WE ALL HAVE THE POWER TO MINDFULLY AND INTENTIONALLY PUT A NAME TO THE THEME FOR OUR 2020. One of the cultural touchstones that make the end of one year and the beginning of the next fun and interesting is the giving out of prizes for “[Whatever] of the Year.” Car and Driver picks the year’s 10 Best Cars, Time names Person of the Year, annual Nobel prizes are handed out, and the Merriam-Webster dictiona...

If you commit yourself to lifelong learning, you’ll always be seeing the world through new eyes. You know the traditional cartoon showing a tired old man, usually bent over a cane, with a sash reading the number of the outgoing year. Next to him is a chubby-cheeked, smiling infant with a sash bearing the new year on it. Good riddance to the worn-out, moribund old year! Welcome to the fresh new one, with all its pos...

If there’s ever been a time with such a politically and socially polarized mood among Americans, it wasn’t in my lifetime, and I wouldn’t want to go back there. It’s gotten to the point where people are “de-Friending” their closest relatives, friends, and co-workers on social media, and friendly clubs and book groups are setting ground rules about what things can’t be talked about o...

Graduation speakers, romantic comedies, and even our best friends from our freshman year of college have all, collectively, sold us a bill of goods. It turns out, you probably won’t get hit by Cupid’s arrow with “love at first sight,” either in your romantic or your work life. In fact, there’s strong evidence that most people are never going to find a great passion in life. Nope, most of us...

I just happened to be walking past the TV not too long ago and saw the Today show’s third hour, the one where they deal with less serious topics. The anchors were talking about something they were doing all week, a “complaint cleanse.” Turns out, they were inspired by a social-media post from a poet. That poet, Cleo Wade, you might say, complained about complaining: “Complaints have no magic,”...

There are few relationships as intimate in your working life as the one you create when you mentor someone. There are also few partnerships as fraught with peril or as likely to veer off course and lose their effectiveness for both of you. If you’re going to go to the trouble of finding a person you want to mentor and putting quality time into it, you really want to make sure it brings value to both parties. Here are...

When the company taps you on the back, don’t look back. Think about what you need to do (and what not to do) to make yourself successful in your new role. If this scenario hasn’t happened to you, or not recently, it is surely something you dream about. You’re called in to the boss’s office for a meeting. There, you get the happy news that you’ve been tapped for a new role at your company, po...

When you’re the person who makes the seating chart, you have a lot of power and also a serious responsibility to optimize a functioning workplace. There’s a whole Myers-Briggs personality chart of different needs to consider when deciding who sits where and in what kind of working environment. You’ve got your introverts who suffer in an open area with no control over chatty co-workers; then there are th...

You know what to do with an underperforming employee, but what about an efficient but difficult one? I’m a strong believer that you can’t be too positive or too empathetic in the business world. Yes, a lot of places of business are far from that ideal, but that’s exactly why you should distinguish yourself from the dog-eat-dog norm and try to make your work life a place of caring and sensitivity. Why...

If you’re a good leader, you probably encourage your employees to come to you with ideas, feedback and complaints. Plus, most modern companies have some chain of command set up to “listen” to workers, ranging from employee help lines, surveys and check-in meetings all the way up to extensive HR structures. But that’s not the kind of listening I’m talking about. I’m talking about walkin...