of wonderful ooks, includes The Upside of your Dark Side and The Courage Quotient.
In our conversation we dig into why the “happy” emotions feel a bit same-ish, and why the “sad” ones feel different; how being disconnected from your feelings makes you less smart; a simple way to settle down when you’re feeling upset; and an essential, timeless insight for managing through difficult times.
You can meet Robert at PositiveAcorn.com.
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free.
I like hyphenates. People whose journey has meant that they’ve got a bit of this and a bit of that. People who’ve taken expertise from one world into another. People whose journey to now makes no sense and total sense at the same time.
I’m a bit like that (so confirmation bias, I guess). So to is Dr. Edy Greenblatt. She is a resilience pioneer, a work/life balance expert, and a coach supervisor. She has a Masters degree in psychology, and a joint PhD in organizational behavior from the Harvard Business School, and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she specialized in dance. Her breakthrough work on personal resource management is the award winning book, Restore Yourself: The Antidote for Professional Exhaustion. And that tool, and that book, has been really an effective framework to help people become more resilient under different circumstances for people worldwide.
In our conversation we dig into what, exactly, a dance anthropologist is; how to find those behaviors that nourish and deplete us; and Michael gets some coaching on dealing with a particularly annoying pile of paperwork.
You can meet Edy at www.edygreenblatt.com and on social at @askdredy.
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free.
When I'm thinking to myself, "All right. Who do I need to talk to about money? Who would be a great source of wisdom and calmness and guidance in this time?" I thought I should introduce you to the person who helps me most. I'm going to introduce you to my financial advisor, Rona Birenbaum, who is brilliant. I love her not just for how she manages our money, but for how she calms us down.
Rona is the founder of Caring for Clients--the name says a lot right away--a Canadian fee-for-service financial planning firm. Wealth Professional magazine has named Caring for Clients the top independent firm in Canada in 2017, and Rona has been named one of the top 50 advisors in Canada for five years running, an award well-deserved. Rona was recently named a Women of Influence in financial services.
We’re not covering specific investment strategies in this podcast, because they’re irrelevant to most of us all the time, and immediately out of date regardless. But what we do get into is the mind-games of investing our money; what it means to plan positively using three different scenarios; just how a stock differs from a bond (so a tiny bit of financial basics for those of us who need it); and the power of self-care.
You can meet Rona at www.CaringforClients.com and on Twitter @Caring4Clients.
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free.
Some years ago I was wandering up my street, Roncesvalles Avenue, here in Toronto where I live. I wandered into my library and one of the reasons I go into the library is so I can wander the shelves and I can let serendipity happen. A book waves at you and goes, hey, notice me! In this visit, a book leapt off the shelf: The Chairs Are Where the People Go. As a facilitator and somebody who cares about group dynamics, I thought … well that's interesting, what is this about? So I took it home and I read it, and I came to know its author, Misha Glouberman
Misha runs a program “How to Talk to People About Things” and is also a faculty director at the executive education program at the Ivy Business School. He hosts the Trampoline Hall Lectures, which are a quirky Toronto bar room lecture series, which have a fabulous energy and fabulous speakers. It's like TED, if it had a punk spirit. His book, The Chairs Are Where the People Go, was named by The New Yorker magazine as one of its top nonfiction books of that year.
In our conversation we work on how to get out of our own way when we’re having a conversation; the foundational error that derails a good conversation; how curiosity can be a saving grace; why we so often continue to tolerate short-term irritation; and why we’re often not bold enough in owning up to what irritates us most.
You can meet Misha at his website www.MishaGlouberman.com.
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free.
When I moved to Toronto and first dipped my toes in the murky waters of professional coaching, the name that got whispered with awe in the coffee shops and the ICF chapter gatherings was Karen Wright. Karen was already doing “coaching 2.0” before we’d really figured out what “coaching 1.0” was. Smart, provocative, rigorous and values-based.
She and I have become friends, which I’m grateful for not just because we can share the occasional glass of wine, but because she’s who I turn to when I want to talk about helping leaders be their best and stay the course.
In our conversation we talk about why your own ambition might get in the way of your own ambition (yes, that’s what I meant to say!); the difference between a purpose-driven leader and a values-based one; and how one of the best tests of a value is when you notice how you’re letting yourself down.
You can meet Karen at parachuteexecutivecoaching.com and on LinkedIn.
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free.
Can you tell the difference between a good PowerPoint deck and one that’s lousy? Do you have a commitment to slides that are useful, elegant and that tell a story? Do you feel some part of your soul die when you’re subjected to some poorly planned and poorly designed presentation?
If so, knowingly or not, you’re likely a disciple of Nancy Duarte. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Duarte, an agency based in Silicon Valley that has been at the forefront of the revolution to improve communication. Along the way they’ve created more than a quarter of a million presentations, and trained thousands of people in their approach.
Nancy’s the author of multiple books, all of which sit on my shelves. Her first was Slide:ology, her latest is Data Story. In our conversation we explore the power of the three-act structure, different types of stories and the problems they solve, and how to start and finish any story with grace and aplomb.
You can meet Nancy at Duarte.com and follow her on Twitter @NancyDuarte.
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free.
"If music be the food of love, play on." That William Shakespeare was onto something. I think he’s going to go places.
So too is my guest, Nathan Leigh Jones, a musician and an academic. Let’s start with the facts he's an avid singer-songwriter: he's taken his piano all over the world, including performances at Joe's Pub in New York City, the Sydney Opera House, and even Google's headquarters in Mountain View.
But he’s also doing a PhD that exposes the impact of music and lyrics on emotional wellbeing, and that expertise has meant he was the official music curator at the World Happiness Summit, and he shared his insights at the World Congress of Positive Psychology and the Australian Leadership Coaching Conference.
In our conversation we talk about the dance between words and music, how you test to discover if lyrics really matter, and how to build the playlist you’re going to need.
You can meet Nathan at nlj.co and connect with him on Twitter @nlj_co.
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free.
This is the first season of We Will Get Through This, and of course I’m curious … should I keep doing it? Personally, I’m really enjoying the conversations, but I want to make sure that they’re useful for you too.
Will you email and let me know? Tell me what you like and don’t like about the show. Suggest some awesome guests, if someone comes to mind. Inquiries@MBS.works. I’d love to know what’s on your mind.
This show is brought to you by The Advice Trap, Michael Bungay Stanier’s latest book. You can access a wide range of tools to help #TameYourAdviceMonster at www.TheAdviceTrap.com
If you’d like to spend more time with Michael and people he admires, sign up for The Year of Living Brilliantly. 52 teachers over 52 weeks, each teaching one brilliant insight. Absolutely free.
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