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The Power Of Yes – Leadership Lessons from My Car Dealership
I was in the waiting area of the dealership while my car was getting an oil change. Tony, one of the service reps saw me and asked if I had been helped. As I nodded positively, he seemed to recognize me and said, “You have the grey Forester, right? What brought you in today?”. I was pleasantly surprised that he remembered me from my last visit three months ago. In today’s data/AI driven world, Tony’s apparent simple human conversation felt like a rare treat! I have already been a happy customer for the past several years of this local dealership. As a coach helping leaders and teams harness their fuller potential,…
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How Coaching Can Increase Employee Engagement
I have worked within the high tech industry for over a decade and I have always wondered why a large number of the great hires end up disengaged, identified as below average performers so soon after hire! First as a manager and now as a coach, my observation is the raw potential the employees bring often gets underutilized because of the chaos in the workplace. Despite the relative maturity in the high tech industry we still depend on Darwin’s “Survival of the fittest” theory. I believe a coach can be a catalyst to increase the odds for each employee to be of the “fittest” species in the corporate jungle. Below are the stories of two…
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Agile Way to Plan Your Career – Story Of A Tech Leader (Video)
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Everyone And Their Mother Is Talking About “Coaching” – What Is It Really?
It will be rare to find someone who never heard “coaching” and yet it is one of the most overloaded terms today. Starting from sports coaching, tutoring or mentoring a junior professional, coaching bears a very diverse context. One common denominator though is about helping another person getting better at some skill. In the professional world, coaching is becoming more common in recent years. And that is where it could use little more clarity. According to the International Coach Federation(ICF), coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The basic premise is, the person being coached is whole,…
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Women In Tech – Let’s Tap Into Our Own Greatness
[Look for a special discount code inside -Sharmin] Background Story – Last year I attended a global conference in Warsaw with a few hundred International Coach Federation (ICF) leaders from across the world(140 countries to be specific). The trip was very significant for me on many levels including the opportunity to meet some very talented and passionate leaders in the coaching industry. Kelley Russell-Duvarney was one of them. Although our personal backgrounds had very little in common, we found ourselves in an extremely engaging conversation as we sat in the last row of a tour van for several hours during our group trip. We quickly appreciated the similarities in our thinking as we…
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Nervous About Networking? Find Your Own Sweet Spot
During my corporate career I once attended a class on “how to show up confident”. It had quite a few tips I don’t remember those exactly. But today I remembered about it when I noticed that I was feeling very confident and at ease during a networking event. In particular I was standing exactly the way it was taught in that class, standing with the feet in a V-shape and hands on the sides! In that confidence class when the instructor taught us about the standing poses, it didn’t make too much sense. It felt awkward, not only that, my analytic mind had lots of why questions. But today I…
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Aspirations – Find Your Own Unique One
Few years back we went to Zion national park in Utah. We hiked on a mountain in the scorching 80 degree heat. The destination was the “upper pool” a small body of water with a sandy beach. As we reached there, we savored the moment of achievement by cheering and taking pictures. But my 6-year old and her friend didn’t seem to care – they got something more exciting – the wet sand! To a 6-year old the wet sand and the possibility of sand castles seemed much more fascinating than my measure of achievement. We often forget that – instead of finding our own unique aspirations – we limit ourselves…
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Looking Back: Five Years of My New Career and Life
Today is the 5th anniversary of my post-Microsoft life :). Hard to believe how time flies! It was not just a new career I wanted to pursue; I also wanted to be part of the neighborhood I lived in. Being someone coming from a totally different culture and moving towards an even more unknown career I had to go through a steep learning curve many take for granted. Today I decided to take a pause and celebrate by reflecting on the past five years of my life. Other than completing the coach training to obtain a Certified Professional Coach (CPC) and Associated Certified Coach(ACC), here is a snapshot of what…
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Afraid of Feedback? Find How It Serves You Best
If you are a corporate employee, notice the feeling you are having when you read the word “Feedback”. “I have some feedback for you” often creates the same or worse visceral reaction as “we have a problem”! A quick web search brought this definition of feedback: Comments in the form of opinions and reactions to something, intended to provide useful information for future decisions and development. Based on my experience, the more common connotation of feedback is: It is unpleasant, negative and often brings a defensive behavior. Now that I am not part of the corporate system and I don’t have the luxury of getting the unsolicited feedback regularly, I thought I wouldn’t…
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There Is More Than One Reality – Choose That Serves
“Reality is reality, there is no point to sugar coat it “– a friend of mine uttered with a great sigh! I agree and there is more. It reminded me of the story of a young woman, Irene, who didn’t try to sugar coat a gloom “reality”. Instead she chose to focus on another reality –It turned her around from being stuck to being successful. When Irene reached out to me during February this year, she had been feeling stuck. She was not able to make any progress in her PhD thesis for a very long time, every time she tried to force her, it backfired. Her thoughts/ideas got crippled by…
