Oct 12

Are You Leading People the Way You Want to Be Led?

Most of us lead people exactly the way we would want to be led. It sounds fair, until someone on your team wants the opposite, and you do not notice. Jessica and Brian look at where that shows up. Treating people the way you would want to be treated is a good start, but it quietly assumes everyone is you. In leading, it shows up in three places: the steer, the space and the thanks. You will hear two stories from one team: a manager who gives a new starter the goal and leaves him to it, then walks her next hire through every step, and why she was kind both times and still got it wrong. Jessica owns up to giving a new colleague a two-line brief and finding out a week later that the plan had been rewritten four times. In this episode • 0:00 Leading people the way you would want to be led • 0:23 The three places it shows up: the steer, the space, the thanks • 3:06 Two stories from one team • 5:14 How do you lead, when you are not thinking about it? The steer, the space and the thanks The steer is how much direction you give. Some people want the destination and nothing else, and detail feels like being told they cannot think. To others, a goal with no route feels like being dropped in the sea. They are not slow. They want to get it right the first time. The space is how often you check in. Some people feel trusted when you leave them alone, and a daily check-in reads as doubt. For others, silence reads as being forgotten. Same gap, two different messages. The thanks is how you say it went well. Some people want it said in front of the team. Others would rather a quiet word, or a note that shows you noticed the detail, not just the result. You can be a generous manager and still get all three wrong for the same person, because you are being generous in your own language. Try this at your next one-to-one 1. Notice which of the three you give by default, because it is what you would want. That is usually your blind spot. 2. Ask one question, not all three: do you want the goal or the steps, how often should I check in, or how do you like to hear it went well? 3. Write the answer down. Go deeper You know exactly how you like to be led. How you come across when you lead, you have never seen from the outside. The Colour Personality Quiz is twelve questions, three minutes, free. It names your colour. Start there: Take the Colour Personality Quiz. Related reading on Best of Motivation • Colour personality test • What do personality colours mean? Support the show If this episode helped you think more clearly, try the free Colour Personality Quiz at bestofmotivation.com/personality-color-quiz — it takes 2 minutes and shows you how you lead, decide, and communicate. Best of Motivation is a quiet, reflective podcast about clarity, decisions, and navigating work and life with intention. Listen in any order. Start with what fits your moment.

Oct 5

Why Some Colleagues Love Change and Others Resist It

Some people hear "we're changing how we work" and feel a lift. Others hear the same sentence and feel their shoulders drop. Same meeting, same slide, two completely different mornings. Jessica and Brian look at why. Nobody is for change or against it. Everybody is asking a question first, and three questions arrive before any opinion does: the pace, the people and the proof. You will hear two stories from one team, a colleague who is delighted by a new project tool and one who asks what happens to three client projects mid-move, and why neither of them was wrong. Jessica owns up to changing a weekly check-in on a Monday with no warning, and taking the quiet in the room as a yes. In this episode • 0:00 Same sentence, two different mornings • 0:25 The three questions that arrive before any opinion: pace, people, proof • 3:01 Two stories from one team • 5:00 Which question do you ask first? The three questions behind every reaction to change The pace is how fast this is going to move. For some people a change only becomes real once it starts, and waiting is the cost. For others the same speed feels like being rushed past the part where it gets worked out. The people is who this lands on. Some people read every change through the humans in it: who covers the handover, who has been left out of the loop, who suddenly has twice the work. Until that is answered, they cannot hear anything else. The proof is "show me". Some people will not move until they have seen it work somewhere, a pilot, a number or a case. It is not negativity. They are the ones who will be asked later whether it worked. When nobody answers the first question someone is asking, it comes out sounding like a no. Try this the next time a change is announced 1. Before you react, name which question you are asking: pace, people or proof. Just to yourself. 2. Say that question out loud before your opinion. How fast, who for, or show me. 3. When someone pushes back, do not answer the objection. Ask which of the three they are really asking. Go deeper Which question do you ask first? It is usually the one you would call just being realistic, and it is the one you have never seen from the outside. The Colour Personality Quiz is twelve questions, three minutes, free. It names your colour. Start there: Take the Colour Personality Quiz. Related reading on Best of Motivation • Colour personality test • How to deal with a toxic coworker Support the show If this episode helped you think more clearly, try the free Colour Personality Quiz at bestofmotivation.com/personality-color-quiz — it takes 2 minutes and shows you how you lead, decide, and communicate. Best of Motivation is a quiet, reflective podcast about clarity, decisions, and navigating work and life with intention. Listen in any order. Start with what fits your moment.

Sep 28

Could Your Greatest Strength Be Holding You Back at Work?

Think about the one line of feedback that has followed you from job to job. New manager, new company, same sentence. It keeps coming back because it is not describing a weakness. It is describing your best trait, seen from the other side. Jessica and Brian look at the calm-week version of a strength: not what it does in a crisis, but what it quietly does every ordinary day. A strength works on you in three ways. It decides what you notice, it decides what you get thanked for, and it decides which skills you never had to learn. You will hear two stories from one team, a careful colleague facing a half-written brief and an easy-going one who never says no, and why neither of them was wrong. Jessica owns up to running a meeting where everyone felt heard and nothing was decided. In this episode • 0:00 The thing you are best at decides what you never see • 0:20 The spotlight, the applause and the shortcut • 3:04 Two stories from one team • 5:17 Where does your light point? The three quiet ways a strength works on you The spotlight is what your strength makes you notice. Quick people notice delay. Careful people notice the mistake nobody else saw. People who read the room notice who went quiet. Everything outside that light goes dark, and it is not carelessness. It is where the light points. The applause is what you get thanked for. Fix it fast, catch the error, smooth the tension, and people say thanks, so you reach for the same tool again. Nobody asks you to stop doing the thing you are best at, so nobody tells you when it starts costing the team something. The shortcut is the skill your strength let you skip. The confident talker never had to prepare. The organised one never had to improvise. The easy one never had to say no. It costs nothing for years, until one role needs exactly that skill. Try this this week 1. Before any decision that matters, ask: what would I miss? Then ask the one colleague whose strength points somewhere else. 2. Once, in something low stakes, practise the skill you skipped. Prepare the talk you would normally wing. Say no to one favour. Send the rough version first. 3. Ask one colleague: what do I do that you have to work around? Then just listen. Go deeper Which way your light points follows a pattern. The free Colour Personality Quiz takes about three minutes and names your colour: https://bestofmotivation.com/personality-color-quiz/?utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=cq90&utm_content=s8e5 Support the show If this episode helped you think more clearly, try the free Colour Personality Quiz at bestofmotivation.com/personality-color-quiz — it takes 2 minutes and shows you how you lead, decide, and communicate. Best of Motivation is a quiet, reflective podcast about clarity, decisions, and navigating work and life with intention. Listen in any order. Start with what fits your moment.

Sep 19

Who Do You Become When You're Under Pressure?

Think about the Thursday afternoon of your last compressed week. Not how you felt. How you sounded. Somebody on your team is still carrying the version of you they met that day. In this episode Jessica and Brian take apart the most common story people tell about a hard week, that it made them someone they are not, and replace it with something less comfortable. A heavy week does not hand you a new personality. It takes the dimmer switch off the one you already have. Three things move, and they move in the same direction every time: up, in, and down. You will hear two stories from the same team in the same launch week, a ten-minute check-in and a nine-at-night write-up, and why nobody in either one was wrong. Jessica owns up to being the thorough one who became the delay. And there is one sentence to say in a calm week that buys you the whole of the next loud one. In this episode • 0:00 Nobody turns into a different person in a bad week • 0:19 Up, in, down: the three things a heavy week moves • 3:28 Two stories from one team in one launch week • 5:55 Which one is loudest in you? The three movements Up is volume. Your default does not change under a deadline, it gets louder. Decisive on a normal Tuesday is abrupt by Thursday. Thorough becomes the bottleneck. Warm becomes the person who will not give anybody a straight answer. Same trait, no dimmer. In is what your view does. It narrows to the thing you personally own and everything else greys out. It is not selfishness, it is triage, and it is invisible from where you are standing. Two people leave the same meeting each certain the other has lost the plot. They are not disagreeing. They are looking at two different problems. Down is your tolerance, and not for people. For how long things take. Somebody wants to sleep on it and it reads as an obstacle. You are not annoyed at them, you are annoyed at how long they need. Try this in a calm week 1. Tell the handful of people you work with every week what you look like under strain. One sentence: "I get short, it is never about you." Said before a heavy week, it is a map. Said during one, it is an excuse. 2. When somebody lands badly on you, ask one question before you respond: is this who they are, or is this Thursday? Most of the time it is Thursday. Start here All three happen to everyone. But one of them runs louder in you than the other two, and it is usually the one you would argue you do not do. You have watched your team under strain for years. You are the one person in that room you have never seen from the outside. Take the free Colour Personality Quiz. Twelve questions, three minutes. It names your colour. Start there. Related reading • How to communicate with each personality colour • What the personality colours actually mean • Personality colours at work Support the show If this episode helped you think more clearly, try the free Colour Personality Quiz at bestofmotivation.com/personality-color-quiz — it takes 2 minutes and shows you how you lead, decide, and communicate. Best of Motivation is a quiet, reflective podcast about clarity, decisions, and navigating work and life with intention. Listen in any order. Start with what fits your moment.

Sep 14

Why Your Messages Sound Colder Than You Mean Them To

Think about the last message you sent before you left the house this morning. Was it short? Was it long? Somebody read it in a way you did not intend, and you will probably never hear about it. In this episode Jessica and Brian take apart why perfectly polite messages land as cold, why “add a friendly opener” makes it worse for half your readers, and the three settings every message carries whether you meant them or not: length, warmth, speed. You will hear two stories from the same team, a two-line Friday update and a four-hundred-word Monday email, and why nobody in either one was wrong. Jessica owns up to being a two-line replier. And there is one thing to try on the very next message you send. In this episode 0:00 Three polite lines, read as annoyed 0:27 The three dials: length, warmth, speed 3:31 Two stories from one team 6:09 Which dial is yours? Start here There is one dial you push harder than you realise, and one you misread in other people over and over. You have watched everyone on your team for months. You are the one person you have never observed from the outside. Take the free Colour Personality Quiz. Twelve questions, three minutes. It names your colour. Start there. Related reading • How to communicate with each personality colour • What the personality colours actually mean • Personality colours at work Support the show If this episode helped you think more clearly, try the free Colour Personality Quiz at bestofmotivation.com/personality-color-quiz — it takes 2 minutes and shows you how you lead, decide, and communicate. Best of Motivation is a quiet, reflective podcast about clarity, decisions, and navigating work and life with intention. Listen in any order. Start with what fits your moment.

Sep 4

Why One Conversation Can Cost You the Whole Afternoon

You can walk out of a twenty minute one to one more tired than you were after a three hour workshop. Same day, same you — and the twenty minute one wins. The usual explanation is introversion, and it's the wrong one. People who love a crowd come out of a single one-to-one completely flat. Quiet people run six back to back and are fine. What actually decides it is what that particular conversation asked you to *run*. This episode names the three things that charge you in a one-to-one, and gives each one its own fix: • Load — translating in real time, because your natural order isn't theirs. Fix: front-load it. One adjustment, made in the first two minutes, then stop translating. • Lock — holding your own default down for the length of the conversation. Fix: cap it. Say the thing you're holding, early and lightly. • Loop — the conversation that ends without landing, and then runs in the background all afternoon. Fix: close it on purpose, in one sentence. Nothing has to go wrong for a conversation to be expensive. That's the part most people can't account for. The part this episode can't give you The three drains don't cost everybody the same. One of them is your expensive one — some people barely register load and are undone by loop; others sit in an unresolved conversation all week quite happily and it's the lock that finishes them. Which one is yours tracks how you're wired, closely enough that it also tells you which conversations belong in your morning and which two you should never stack back to back. Take the free Colour Personality Quiz — twelve questions, about three minutes. It names your colour, and the drain that comes with it. Related reading • How to communicate with each personality colour • Personality colours at work Support the show If this episode helped you think more clearly, try the free Colour Personality Quiz at bestofmotivation.com/personality-color-quiz — it takes 2 minutes and shows you how you lead, decide, and communicate. Best of Motivation is a quiet, reflective podcast about clarity, decisions, and navigating work and life with intention. Listen in any order. Start with what fits your moment.

Sep 2

Why Some People Are Easy to Work With, And Others Drain Your Energy

Have you ever worked with someone and thought, why is this person so difficult to communicate with? The honest answer is usually that they aren't. They're difficult to you — and someone two desks over finds them completely straightforward. Most conflict at work isn't disagreement. It's mistranslation. The two-line message that reads as annoyed. The full backstory that loses them by sentence three. The yes you get in the meeting that never actually moves. And the feedback given with no run-up that quietly costs you someone three months later. Underneath all of it sit two questions — do you move fast or slow, and do you lead with the task or the people — and the four patterns they produce. This episode covers what those patterns are, why the same sentence lands four different ways, and a simple way to adjust before your next difficult conversation. The part this episode can't give you Every adjustment you make starts from where you're already standing. And you're the one person in the room you've never observed from the outside. Most people are two colours with one in front, which is exactly why guessing your own is harder than it sounds — and why your blind spot is, by definition, the thing you can't self-report. Take the free Colour Personality Quiz — twelve questions, about three minutes. It names your colour, how you communicate, and the blind spot you can't see from the inside. Related reading • What do personality colors mean? • How to communicate with each personality colour Support the show If this episode helped you think more clearly, try the free Colour Personality Quiz at bestofmotivation.com/personality-color-quiz — it takes 2 minutes and shows you how you lead, decide, and communicate. Best of Motivation is a quiet, reflective podcast about clarity, decisions, and navigating work and life with intention. Listen in any order. Start with what fits your moment.

Aug 28

The Conversation You're Avoiding: A 5R Approach

Have you ever known you needed to have a difficult conversation with someone, and kept putting it off? Most of us have. This episode walks through why we avoid these conversations, why avoiding them makes things worse, and a five-question check plus a four-step structure that turns a confrontation into an actual conversation. What's in this episode: - Why your brain treats a hard conversation like a threat, and why avoiding it never actually saves you anything - The 5R diagnostic — five questions to run before you say a word, so you know if the conversation is even yours to have - The four-step structure for the conversation itself: Fact, Impact, Perspective, Next Steps - A real workplace example showing the same five minutes going two very different ways - The three phrases that guarantee defensiveness, and the one thing to do today instead of the conversation itself The 5R diagnostic — run these before you decide a conversation needs to happen at all: 1. Reprioritise — Is this person overwhelmed with competing demands? 2. Reset Expectations — Was the standard ever clearly communicated in the first place? 3. Recognise — Have you only ever given this person corrective feedback? 4. Resource — Is something blocking them that hasn't been addressed? 5. Role Model — Are you demonstrating the standard you're about to ask for? If any of the five is broken on your end, fix that first. Sometimes running the five means you don't need the conversation at all — the issue was never them. The conversation you're avoiding right now might be the conversation that shows you care enough to have it. Read the full breakdown, including the complete Fact / Impact / Perspective / Next Steps script: https://bestofmotivation.com/the-difficult-conversation-script-a-5r-approach/ Clarity over noise. Support the show If this episode helped you think more clearly, try the free Colour Personality Quiz at bestofmotivation.com/personality-color-quiz — it takes 2 minutes and shows you how you lead, decide, and communicate. Best of Motivation is a quiet, reflective podcast about clarity, decisions, and navigating work and life with intention. Listen in any order. Start with what fits your moment.

Best of Motivation | Clarity Over Noise

Are You Leading People the Way You Want to Be Led?

Why Some Colleagues Love Change and Others Resist It

Could Your Greatest Strength Be Holding You Back at Work?

Who Do You Become When You're Under Pressure?

Why Your Messages Sound Colder Than You Mean Them To

Why One Conversation Can Cost You the Whole Afternoon

Why Some People Are Easy to Work With, And Others Drain Your Energy

The Conversation You're Avoiding: A 5R Approach

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Best of Motivation | Clarity Over Noise

Episodes

Are You Leading People the Way You Want to Be Led?

Why Some Colleagues Love Change and Others Resist It

Could Your Greatest Strength Be Holding You Back at Work?

Who Do You Become When You're Under Pressure?

Why Your Messages Sound Colder Than You Mean Them To

Why One Conversation Can Cost You the Whole Afternoon

Why Some People Are Easy to Work With, And Others Drain Your Energy

The Conversation You're Avoiding: A 5R Approach

Trailer

About

Information