Thinking Out Loud

Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development offers a range of programs for businesses and entrepreneurs.  Their Top Gun Program is top flight, offering knowledge, insight, and resources to get business ideas focused and launched.

I’ll be offering a program (click here) to leaders through MCED on  October 10th, “Aligning Leadership & Communication Styles.” The goal of this workshop is to help leaders work more skillfully with their communication style strengths and challenges, recognizing the impact they have on others and developing tools best suited to their goals.

It’s past time to rename “soft skills.” Soft skills, as we all know, are people skills: getting along, communicating well, exhibiting interpersonal finesse.  Calling them soft skills has been a way of differentiating them from hard skills, although no one really uses that term. Hard skills are those associated with numbers: quantitative analysis, efficiency and making hard decisions “based on the numbers,” while you set aside your feelings. Read More

Lunch & Learn at the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development.  I’ll be teaching a workshop (click here) on “Communication Styles In The Workplace.”  We’ll be at the University of Southern Maine campus, July 17th, where the technology will allow us to share the workshop experience in real time at other UMaine campuses.

Learn about team collaboration and creativity through the Communication Styles Framework.

Donna was feeling bogged down by her lack of organization, as she put it. “I have so much stuff in my life (things!) that I can’t seem to organize, and it feels like it holds me back.” This is surely a common complaint and frustration for many people. From the outside, it seems like an easy problem to solve: devote small amounts of time regularly, sort items in boxes, and handle disposing of or packing for storing the easy stuff first. Donna, of course, knew that drill and had tried it many times without success. She had just turned fifty and wanted to “put her house in order,” literally and figuratively, but she was frustrated and discouraged. Read More