Three Ways to Break Your Bias
Vancity Credit Union is completing a month of learning about unconscious bias. Partnering with the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI), all employees are completing online learning and discussing bias within teams. A quick Google search will reveal dozens of articles...
Four Tips for Planning your next Trip
Most of us travel. Before you leave your home it’s critical to set yourself up for success by preparing with a good trip plan. You’ll want to consider the theme of your trip, where you will eat, sleep and frolic as well as the needs and desires of your travelling...
Six Professional Lessons From Six Movie Side Hustles
We tend to remember Indiana Jones as a Nazi-fighting, world-saving, rough-and-tumble adventurer, not as a Professor of Archeology. We tend to remember Erin Brockovich as a feisty, community-minded legal aid who held corporations accountable, not as a single mom. And...
Five Career Lessons from Agile Management
Agile methodology is a business practice that encourages collaboration and empowers people to make decisions as close to customers/members as possible in order to continuously improve the planning and delivery of a project. Last week I listened to this HBR IdeaCast...
Three Professional Lessons from Leicester City Football Club
Leicester City Football Club’s (LCFC) recent Premier League victory has the sports world talking. Such an achievement is unheard of in world football. Their victory is already being heralded by commentators as one of the greatest football achievements in history....
Three Ways to Blend Your Work and Life
A lot has been written about work-life-balance. Like, a lot. An interesting outcome of the Millennial generation taking our rightful place on the throne of everything is that we're more inclined to blend our work and life than we are to balance (or compartmentalize...
Six Organizational Development Lessons from the San Antonio Spurs
It’s the first round of the NBA Playoffs and the San Antonio Spurs are a title contender. This seems to happen every year. The franchise has become a model of success in the sports entertainment business, as the Spurs have a culture of collaboration, humility,...
Career Lessons from Comedians
These days I’m on a real podcasting kick. One of my favourites is the Nerdist, which is moderated by comedian Chris Hardwick. Hardwick has all sorts of guests, but some of the most interesting are his fellow comics. During the hour long shows, comics such as Steve...
Four Tips For Asking Great Questions
Asking good questions is an important quality of a friend, a partner and a co-worker. It’s also particularly helpful in a work setting. Whether you are meeting with colleagues or attending your monthly board meeting, asking good and insightful questions without fear...
Five Community Building Lessons From Football Supporters
As a partner in a Vancouver Whitecaps FC movement called Curva Collective, I know a thing or two about creating a positive atmosphere through collaboration. Whether you call it “football” or “soccer” (I will call it the F-word), being a member of any sporting...
In Praise of Silence and “Stillness”
We are bombarded by media and noise all the time. On the bus, many of us are plugged in like zombies, imbibing a steady stream of google music and podcasts in a desperate last ditch effort to battle back the silence (and accompanying boredom) of a long ride home. At...
Three Reasons Why You Should Cultivate Grit
Having grit means being in possession of courage, strength and resolve – it means having passion and perseverance for very long term goals. Literary and cinematic characters that are known for their grit are persistent, resilient and thrive during uncertain times....
Five Mindfulness Lessons I Learned from Spilling Water on my Laptop
Two weeks ago I my enthusiastic hand-talking resulted in a lidless water bottle toppling its contents all over my laptop. Several tabs, documents and emails were opened when the catastrophe ensued and the screen went very black very quickly. All that was not saved was...