Anniversary Retrospective: My Favorites
November 30, 2006
This is the last in my 10th business anniversary and 4th blogging anniversary retrospective series. Boy, it took a long time for me to select my favorites and it was a fun trip down several years’ worth of memory lanes.
I finally made the decisions based on two criteria: I had fun writing the post or it was personally meaningful to me, and the post generated feedback (in comments and emails) that told me it was funny or meaningful to many others. These are the ones that made the cut: [Read more]
For Strong Client Relationships, Beware the Distancing Spiral
November 29, 2006
“Beware the distancing spiral.” I just came across this note in one of my notebooks from a decade ago and never has a truer thing been said. The note was scribbled in the margin, clearly quoting one of my conflict management professors.
Finding the note made me smile because I just said the same thing twice in the past two weeks. I said it to my class of graduate mediation students (I now teach where I once studied). And I said it to a coaching client who’d come to me because of frustrations with a few difficult clients she couldn’t afford to fire. Read on >>
Anniversary Retrospective: Most-Commented-On Articles
November 22, 2006
My 10th year anniversary retrospective continues with a list of my five most-commented-on articles. They’re on this list if they received the most blog comments and email messages combined.
The vast majority of folks who commented on or wrote to me about these articles did so because the article resonated with them in some way, or moved them emotionally and in a good way. Most were women, as I’d expect, since I primarily write here for a female audience.
But a couple of folks wrote to tell me I was, essentially, a dolt. Their words were generally less kind than “dolt,” though. Lucky for them that I’m a mediator with a pretty high tolerance for ineffective communication behavior! Gotta love the rich tapestry of human opinion. [Read more]
Anniversary Retrospective: My Most-Read Articles
November 20, 2006
Earlier in the month I said that in celebration of 10 years in full-time private practice as a mediator and conflict management coach and consultant, I would be posting a retrospective of articles. This post is the first in that short series, which will continue into next week…If you’re relatively new to Conflict Zen I hope they’re helpful and entertaining!
My 10 Most-Read Articles of All Time [Read more]
The Most Disastrous Thanksgiving Ever
November 17, 2006
When I was in my 20s and my mother was still alive, she broke her hip a few weeks before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was a major family event each year and my mom had always done it all, a Renaissance woman.
Stuck in a wheelchair, she was sad and unhappy that she wouldn’t be able to handle Thanksgiving that year. No worries, Mom, we all said, we’ll do it. My siblings and I would be there from our various corners of the Northeast U.S. and we decided we’d rally for the cause. My father, never one to cook, would also help out.
It was the most disastrous Thanksgiving in anyone’s memory, before or since. [Read more]
New Conflict Management Mantra: Lose Control, Gain Command
November 14, 2006
I must have done something to annoy the tech gods last week…both my Internet connection and my Dell laptop crossed their arms and refused to do a thing. First the Internet, then the laptop, then both.
So I’m writing this from my shiny new evangelism-inspiring Macbook. As I set it up over the weekend, somewhere in my launch travels I came across this quote from Apple, about the act of switching from PC to Mac:
“Lose control, gain command.” [Read more]
A Month-Long Birthday Celebration
November 8, 2006
Today marks the end of my 10th year in full-time private practice, my 10th year with a single-minded focus on helping people talk things out in their important relationships at work and home. It also marks, almost to the exact day, four years of blogging on the same subject.
Back in 2002, when blogs were still mostly associated with teenage angst and personal journals, I though I’d try out this new-fangled thing as a business person. I had no readers at all.
