Many years ago, I read the fantastic book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink, and it changed the way I looked at motivation. Instead of thinking about the hundreds of ways I could motivate my people - give them more ownership? chances to belong? free time? cupcakes? - it helped me focus on three major things: A utonomy, M astery, and P urpose. Autonomy Pink argues that autonomy - the desire to be in charge of our own time - is a core driver of

I've been doing some strategic planning work (with some of my favorite people at Wildfire Strategies) for a pair of hospitals in NYC in the last few months, and in one of the hospitals, the CEO had already drafted his ten points of focus for the next few years. We saw two main ways forward: stick to his well-crafted ten points and lose the buy-in of the hospital, or go back to the drawing board and find a way to integrate his objectives into a greater strategy. We quickly c

I've been teaching goal setting for years, and when I started, the research was pretty clear that sharing your goals publicly would help you maintain motivation and make it more likely that you would reach your goals. It's worked for me for years, and I haven't questioned it. That is, until a client of mine really didn't want to share her goals, and insisted that the research had to be wrong. So I did a little digging to bring you an update. I was pleased to find that there

The other day, I did some momming worthy of the Golden Globe for Best Parenting in a Comedy Series. My daughter had done something kind of stupid and impulsive and was mortified by her own behavior. My husband and I agreed that punishing her for what she did would just compound her embarrassment and shame, and so we decided to help her process her feelings instead. (And, of course, there was no screen time.) In that moment of parenting, I was intensely focused on the prese

We've all worked with someone who, for reasons we can't understand, just doesn't do the things they're supposed to do. The filing piles...

I'm guessing you can relate. It's summer, and my kids are on vacation. They think I'm on vacation, too, and abandoning the computer is...

In his oldie-but-goodie 1995 book ‘Supermotivation’ , author Dean Spitzer describes 8 desires which drive our inner motivation. While...