How Direct Are You?
You think you’re being direct in your communication. This is a highly valued quality in business culture in the US and other western countries. Being direct is useful because it saves time, keeps the air clear, and moves the action forward. Even with this espoused...
The Work You Do
Your Job as Part of the Bigger Picture In light of Labor Day just past, let’s take a look at what we do and what it means.Each day, we pick up our work and go forward. Sometimes we can tell we’re moving ahead, sometimes we are in maintenance mode or a creative...
When is it Time to Upgrade Your Communication and Influence Skills?
We manage our everyday work and personal lives, communicating perfectly well, thank you, and generally do fine with it. People are flexible, we make requests that are clear enough, things get done. Why would we want to mess with something that’s working?Here are some...
When Was the Last Time You Sharpened Your Syntax?
No matter what we are doing, our results rest on how we do it. Zen teacher Cheri Huber says, "How you do anything is how you do everything." If we could fathom our own patterns, and the ways they serve and don't serve us, much of what annoys and derails us might be...
Pay Attention to the Step You Are On
Who in today’s world is NOT dealing with overload of stimuli, things to do, information to keep track of, and personal pressures? It’s a challenge for one person, in one body, to keep up. Our mental strategies for coping are not necessarily the most useful. As Cheri...
How to Probe Like a Pro
Smart, helpful types (like you and me), are truly interested in what others have to say. We want to understand more than just the surface level, sometimes because we want to empathize, sometimes because we need or want to know more for its own sake. Questioning can...
Are You A Universal Communicator?
A central goal of Syntax for Change is that we practice to be "universal communicators." What does this mean, and why is it the key to expanding your influence and simplifying your life? You have long since realized intellectually that each of us thinks and...
The Structure of Influence
Are you sometimes frustrated when good ideas, from you or others, go nowhere? What do you do when you run up against resistance or just can’t seem to get a response? New ideas and solutions are needed for problems to get solved, for innovation to occur, for...
Choosing Happiness
Reflections on being happy, including why your happiness is a gift to people you don't even know. What is happiness? What does it take to be happy? We all want to feel happy. Do we know how? It seems we were born knowing how. Babies show their feelings -- and...
Radical Cooperation
A dozen ways to make someone else's day better Small efforts make a big difference. We may take for granted the extent that we rely on good communication from other people. Some folks are just great to work with. The central skill of such people is excellent...
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