When you become a manager for the first time, you might have an image of the kind of leader you want to become. More often than not, though, we don’t have any vision of how we want to be as a manager – we just got promoted, and all we want is to prove we are fit for the position,

“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room” – Jeff Bezos Do you know what people say about you when you are not in the room? When asked about your leadership style and working habits, do you know what they say? Do you like what they say? Cause the way others see you and

For most, becoming a manager is stepping into new territory, and very often, we step into it completely unprepared. I talk to many new managers who are surprised and often overwhelmed by how many new expectations they have to meet and don’t know even where to start.   As a manager, you need to communicate differently, delegate, give feedback, make

I was running a workshop recently, and at the very end of the 2-hour programme, one of the participants asked me the following question: why are we here and why did we have to have this training? It was a surprise for me and gave me a bit of a pause, and not because I did not know the answer

What is feedback? In the most basic understanding, it is a piece of information that comes back to you, a reaction of the others on what and how you do things. Feedback comes in many forms – you can get it in a conversation, in an e-mail, or you can observe it as an action. Your customers give you feedback

WAIT – What Am I Telling myself? During my coaching journey with Co-Active Training Institute, I learnt one of the super helpful acronyms, WAIT, which stands for Why Am I Talking.  It was one of those (next to FAIL – For All I’ve Learnt) that I kept written on a post-it note above my desk when I started my coaching

How do you feel before an important meeting or a presentation? Do you suffer from stress and anxiety before The Day comes? How do you deal with it? How do stress and anxiety manifest for you? Do you have troubles sleeping? Get frustrated and irritated for no good reason? For me, the anxiety starts as a delicate sensation in my

My clients often ask me how to give constructive negative feedback to their employees, colleagues, or even their bosses. They look for proper and effective ways of passing criticism on a poor job or behaviour they want to eliminate. Interestingly, managers rarely ask me how to give positive feedback. If I ask them about it, usually they believe that positive

Do you often replay a past situation or conversation in your head and wish you responded differently? Or are the best answers coming to you right after you finish the meeting or just after you hit the “Send” button? I think we all had at least one conversation when we said something too quickly or we reacted in a way

Work is not a popularity contest – with this sentence, my manager tried to convince me to stop being too nice to people around me. It was one of the sentences that I wouldn’t say I liked when I heard it first, and I profoundly disagreed with it. I was terrified by the thought that people will not like me!