Welcome to Flip’s Tips! This is a series of tips derived from my book, Balanced Effectiveness At Work: How to Enjoy the Fruits of Your Labor without Driving Yourself Nuts.
In this series, I outline a potential workplace problem or description of a situation, a way to look inside and ask questions of yourself (your frank self-assessment), and my suggestions about how to initiate a change process in this area (Flip’s Tips).
Many of us create unrealistic expectations about how many tasks and accomplishments we can fit into a single business day. We seem to continually search for ways to deal with the pressure of lists, meetings, deadlines, and commitments. Meanwhile, our stress of trying to keep......
The next time you’re bummed out about your past, current, or future situation, there is a powerful tool that can show you where the answers reside—and I’m sure you have one in your office or home. It’s called a mirror! How we view ourselves and......
One way to describe our personality is to say that it is made up of our patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. When we show up at work, we are bringing these patterns with us, and to the extent that they are useful, we can......
We have an astonishing capacity to set unreasonably high internal standards, look for the slightest evidence that we may in fact be screwing up, and serve as judge and jury for ourselves, usually with a “guilty” verdict. What happens too often is that the capacity......
Fear, and its smaller sibling—anxiety—can serve a useful purpose in our lives, but only in a very narrow way, and under specific circumstances. Most of what we hold as anxiety about the workplace falls under the old-fashioned category of “neurotic”: it’s not really significant enough......
So often in the workplace, we think that everyone is relatively on the same page; however, it is probably more accurate to assume that it’s like the bar scene from the first Star Wars movie—aliens from every different galaxy, each with their own conceptual frameworks......
When we experience discomfort or disconnect in a relationship, one of our first tendencies is to find fault with the other, to view him in a negative light, and express these thoughts and feelings to those around us. Sample scenario #1: Oscar finds his supervisor......
I don’t know about you, but my old approach to conflict only had three options: (1) be really, really nice and hope things would get better, (2) run like hell (literally or internally) from the situation, or (3) get tired of holding that beach ball......
While there is a premium placed on task management in virtually all workplace settings, we cannot achieve optimal results without effective relationships across the organization. Knowing when, where, and how to shift our energies on this continuum can be a valuable component to our success.......
Yes, I was one of those starry-eyed individuals (OK, technically a “hippie”) who thought that if we could just get the right crew of groovy people together, things would work out somehow. Well, that got me/us a certain distance, but nowhere near far enough. There......
Setting clear boundaries and limits is an important component of managing both our work and our stress. Sometimes boundaries are firm; sometimes they’re flexible—but if they’re unclear, inconsistent, or nonexistent, it doesn’t serve us well or those around us. Sample scenario #1: Kayla is a......
One definition of workplace culture is “a set of basic assumptions that defines for us what to pay attention to, what things mean, how to react emotionally to what is going on, and what actions to take in various kinds of situations” (Edgar Schein, Organizational......
Something seems to happen when we get together as a group or team in the workplace. It’s like some invisible set of rules takes over (which, in fact, it often does). Having good in-the-moment awareness and a functional set of tools for understanding and working......
When we are whipsawed by our emotions, when we are fixated on a desired outcome, and when we simply need people to behave in the ways we need them to, we set ourselves up for frustration (not to mention impacting our results). The art of......
When we’re solely focused on chasing our own success, we run the risk of shutting ourselves off from the world around us, and fail to see how our talents are best used for something other than our exclusive gain. Being in service not only provides......
Almost all of us feel that there is something “out there and in here” other than our normal, time-limited, material existence. While there are literally hundreds of names for what I will generically call a “Universal Life Force,” what matters is not so much how......
Concepts are great, knowledge is good, trying things out is helpful; however, for lasting change, we need to incorporate and integrate our new beliefs and behaviors through practice. Yoga, sports, meditation, music, and many other categories benefit from the commitment to consistency. Ideally, we practice......
When we realize that instead of being helplessly strapped onto the roller coaster of life, we are actually the track codesigner, the ticket taker, and the maintenance worker, things shift. We have increased awareness in the moment of our patterns, triggers, and options. We tend......