Things You Must Learn for Yourself

At the beach the oth­er day, I noticed a pat­tern of small stones laid out on a larg­er one. It was some­one’s life, I thought, all the things they had learned on their own. And so I thought of all the things any of us must learn, each one anoth­er small stone in the pattern: […]

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October 11, 2021 – 2:30 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Choices | Comments (0)

Pause Reflect Refocus Reignite

So many man­agers and lead­ers these days are deal­ing with whole­sale sea change, not just lit­tle shifts in the lev­el of the tide. Not minor waves of change, a process here and there, but over­whelm­ing, mul­ti­fac­eted shifts. Covid. Turnover. New lead­ers. Restruc­tur­ing. Pri­or­i­ties expand­ed. All of the above, overnight. The whole orga­ni­za­tion in ongo­ing redefinition, […]

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August 31, 2021 – 3:09 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Choices, Consciousness, Reflective Leadership | Comments (8)

The Reason for Evil

Gwen Adshead begins her recent book, The Dev­il You Know: Sto­ries of Human Cru­el­ty and Com­pas­sion, with an epi­graph from Carl Jung: “The rea­son for evil in the world is that peo­ple are not able to tell their sto­ries.” As a foren­sic psy­chol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist she’s heard some unimag­in­able ones — from decades of listening […]

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August 6, 2021 – 10:55 am | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Conflict, Openness, Self-Knowledge, Wounds | Comments (4)

The Mutiny Against Our Conditioning

As adults we come up against facets of our­selves that we wish to change. Uncon­scious big­otry, for exam­ple, or cer­tain aspects of intro­ver­sion or exces­sive guilt, impa­tience or ego­cen­tric­i­ty — our weak­ness­es and the results of our “over-strengths.” Tak­ing on these chal­lenges sounds good and promis­es a desir­able trans­for­ma­tion but in real­i­ty also por­tends the […]

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May 6, 2021 – 10:51 am | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Choices, Conflict, Consciousness, Power, Truth, Wounds | Comments (10)