Building Self-Trust

High self-trust is a essential to leadership. At a bare minimum we need it because leadership often demands we handle tense or sensitive situations and potentially must make unpopular decisions. Sometimes we must influence not only ourselves but a team or several teams or a whole organization. I use this word, self-trust, instead of self-confidence […]

December 18, 2020 – 4:24 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Consciousness, Openness, Self-Knowledge | Comments (2)

How to Meet a Strong Emotion

The problem with strong emotions is that we over-identify with them. It’s not that I feel sad. I am sad. It’s not that I feel envious, or mad or guilty. Rather, all too easily I become these emotions and act them out. Later, I may say: “I wasn’t myself” (but, of course, I was.) If […]

December 13, 2020 – 2:35 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Choices, Consciousness, Self-Knowledge | Comments (1)

On Disbelieving Your Own Thoughts

A central challenge of leading is being able to see — see very clearly — what is happening. Many things can impede this needed awareness and insight — inadequate data and wrong information being two of the most common problems. A third may be our own biases, the unexamined personal beliefs that drive poor judgment. […]

October 26, 2020 – 3:19 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Consciousness, Journey of Unlearning, Power, Reflective Leadership | Comments (1)

Inner Worlds, Outer Actions

At the second conversation with a new client, she said to me, “I really got the point of what you said in our first session. It was kind of, ‘Stop whining and get back to work.’” This was way off. I’d said no such thing. This was clearly the inner world of the client acting […]