Project YOU

  Team Leaders – Are you frustrated by a disengaged employee in your team? Do they appear cynical and recalcitrant to you? That is often a presentation layer of an underlying hurt. Here is something you may want to consider about the team member.   -There is a likelihood that the employee has been burned before, especially when they were passionate and wanted to serve with the noblest of motives. It is easy to lose faith after a few poor experiences. -They start believing that their skill and passion are of no value to their leaders. -When all they see is a minefield ahead for sharing their knowledge and gifts, cynicism starts taking hold. Sadly, it also leaves them with an unfulfilled desire to make a difference.  These steps may help- 1.     Focus your one-on-one conversations on their passions. Be sincere. If possible, avoid scripted lines from a manager handbook, because they rarely flow out as sincerely as one would hope. People can smell a phony from a mile away.   2.     Get

  Do you retreat and hide when you feel rejected at work? Do you stop speaking up in meetings? Do you try to stay under the radar? Rejection often signals that something is wrong in terms of your perceived value or social standing in the corporate hierarchy. Your instinctive reaction to retreat is normal. Taking a little time for analysis and reflection is just what the doctor ordered. However, if you retreat for too long, you deprive yourself of growth opportunities and lose valuable time in which you could have showcased your gifts and talents. Playing small serves no one, especially you. To come out ahead after a perceived rejection, take the time objectively to assess the situation. Ask, is it personal? Know that our filters and biases may be clouding our perception. Most of the rejections we face aren’t personal and can be attributed to factors we can't see yet. Here, assuming good intent will help alleviate the pain and accelerate our recovery from the perceived rejection. So

  Are you listening to the whispers from your intuition or paying attention to the little breadcrumbs the universe is laying out for you? If not, what clues are you missing? I can’t say I was always tuned into that inner voice, but for whatever reason, I was listening when a colleague remarked “You need to do more of this in your day job.” The ‘this’ she was referring to, more than a decade ago, was speaking from the podium after she heard one of my speeches at our Toastmasters club. That suggestion inexplicably took hold! My corporate role at that time was mostly leveraging my technical and analytical skills and I knew I had to invent opportunities for presenting. With the help of my leaders, I recrafted my role slowly to include more speaking opportunities. In hindsight, this was the inflection point but I did not know it then.     After that inflection point, in the years that followed, I stumbled upon another unexpected discovery (aka breadcrumb from the universe) while involved in