Manage To Engage | Businesses Grow When People Do

Whatever your challenges, awareness is usually what you need to surmount them. And meditation is one of the primary tools to develop awareness. However, meditation is widely misunderstood and often tragically misused. This episode continues our series on meditation with part three. We return to the question of “What is meditation?” from the perspective of awareness as subtractive in nature. This frames meditation as a challenge you’ll be able to face head-on, and get the most out of your efforts, by paradoxically being willing to get nothing at all.   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

Whatever your challenges, awareness is usually what you need to surmount them. And meditation is one of the primary tools to develop awareness. However, meditation is widely misunderstood and sometimes tragically misused. This episode is part two of the series on meditation. In the last episode we showed how subtraction is the governing dynamic of awareness. What are the implications of this? What can we do with the discomfort related to practicing skills and the losses related to awareness. Today we go on to examine the implication of how hooked we all are on the more comfortable knowledge and skill acquisition, and how we avoid awareness. The result is that, in the name of comfort, we self-sabotage in the most profound and fundamental way possible. This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

Meditation becomes increasingly popular in the western world, but it’s largely completely misunderstood. The tragedy is that the widespread misconception of meditation creates stagnation and missed opportunities in people that can span an entire lifetime. It’s not about relaxing, it’s not about clearing your mind, and it’s not about controlling your thoughts. Even if you’ve been meditating your entire life, you may have been going in circles without this key distinction, that has to do with the nature of awareness itself. And if you’re just getting started with meditation, then you definitely don’t want to miss this series.   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

Managers often complain they want their people to step up, or be more engaged, or take more risks. In this episode, you’ll learn one simple question you can use to make that happen. You’ll be surprised to find out it’s more about undoing something than doing something. What if your people know more than they let on, and are just afraid to share what they really think? How do you change that?   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

One of the most common and unseen excuses in our world is caretaking. Caretaking comes from a caring place, but lets someone off the hook or otherwise serves an other in a way that hurts everyone involved. Caretaking is fundamentally about the caretaker, who is avoiding confrontation, wanting to be liked, or has some other understandable self-interest that they hide by making it about the other person. How does this affect a workplace and what do you do about it?   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

We live in a world where the existence of “alternative facts” is now accepted by many. How do you manage someone when they’re seeing a situation so differently, that you just can’t see eye to eye? It’s related to a philosophical question humans have struggled with since our civilization began, but fortunately there’s a simple way through it.   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

How does a manager insist on accountability and results, and still give someone the emotional support and room to process a change for themselves? In other words, how do you balance supporting someone to explore their own limitations while making sure the customer gets what they bought? It’s a tricky balance, but it can be done. Most managers err on the side of either caretaking, allowing for employees to not reach their potential, or become task masters who lack curiosity about the internal worlds of their people.   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

Do your government given rights related to freedom apply in the workplace? Tricky one, right? How far can an employer go in pushing someone into discomfort? What responsibility does a manager have to make an employee’s work experience comfortable? How should one think about this?   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

What place is there for compassion in the workplace? How do you balance your sense of humanity and care, and the need for results when money is on the line? We’ve come a long way since the 1950s bringing emotional intelligence into the work environment, but in what ways has it gone too far, and what’s a manager to do about it?   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

What’s your communication turnaround standard? Do you have one? Does your department or company have one? Part of integrity and thrival is getting back to people in a timely fashion, and organizing your life so you can do so easily. How do you make sure integrity expresses in all of your communication?   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

We all know that integrity is important, but what is it, exactly? You may be surprised to discover that you don’t have the integrity you tell yourself you do, and therein lies the opportunity. The most basic expression of integrity is keeping your word, and most people don’t do it nearly as often as they think. The result? Broken agreements are bad business. They hurt you and those around you in ways you may not have appreciated until now.   This series is from a recent webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

What is the essence of business? Understanding that business is fundamentally made up of agreements is critical to success in anything. Most business problems can be reduced to where agreements were unclear and/or broken; therefore, the clarification of agreements and the rigorous pursuit of keeping them is the simplest way to greatness. Simple is not, however, necessarily easy. But when you understand just how important it is, it gets easier.   For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

How well do you know yourself? Is it possible to know yourself too well? And do you identify yourself as being a responsible person? What if the idea that you’re a responsible person is actually in your way? Most people problems inevitably come down to responsibility, and most responsibility problems come down to the illusions we tell ourselves. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

This is the finale of our Illusion of Frustration series, excerpts from a particularly powerful Clear and Open Leader’s webcast. We’re all over-identified with one thing or another, and in this segment we look at how one can be over-identified with frustration. What if frustration was filling a hole inside you? What if you would become someone quite different if you let go of frustration? Are you willing to find out? This series is from a recent leaders webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

This episode is part three of our Illusion of Frustration series. In this episode, we reveal the meta-false-assumption that underlies frustration–a lens you look through all the time without realizing it. The bad news it’s causing a huge portion of your suffering. The good news is that it’s a simple shift. This series is from a recent leaders webcast that happens each week for members. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

This episode continues our exploration into frustration. So if you accept that the arbitrary expression of frustration at work is not good, what do you do when it comes up in you? How do you manage the frustration inside you and do the right thing to help yourself and those around you? What’s the difference between having frustration and becoming it? That’s what we explore in this segment. For more information about the many benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

This episode begins a four-part series on the subject of frustration. Many would say we live in a frustrating world, but is the frustration really in the world, your work, or in your employees? What if letting yourself express that frustration is mostly making things much worse? Join these segments from a recent leader webcast and unpack frustration with us. Believe it or not, this is a path to an entirely different relationship to reality, as well as a way of helping your business grow. For more information about all the benefits of Clear and Open Membership and how to get the help you need in conversations like this, go to clearandopen.com.

This episode is part five of the series on heart-centering and is an assignment from the Open To Excellence course available to Clear and Open Members. To find out how to join the conversation and become a member, go to clearandopen.com. This is a short, but powerful piece on how to write your own eulogy. I know of no other exercise that goes right the core of what matters to you, and forms a powerful foundation for goal-setting, planning, or any kind of pursuit. The more difficult the path ahead of you, the more important you know why you’re doing it.

This episode is part four of the series on heart-centering. This series is made up of excerpts from the Open To Excellence course available to Clear and Open Members. To find out how to join the conversation and become a member, go to clearandopen.com. What if being too sure about who you are is exactly what’s in your way? If it’s the design of Life that you must evolve to have your dreams come true, then being too sure of who you are could be your obstacle. How do you hold that loosely? How can you use not-knowing to get where you want to go, or find out where you want to go?

This episode continues the heart-centering theme of the last two episodes and deconstructs guilt, a pervasive theme in our society often not seen for what it is. This is another excerpt from the Live, Open To Excellence Course currently in progress. Many people use guilt as a kind of fuel-source without realizing it. It’s sort of like running your car on a mix of gas and oil. It’ll work, but it’s limited and can have some serious side-effects. Discover how guilt and unhealthy caretaking may be unconsciously holding you back, and a deeper place to fuel your excellence from. To find out how to join the conversation and become a member, go to clearandopen.com. Thanks for listening!