My Writings
Reflections on Life and LeadershipGet Started
Emotional Intelligence
- How to Deal with Your Emotions In The Workplace And Make Them Work?
- Why Our Emotions Can Be Overwhelming? Learn 5 Steps to Deal with Them Effectively
- How To (and not to) Deal with an Emotional Employee?
- The Role and Importance of Emotions in Our Professional and Personal Lives
- Discover 10 Myths and Realities about Emotions, And Change Your Life?
- Do You Know Your Emotional Triggers? And What To Do When You Are Triggered?
- How Can We Overcome Negative Emotions And Create Joy And Fulfilment?
Conflict Resolution
- Understanding Conflicts Better – The First Step to Conflict Resolution
- What Not To Do When Conflicts Happen?
- How to Prepare for a Conflict Resolution Conversation?
- Eight Practical Tips for Making A Conflict Resolution Conversation More Effective
- Focus on Interests, Not on Positions – And Make Every Conversation More Productive
- What To Do If You Can’t Achieve Consensus in a Conflict?
- There Are Only Perspectives, No Truth. And Five Perspectives You Can Use Anytime
Most Recent Articles
5 Unconscious Ways We Limit Our Own Freedom
I still remember that morning of excitement. It was supposed to an relaxing long drive in my new car, but I had no idea how the day would turn up. As I started the engine and pushed down on the accelerator, I got busy admiring the posh interiors and the sophisticated dashboard of my car. As soon as I got on the highway, I turned on the cruise...
10 Powerful Connection Questions to Connect with Employees on a Deeper Level
Do your conversations seem artificial and meaningless? Do you find it difficult to go beyond niceties and connect with your employees? What do you do when the answers you get are rote, scripted, and hide the “real” stuff underneath them? The innocuous “How are you?” at the start of a conversation often begets a rote and scripted response like “I...
What Is The Baskerville Effect and Why Your Thoughts Matter?
So much has been written and said about the power of positive thinking that an ordinary person could even develop a strong allergy to the very notion of "thinking positive". Therefore, in this article, I will talk about negative thinking and the consequences of it, fatal sometimes - one of these phenomena is called the "Baskerville Effect". What...
Busting The Myth of Individual Performance. A Radical New Equation For Improving Performance At Work
What causes employees to put themselves between a customer and bullets from a terrorist attack? It is very difficult to imagine anybody valuing their work so much that they put their lives at stake to protect customers. Yet, that is what many employees of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai did on 26 Nov 2008 when terrorists attacked the hotel...
Tired Of Outdated Processes In Your Organisation? Here Is A Step by Step Guide To Change or Remove Them
Why would a monkey not go after a bunch of bananas placed within his reach? An experimenter puts 5 monkeys in a cage. High up at the top of the cage is a bunch of bananas. Underneath the bananas is a ladder. The monkeys immediately spot the bananas and one begins to climb the ladder. As he does, however, the experimenter sprays him with a...
How I Made My Laziness and Procrastination Productive, and Used It To Read Over 250 Books In the Last 5 Years?
The dictionary defines procrastination as "the action of delaying or postponing something”. There was a time when I used to believe that procrastination is a bad habit and that only bad or weak people procrastinate. However, after reading a lot of psychology and neuroscience research, I now realize that we are all lazy and procrastinate on...
How Can We Overcome Negative Emotions And Create Positive Energy To Achieve Joy And Fulfilment?
We all experience a wide range of emotions. If we are human, we can not escape feeling the same emotions as everyone else. In fact, the more psychology and neuroscience research I encounter, I wonder that a better name for us would be "emotional beings" rather than "human beings". Emotions (not logic) are what decide each and every action we...
7 Empathetic Questions To Ask At Work to Understand And Support Your Colleagues
One of the most important tasks of a leader is to support her people with the challenges they face. However, in the pressure-filled and fast-paced routine of everyday work, the challenges each one of us face might not be easily identifiable. Due to workplace culture and social taboos, people might be struggling with some very important issues but...
5 Research Backed Reasons Taking Regular Breaks Can Help You Get More Done
If you have a lot to do, take regular breaks. Find out about the counterintuitive advice of taking breaks to get more done. Are you surging ahead in life? Is your life becoming too fast for comfort? Why not take a break? What did I just say? Do you think you have a lot more to achieve and you just can't afford to take breaks? Does this sound like...
The 7 Most Powerful Investments You Can Make. They Are Not What You Think
What comes to your mind when you are asked about the most powerful investments you should make? Is it stocks? Is it bonds? Or a new house? Real estate is the safest investment, you might have heard. If you ask me, I would say, neither! Over the course of my life, with its few successes and numerous failures, I have come to see another type of...
Why Unreasonable Goals Are Better For Your Growth And Success?
Have you ever achieved something you aimed for still felt like "meh"? Do you feel "empty" on the inside despite being successful by usual standards? Here is how to achieve meaningful success by overcoming our deep psychological need to play it safe. If you have ever done any writing on a computer, you would have relied on copy and paste. It's...
51 Powerful Questions to Ask in Different Situations, and The Art of Asking Powerful Questions
After leading teams for the last decade and a half, if there is one skill that has made the biggest difference in my ability to improve individual and team performance, it has been my ability to Ask Powerful Questions. This is not to say that other skills like listening, emotional intelligence, and conflict resolution are not important - they...
Why Anger Is The Most Compassionate Human Emotion? And 3 Ways to Use it Productively?
“Anger is the deepest form of compassion,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote. Most people do not associate anger with compassion. In fact, at first glance, it looks and feels like the exact opposite of compassion. But as with most emotions, the more attention we pay, the more aware we can be of what our anger is trying to tell us. In this...
Why Our Emotions Can Be Overwhelming? Learn the Neuroscience behind Emotions, and 5 Steps to Deal with Them Effectively
We all have been in situations where our emotions have overwhelmed us. We all have done something in the heat of the moment that we regretted later. In such situations, our emotions can affect our ability to think and act rationally. We find ourselves unable to think clearly in such a state, and every passing second feels like an added burden....
Discover 10 Myths and Realities about Emotions, and How That Will Turbo Charge Your Emotional Intelligence And Change Your Life?
Improve your communication skills by discovering how science has busted these 10 myths about emotions. Tap into the deep psyche of human emotions and stop them from holding you back in life. Read this article and understand how it can help you become a more empathetic colleague or leader. Emotions can be a touchy topic to talk about. Because of...
Do You Know the People Behind Your Colleagues? And 5 Reasons Why It Matters
I stood next to my car door, stunned and frozen in place. I had just walked out of my workplace to leave when a stranger walked up to me and casually handed me a large, white envelope. Divorce papers. My children were waiting at a friend’s house for me to fetch them. My mother was in the hospital, and I’d promised to visit that day. I also had a...
Give Yourself Permission To Focus on the Journey Instead of the Destination. Here’s How It Can Fill Your Days With Joy and Satisfaction?
During a 3200 meter race in 2012, Arden McMath collapsed due to exhaustion. Instead of continuing past her and finishing one spot ahead, fellow runner Meghan Vogel stopped to give Arden a hand. Meghan draped Arden's arm over her shoulders, and supported her the last 50 meters to the finish line. When they crossed, Meghan ensured Arden finished...
15 Timeless and Valuable Lessons Learned After 15 Years of Working Professionally
I started to work professionally in 2005, and very soon it will be 15 years. Over this decade and a half, it has been a wild journey working in over 8 different companies across 2 continents, including 2 companies that I started. I have seen ups and downs and worked with people and teams from all over the world. I also dabbled in social activism...
Why We Must Be Careful Not To Choke On Your Thoughts? And How Our Thoughts Are Different From Deliberate Thinking?
"It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” — Henry David Thoreau Have you ever found yourself lying awake at night trying to get some sleep, only to discover that you are caught in a seemingly endless loop of random thoughts? “I've got that big presentation so I should probably leave early...
Can We Walk in Another Person’s Shoes? Why Empathy Might Be The Most Important Human Ability?
On a recent archaeological dig in Man Bac in what is now northern Vietnam, a team of researchers made a remarkable discovery. While unearthing the remains of some Stone Age people who were buried 4,000 years ago, they discovered one young man who had been placed in his grave differently from the others: he was curled in the fetal position. It...