Awareness of Limitations – A Key Leadership Skill

Effective leaders are aware of their limitations and seek input from people with perspectives different from their own.

I have been coaching personal and leadership development for over 30 years and have found that most people like to hear about themselves and what they do well. While all the common skills of leaders are challenging, the first, having your strengths identified and validated is a whole lot easier than facing that there are things at which you are not particularly gifted. In the glow of hearing all about one’s strengths and the power of natural skills, limitations are easily ignored or minimized. It is, however, equally important for those who would lead to face that there are more skills for which they have little or no natural aptitude than there are skills for which they do.

5 Myths about Business Travelers

Traveling a lot for work recently has provided me with some unique opportunities to observe people.   There are lots of stories and jokes and stereotypical characteristics about road warriors – people who travel a lot on business – and I expected to run into a lot of confirming examples. But what I’ve discovered is the few are creating an image to the detriment of the many.  Here are 5 debunked myths about road warriors that may surprise you:

How to Develop Excellence in Your Children

Periodically I run across an article in the newspaper or a magazine lamenting the state of education in the United States and how we are falling behind other countries in math, science, engineering, etc. The articles usually go on to make a call for some type of drive for excellence in education or the need to prepare our children to create a country that can compete internationally in the coming decades.

BUSINESS PARTNERS AGREE TO MEET, BUT WHAT SHOULD THEY TALK ABOUT?

By Dorene Lehavi

If you read my article Why Business Partners Don’t Like Meetings and the consequences for not meeting regularly, the question arises, what should be discussed at the meetings.  Today’s article answers that question to make meetings worthwhile, interesting and inspiring, where important things get accomplished.  If done well each partner stays knowledgeable about the whole business.

Who Are You? It’s a Question of Consciousness

I have always been fascinated by the intersection of science and spirituality. Not in the way the two clash as in the vitriolic, polarizing, and often political right/wrong arguments over evolution v. creationism, but in the way they come together like in Deepak Chopra’s book The Tao of Physics or the popular film from 2004 What The Bleep Do We Know? I recently had another experience that brought these two seemingly different worlds more closely together.

Making it Happen Anywhere

After years of being on the road and working from hotels and client sites, I basically have a love/hate relationship with technology.

Learning How to Sell by Taking My Own Advice

At Your Talent Advantage one of the things we pride ourselves in is that we live the theory. By that we mean that we integrate into our personal and business lives the very things we coach others to do.

First and foremost on the list of things we coach others to do is to discover what you are good at and do more of it. Number two is that the most effective way to excel in any role or position is to do it in a way that is supported by your natural skills and talents. In other words, “Do it your way.”

Business Partners Play the Blame Game

By Dorene Lehavi

He said his name was Craig and he sounded very distraught because his business partners were having a meltdown. After 12 years of getting along well in a successful business, they were blindsided when they lost their biggest client.  Worse was that the 4 of them, usually friends, were blaming each other, getting into yelling matches and behaving in ways that until now had been totally foreign to this “ideal partnership”.  Could I rescue them?

Transforming a One-Way Conversation With Love

Have you ever been in one of those social situations in which the conversation is all in one direction? You know what I mean, the people you are talking to all focus on telling you about them and their lives, ask you nothing about you and your life, and generally show little or no interest in anything you have to say.

Don’t strangers deserve good manners too?

I’ve been doing a lot of business traveling over the last few weeks. In fact I’m heading out to a client site again this week. With this being a holiday week in both Canada (July 1^st) and the US (July 4^th), I’m sure there will be more than the usual number of travelers at the airport and on the plane.