How to Say No With Grace, Not Guilt

by Denise Green | Energy, Health, Optimal Results, Personal Development, Time management Comments | 0

My new client Mary described herself as “super-busy.” She told me, “I’m not sure what I want to work on. My life is pretty good and I’m overall pretty happy.”

I asked her to take my 3-minute Life Satisfaction Assessment and we’d go over it in our next session. When we talked next she said she was stunned: she didn’t realize that her satisfaction was so out of whack in some very important areas of her life.

Her life was full…but not fulfilling.

Mary was suffering from the results of saying yes to so many people and things, that she didn’t have the capacity to say yes to things that would create a truly fulfilling life.

Can you relate?

If you worry about how to say no so that you maintain relationships and credibility, take the assessment yourself and take one step closer to the life you deserve. Click to get your Life Satisfaction Assessment and Instructions.

Here’s to your brilliance.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

~ Annie Dillard

Share

Are You an Ambivert?

by Denise Green | Career Satisfaction, Coaching, Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Energy, Strengths Comments | 0

Don’t Believe Every Assessment You Take

As a leadership coach, you might think I’d like personality assessments. But I don’t. It’s not that they don’t have some value.  I just think that they’re more limited than people allow for: that humans are more complex than any automatic assessment can capture.

And I don’t care what their creators and promoters say about how precise they are, I get different results depending on the time of day, what’s going on my life, and how much coffee I’ve had.

Perhaps you’ve felt boxed in by one of these reports. According to at least two instruments, I’m an Introvert. And sometimes that feels true: I do sometimes like to think quietly until I’ve fleshed out my thoughts. Other times, though, I spew nascent ideas as fast as I can think them. At times I do gain energy by being alone. But after a while I need to get up and be with people.

About 7 years ago, I came across an assessment called the Highlands Ability Battery that promised to measure innate abilities that didn’t fluctuate after the age of 14.

That was when I heard the term Ambivert for this first time. Finally, I felt understood by an assessment. It was actually worth the painstaking three plus hours to take the tests.

We Ambiverts can be very confusing to others. We can be gregarious one moment, meditative the next.  We get a charge from being with people and working on a team…until we don’t.  For me, this really resonated. I can lead a day-long workshop with passion and deep empathy. After, you can find me in a fetal position in my car, recharging my batteries.

For you all you Introverts and Extroverts, I have a message: it’s not personal, and we’re not crazy.

So What Can an Ambivert Do?

Let people know about your style: that your behavior fluctuations are not about them, just about you needing to manage energy.   Be realistic about your needs. When you need to recharge, don’t feel guilty stepping away. You’ll be more useful and nice to be around when you return. And when you’re in the mood to talk out loud, say that these are early thoughts and that you’re tossing them out. On the other hand, if you need time to think before responding, say so.  People will be less confused, and will make fewer wrong assumptions about your intent.

Think you’re an Ambivert? How can you tell? What advice do you have for others?

Book: Don’t Waste Your Talent by Don Hutcheson

Share

Do You Suffer from Delusions of Smallness?

by BrillianceInc | Emotional Intelligence, Energy, Leadership, Personal Development Comments | 0

Delusional Clients

I’m fortunate to partner with clients who inspire me with their courage, vision, and wit. Sadly, many of them don’t readily see what I see in them: they fail to notice the positive impact they have on others and may suffer from doubt, guilt, and loneliness.

And it’s not just top execs who suffer from this delusion.

Do You Suffer from Delusions of Smallness?

Here are some indicators:

  • You fail to give yourself the same care and consideration as you give others (or your dog).
  • You worry that all you’ve achieved is undeserved or ephemeral.
  • You treat your body as a machine that runs on coffee and doesn’t require ample rest and rejuvenation.
  • You say yes to all demands even if it means sacrificing sleep, sanity, and relationships.
  • You apologize often for things outside your control, as in “I’m so sorry I didn’t respond to your 2:00 a.m. email” or “I’m so sorry it’s raining.”
  • You compare yourself to others or to some ideal vision of who you think you should be.

Reality Check
No matter who you are or what you do for a living, if you ignore your body’s needs for rest, nutrition, and exercise, it will break down someday…almost certainly at a very inconvenient time and place. (Note, it’s possible, but highly unlikely, that you’ll get lucky and earn a standing ovation from 3,000 people after passing out stage as my buddy Steve Roesler did).

What You Can Do About It [Read more...]

Share

Celebrate Every Age

by Denise Green | Coaching, Energy, Health, Optimal Results, Personal Development Comments | 0

Dia de Los Muertos

On this Day of the Dead (aka All Souls Day), I celebrate another birthday.

I love my birthday.

I often marvel when people lament their birthdays. It’s not that I don’t understand where they might be coming from. I don’t romanticize growing older.  I know that birthdays can remind us that we’re drawing closer to our death. But that’s true of every moment, and you don’t hear people complaining every 5 minutes that they’re closing in on death.

Reflecting on why I might have a somewhat unusual context about aging, I recall my Grandma Dori’s frequent saying about birthdays: “It sure beats the alternative.”

My context is influenced not just by my family, by my own health history which has a bit of a Benjamin Button quality about it so far. I began life needing to have my hip rebuilt. At age 6 my vision got bad enough to warrant thick glasses. At 22, I was in an car accident and broke my back, which led to over a decade of pain and sciatica. At 27, I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis.

So, while my contemporaries were thriving physically in their 20s, I was trying to heal physical conditions often associated with old age.*

Seeking treatment for these conditions led me to a world I would have never sought had I been pain free. As a result, I discovered healers and treatments–Western, Eastern, Ancient, and High Tech–that many people don’t know exist. And I discovered this truth: [Read more...]

Share

An Unnecessary Disadvantage

by Denise Green | Authenticity, Career Satisfaction, Coaching, Energy, Leadership, Management, Neuroleadership, Neuroscience, Optimal Results, Personal Development, Science of Leadership, Women in Leadership Comments | 2

Advice You Won’t Find in Just Any ‘Ol Leadership Blog

There’s a lot of great advice to women about how to get ahead: how to have it all, do it all, and look great all the while.

I would like to add one more piece of advice to corporate women: wear comfortable footwear.

That’s right.

Think DSK Could Work in These?

Gorgeous Torture

For some time, this topic had been a niggling thought. Then I went over the edge into official annoyance after reading an op-ed piece by one of my favorite journalists, Maureen Dowd, when, in a piece about France’s Christine Lagard — Minister of Economic Affairs, Finances, and Industry — she found it necessary to describe her beige patent Christian Louboutin high heels (pictured right). It’s not just Dowd: it’s the norm. Once I began looking, I noticed that reports of women in leadership often include descriptions of their appearance.

Watch the news and you’ll see female politicians striving to strike just the right balance between power and femininity. They are subjected to scrutiny that their frumpier male counterparts rarely get. Can you imagine Newt getting reamed for big ankles or Obama for wearing last year’s suit? And can you imagine any of them stumping in stilettos?

My beef is actually not with the journalists. It’s with the shoes.

Here’s why this matters. [Read more...]

Share