I was at the check out at Zupan’s, Portland’s treasured locally-owned grocery store when the young bagger asked If I wanted bags. I pointed  to the bags I had brought in that were laying in front of her. “Oh gosh”,  she said, embarrassed, "I'm at the end of my shift and I’m just fried”.  I told her I used to work in a grocery store and understood. I added that at the time, we  punched the prices into the cash register, shoppers paid in cash, and we calculated the change ourselves. The checker and bagger at the same time said, “no bar codes?” “Nope,”  I answered, “Everything was manual.” Again they said in unison, “no barcodes?” as though it were unimaginable.  

We all do it. Many times a day without even thinking about it. We see a problem and go straight to a solution. Sometimes the problem is obvious: I cut my finger and it’s bleeding. I need a bandage. Much of the time the problem isn’t that simple, and the solution we identify can become the problem.

One of my favorite clients recently worried about the stress on his team as they began to dive into some really cool and creative initiatives they were all excited about. How in the world were they going to get them done on top of an already full workload? I said it sounded like eustress. “What stress?" he asked. Eustress. The good kind.

It was novel at the time. Research began at Harvard in pre-WWII, depression-era 1938 to figure out not what makes people sick or go off the rails, but instead, what helps us thrive. The Harvard Study of Human Development amassed gobs of data across two centuries that uncovered the single most important contributor to our health and happiness: good relationships. More than exercise, diet, work, genes, success, money, or anything else.

It’s been the Sunday Morning word of the year and the main ingredient in most posts of curated wisdom. It doesn’t cost money. Giving and receiving it feels incredible. It helps resolve me-you conflict, breaks logjams in high stakes negotiations, and can, quite literally, save a life. When I forget to do it, I kick myself after, as it’s so obvious that it would have been better if I had.

It’s simple, but not easy, to just listen. To truly hear and understand the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, fears, and dreams of the human in front of us.

There’s a passage in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises in which a character named Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

That quote popped out of something I read a couple of months ago and it really made me think. And the more I thought, the more those three words explained so much. In such a simple and profound way.

I felt like an excited kid anticipating my cross-country trip from Oakland, CA to my new home in Charlotte, NC. Route 66! Lake Havasu and Winslow, AZ, Albuquerque, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, then to Little Rock, Nashville, and the Smokies before landing in Charlotte. Changing landscapes, cityscapes, cultures, and National Parks to experience! It was a great adventure, and it left me hopeful that people with vastly different beliefs can have civil and open conversations about hard-to-talk-about topics.

When the economic crisis descended in 2008, I was involved with Oakland-based East Bay Community Foundation. We watched helplessly as scores of nonprofits were decimated. Yet, in the middle of the worst of it, a few were thriving. Curious, a couple of senior staffers wanted to know why. They found three things these thrivers were doing: they (1) adopted a razor sharp focus on the programs that had the greatest impact, (2) communicated — up, down, sideways, and all around — keeping all stakeholders informed, and (3) did what they said they were going to do. They delivered results.

When Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos became head of a residential college for first-year students, she was shocked by the level of stress, depression, loneliness, and anxiety the students were experiencing. That, and her own self-described “below average” happiness level inspired her to create a course packed with evidence from the happiness research landscape that debunks what we’ve been conditioned to believe will give us the good life, exposes the faulty wiring in our brains that conspires to lead us astray, reveals what does make us happy, and teaches habits we can form to get there.

Classes begin at Harvard Business School this week, and a course that’s sure to fill up fast this year is Associate Professor Alison Wood Brooks’ new offering How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life. It’s based on gobs of data revealing the importance of how we talk — not the proper use of language or presentation skills — how we converse each other in our daily lives. Students will learn conversation skills based on research insights through lots of practice, feedback, reflection, and wisdom from occasional guest “practitioners” such as matchmakers and comedians.

“I just knew.” It’s that feeling you instantly got when you met “the one” or clicked with a friend. Or when you instinctively knew that dog or cat that stood out from the rest of the litter was the one coming home with you, or that house or town you stepped into and just felt at home in. We’ve all experienced this kind of knowing.

Long before the hammer of social distancing shattered our ways of connecting, causing us to quickly pivot to figure out ways to be together, and worry about the emotional effects of isolation, sirens were sounding about loneliness as a global public health problem. Former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic in 2017.

As they do every December, both Oxford Languages (Oxford English Dictionary) and Merriam-Webster announced their word of the year for 2019…

I knew what my word of the year for 2019 was going to be in January. It was my word of the year in 2018. It’s an odds-on favorite for 2020. It’s pervasive in our work, our lives, relationships, our current events. Or, should I say its absence is pervasive.

Often dismissed as nothing more than a dinner party game, sometimes misused to label, pigeonhole, or stereotype people, and occasionally the backdrop for Dilbertian team-building moments, personality typing is both widely used and controversial. I’ve found personality assessments to be an anchor tool in the emotional intelligence toolbox.

I was causing a ruckus with a controversial proposal in a leadership team meeting a few years ago. Tensions were high. Faces were red. Veins were bulging. It was beginning to break into a full-on yelI. I caught the general counsel’s eyes — he’d been staying out of it — and said, dryly, “This is going well, don’t you think?” After an awkward pause, everyone laughed. I’m not going to tell you the rest of the meeting went my way. I will say it helped turn down the heat measurably.

It can be just a little nudge, almost imperceptible. Or it can be a full-on heart pound that makes you wonder if you’re gonna need a trip to the emergency room. You’ve been triggered. Maybe it’s a snarky comment in a meeting, a critique from your partner about how you might’ve scrambled those eggs better, the tipping point of a crushing workload, or your manager just found a mistake in your analysis. If it’s a little thing, it might distract you from what you’re doing for a bit. If it’s a big thing, it can bring an out-sized sometimes regrettable reaction, or cause you to shut down. And it doesn’t feel so good.

We’re drowning in this stuff. Ten steps to this, four ways to that. I like that Gallup has for decades teamed up with other organizations, economists, psychologists, and scientists, to understand the elements of a life well-lived — how we experience our lives and the things that are important to us — and they’ve kept it data-based and fad-free. While global well-being research informs broader societal decisions for employees, communities, and countries, it’s helpful for us to be reminded of what really matters, as we often operate on autopilot in our busy and distracted lives.

The only thing we know for sure about the stories we tell is that they’re not true. Not completely, anyway. Our make-believe can range from getting the details surrounding an emotional event wrong to being unshakably sure of the stories we tell about ourselves that are often turn out to be mind-made.

Integrity is such a big word. It’s the most common value people and organizations cite as “table stakes,” a have-to-have. We want to have it, we want those around to have it, we want our organizations to have it. It’s hard to live up to, especially when we’re challenged and our emotions get the better of us, and our blind spots can get in the way.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers begins with Roseto, a small town in the foothills of Eastern Pennsylvania, named for the place in Italy where its residents immigrated from. In the late 1950s, when heart disease was ravaging the nation — the #1 cause of death in men over 65 — men in Rosetta showed no sign of heart disease at 55, and were experiencing it at half the rate of the US at 65. A local physician, Stewart Wolf, discovered this, got to work conducting careful research, and brought in friend and colleague John Bruhn, a sociologist. Bruhn recalled, “There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were basically dying of old age. That’s it.”

A river is a wonderful metaphor for life — melting snow from a mountain, just a drop at a time, grows to a trickle that develops into a stream and before you know it, it’s a river full of life with blind spots, hairpin turns, exhilarating and sometimes treacherous rapids and waterfalls that instantly transform into brilliant still pools of water full of fish and teaming with birds and wildlife, all surrounded by beautiful vegetation.

The credit for this one goes to Lucy Kaplan, the badass octogenarian teacher/coach and faculty member at the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute (BECI) who is a dynamic blend of humor, compassion, honesty, and rigor. She artfully packaged one of the (let-me-count-the) ways our brains have of holding us back from doing what really want to do in an easy-to-understand acronym that helps us resist our resistance.

Remarkable, really. And I thought it was just me until client after client who gave it a try reported how much of a difference it made to adopt the simple daily practice of writing down three things that went well, and what made those good things happen. This 5 to 10 minute habit seems to have an outsized effect — sort of like a personal “butterfly effect” — where a very small action can have a profound systemic effect.