Monday Morning Business Coach, Author at Carpenter Smith Consulting, LLC

You Might As Well Do What You Love

July 14, 2014

During this season of graduations, we were recently encouraged to watch a commencement speech by Jim Carrey. He was speaking at Maharishi University of Management and the audience of young people seemed absolutely thrilled to have him there. We watched the video expecting the typical Jim Carrey humor and little depth. Much to our surprise, we walked away with two thought-provoking nuggets that we will be speaking about this week and next week. Go Jim Carrey! In talking about his…

Power: Holding Two Opposing Feelings

July 7, 2014

Monday Morning Business Coach

Since we’ve been talking about Emotional Drama and Emotional Data, we wanted to spend this week talking about one of the ways that we have defined adulthood over the years: Adulthood is the ability to hold two opposing ideas or feelings at the same time. The ability to hold two opposing ideas or feelings simultaneously is especially important when managing or leading others. In our work as coaches and consultants, we have seen that individuals who have the ability to…

Emotional Data

June 30, 2014

Monday Morning Business Coach

Last week we talked about the difference between using your emotional response to gather data about what is going on for you and creating emotional drama. We defined drama as the uncontrolled or unconscious expression of emotions, often in ways that exaggerate the importance of what has happened. Drama is the antithesis of healthy emotional expression; it’s the seeping of emotions into the workplace, through covert means, as a result of people not believing they have been heard or understood…

Emotion vs. Drama

June 23, 2014

Monday Morning Business Coach

From time to time, an executive will come to us saying that they are working to create an environment of logic and reason but despite their best efforts they are failing. Unfortunately, the fact that they are failing makes sense. Business is and always will be an enterprise where feelings and emotions are a central part of the environment because of the simple fact that businesses are made up of people. It’s a package deal; people bring the whole of…

Our Insides and Their Outsides

June 16, 2014

Monday Morning Business Coach

A number of years ago, a thoughtful and talented business owner, Andrea, was bumping into some old anxieties about the sustainability of her business and the decisions she was making. We spent a couple of meetings teasing out the data behind her anxiety. We explored what she needed to be genuinely concerned about as the industry changed and the economy floundered. We also explored the various old messages, which were rooted in her family, that were grabbing her by the…

Leader in the Air

June 9, 2014

Monday Morning Business Coach

Recently, we took a cross-country flight and on the flight we witnessed an extraordinary leader in action. Let us explain: At Carpenter Smith Consulting we define leadership as a willingness to influence your world and a willingness to be influenced by your world (or in this case, a plane with 180 passengers on board). One of the things we see in great leaders is that they are in relationship with the people they lead even if it’s not face-to-face. As…

Memorial Day

June 2, 2014

Monday Morning Business Coach

Over the years, Memorial Day has come to mean many different things in our culture—it’s the beginning of summer, the running of the Indianapolis 500, and a day of countless sales—everything from mattresses to lawn furniture. It can be hard remember why we have this holiday at all. A brief history lesson: Memorial Day is the day when we remember the men and women who died while serving our country. Originally (in 1862), it was called Decoration Day, an apolitical…

“Apply Yourself”

May 26, 2014

Monday Morning Business Coach

One of the things teachers often say to the parents of struggling kids is, “Johnny just needs to apply himself.” The parents often walk away agreeing that, in fact, Johnny does need to apply himself and they tell him as much when they get home. While it may sound like a utilitarian comment, it is far from clear what action is required in “applying” oneself—therefore, nothing changes. We can only imagine the number of kids who walk away rolling their…

How Do I Help People Know What They Don’t Know?

May 19, 2014

Monday Morning Business Coach

We received some very nice comments about last week’s post, thank you, and also another question that deserves some thought. “What do you do with people who don’t know enough to know whether or not they are going to hurt the business?” Last week we talked about how to establish the 3-5 rules that, if set, could help guide individuals and teams as they are tackling all the things that come at them day-to-day and week-to-week. The challenge of course,…

How to Identify the “Right” 3 – 5 Rules

May 12, 2014

Monday Morning Business Coach

Thank you for your comments on last week’s post, 3 – 5 Rules. A lot of executives out there resonated with the idea of providing 3 – 5 key expectations or “rules” that can guide their team as they make choices in their leadership and their work. And, many of you asked how to identify the “right” rules for your teams. As we said in last week’s post, the key to developing powerful rules “is to keep them broad enough…