Many years ago, my husband and I set out on a spontaneous weekend trip: no hotel reservations, no agenda, no destination. Our plan was simply to see where the road would take us.
Among the new additions to our revamped Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue course is a skill for receiving feedback we’ve dubbed “retaking your pen.” This skill—which has become THE key takeaway from the course for some learners—handles how to avoid letting negative or poorly delivered feedback upend your sense of self-worth. The importance of feedback …
When we set out a year ago to rebuild Crucial Conversations, our most important objective was to make it relevant. We needed people to see themselves—and their conversations—in this course. More than ever before, we are being challenged to hold Crucial Conversations in a highly polarized, divisive environment. We’re challenging tough topics in the workplace, …
As you may have heard, VitalSmarts became Crucial Learning last week. It’s exciting to stand on the solid foundation of the past and look forward to the unlimited horizons of the future. While preparing to participate in the ATD conference on the morning of the announcement, I thought about what this change means for our company, for our clients, for our trainers, and for me personally—and my thoughts turned to Roger Bannister.
You’re standing there in front of a class full of fellow employees. For the last several hours, you’ve been doing a fantastic job facilitating Crucial Conversations. There is safety in the room. Learners are readily participating and sharing insights. And then one participant shares something offensive, weird, or just plain wrong, and you aren’t quite …
Structure. As a relatively organized human that thrives on predictability, structure is something to which I am deeply attached—and it’s not something that’s been abundant the last 16 months. As I taught an Influencer course in January 2021, my class and I discussed the structural lens of Influence: what it looks like and sounds like, …
My colleague Emily and I have taken on an exciting project recently that has pushed me to look at accountability in a new way. If you’re not familiar, our Crucial Accountability content teaches skills for addressing gaps between expectations and actual performance. The accountability model for managing performance is a great tool for stepping up …
Fifteen years ago I went to Canada and had one of the most profound insights of my professional life. I was a newly minted VitalSmarts Master Trainer leading both a Crucial Conversations course and trainer certification course in London, Ontario, Canada. The facilitators in the course were and are among the most highly skilled I …
It’s not news to anyone that we all feel extra burned out right now. We have too much to do. We don’t have enough time. We’re not getting it all done, and so we miss things and then feel bad about ourselves. I want to help and I’m going to cut right to the chase. …
I am in the process of putting together the pieces of my 2020 training vision for 2021. With so many fractured and competing needs and a drastically different landscape, how do I reset my vision and bring healing and hope to my organization?
