Coach-on-Demand Podcasts™: Recent Episodes
Gregory A. Ketchum, Ph.D.
Dubbed the “Frasier of the Cubicles” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Dr. Greg is a former clinical psychologist-turned executive coach and radio talk show host. His company, TalentPlanet, Inc., is an executive talent firm, providing coaching for executives and Fortune 500 companies. A unique mix of psychology and coaching expertise gives Dr. Greg a great understanding of people and what it takes for career success. Combined with his keen insight into today’s workplace, and infused with his trademark quick wit, Dr. Greg challenges his listeners and clients to reach for career success on their own terms—and to have a good time doing it.
Dr. Greg's partner on the Coach-on-Demand Podcasts™ is Steve Kovsky, who is a technology journalist, an author, and is also a former talk show host.
Dr. Greg formerly hosted a weekly talk show on CNET & XM Satellite Radio on the workplace and careers and was the CBS 5 Workplace and Career Expert for KPIX TV in San Francisco, CA.
For more information go to www.talentplanet.com.
How to Come Aboard and Not Rock the Boat.How to Avoid Hitting a Brick Wall in Your First Month in a New Role or New Job.It is very important to get off to a great start when coming into a new company or a new position within your current company. Making the right moves in your first few months can lay the groundwork for long-tern success. On the other hand making the wrong moves can derail you permanently.
No Really, I’d Rather Do It Myself.Managing Up with Your Micromanaging Boss.You know what it’s like. You’re giving it your best, you know what you’re doing, really, things are under control, but your boss just seems to be having trouble letting go and letting you run with your responsibilities. Whatever the reason none of us really likes being micromanaged nor can we do our best work under the microscope. Learning how to manage up with that micromanaging boss is key to your success as at one time or another we all find ourselves in this situation. Want to learn how to get a handle on it? Listen in.
How To Deal With Someone Whom You Believe Might be Trying to Sabotage YouSometimes it’s difficult to determine if a coworker is out to sabotage you or if something else entirely is going on. In many situation our preconceived notions about someone can completely color the way we see them and their actions in an unfair and inaccurate way. That’s called prejudice. Remember, it’s a quantum world and before you conclude that someone is engaging in sabotage you owe it to yourself and the other person to do your best to determine the reality of what’s going on before your own actions contribute to evoking the very behavior from the other that you desperately do not want. Listen in and we’ll give you three action steps you can take to deal with a potential saboteur.
What Do Emotions Have to do with Leadership? Why Your Success Depends on Your Leadership EQ and Your Business Skills
Talking about emotions at work has traditionally been discouraged. Being able to deal with feelings at work has been viewed as touchy-feely soft skills as opposed to the hard business skills. No more than fluff or a nuisance. Now research is showing that the best leaders have something called EQ (EI) or emotional intelligence in addition to great business skills and their smarts. Have we piqued your curiosity yet? Want to know how to develop your own EQ? Listen in and we’ll give you the lowdown on how to build your EQ and overall leadership success.
Learn How Your Relationship Building skills (Networking by any other name) Are as Important as Your Subject Matter Expertise.
Most people think of networking as something you do when you’re looking for a job, and an activity where you’re looking for others to help you. Further, I’d say that when most people think about networking images of being a phony and using others come to mind. The truth is, networking is one of the key skills you need to succeed at work today. As we’ve discussed in another podcast your technical or subject matter expertise can get you in the door and establish your credibility, but aside from doing a good job it is your ability to build strong internal and external relationships characterized by high levels of trust and commitment that makes the difference in your overall success. Listen in to learn how to make networking a part of what you do everyday in the normal course of your work.
How to Become a More Conscious Leader and Create a Healthy, Energetic Culture for Your Team or Organization.
My guest today, Rebecca Watson, has spent nearly 20 years coaching senior leaders on how to create high performing teams and a healthy, vibrant culture in their workplaces. She is a master coach, author, speaker and online trainer hoping to share her knowledge as widely as possible so people don’t suffer under poor leadership. Her most recent book is entitled “Conscious Leadership - And The Power Of Energetic Fields.” Rebecca is based in London, England.
The Key to Working With Difficult People is Not to Focus On How You’d Like Them to Change, But Rather on How You Need to Change to Be Successful.
No matter what walk of life we choose we are always going to run across individuals whom we find difficult to successfully work with. Now just because we find someone to be difficult doesn’t necessarily mean that we can write them off as a jerk, and if we do we’ve learned nothing about how to deal with people in these situations. When we label someone as just being a difficult person it leads us to the belief that they own 100% of the problem, and as we’ve talked about in other podcasts, we always have some part of the responsibility when interactions and relationships become problematic. The real key to success in situations like this is entirely dependent upon where we focus our attention. If you’d like to learn where to focus your attention so that you can successfully work with people whom you experience as difficult just give a listen.
What to do when you’re a good ways into a collaborative project and you realize in your gut that you're just not into it?
Your ability to be truly honest with others is dependent upon your ability to be honest with yourself about your feelings. Taking your feelings into consideration when making important decisions and commitments gives you the capability to make better decisions and avoid making commitments that your heart just can’t make. If you’d like to learn how to get better at including your feelings in major decisions and commitments give a listen.
You’re leading a high profile change effort and despite the fact that all of the key players say they’re totally on board you keep running into resistance. In this cast we show you how to identify the source of that resistance, but more importantly how to overcome it with grace and style. What more could you ask for?
How To Do Training and Development Right In An Online, Zoom Work World.
Whether you’re a provider or consumer of online training it’s important to understand how the online learning experience vastly differs from that of the in-person classroom. Taking material developed for the in-person classroom and just pushing it online doesn’t work and bores your learners to tears. Want to learn what makes for successful and engaging online learning? Give a listen to my interview with Curt Dowdy, CEO of InnerProfessional on what works and what to look for in your next online learning experience.
Uncertainty has always been a part of our world, but with Covid 19 and all the disruptions it has caused it looks like uncertainty is now a permanent, unrelenting worldwide fixture rather than something that happens in response to a particular crisis and then recedes. Despite how much we may dislike uncertainty, learning how to not only accept, but truly embrace it and the new possibilities it brings is one of those fundamental leadership skills for our time. If you’d like to learn how to make this leadership switch, give a listen to my interview with executive coach, leadership consultant and six-time Ironman triathlon finisher Bobbie LaPorte.
It turns out that one of the absolute best coaches you can hire is yourself. If you'd like to learn some practical self-coaching skills give a listen to my interview with Mike Normant, the creator of Coach Your Self Up, a training program that teaches self-coaching skills to help individuals make lasting behavior changes in support of their career and life goals.
How to Be Honest With Others When They Let You Down Without Becoming Disrespectful.
You know the situation where someone tells you that they're going to do something and then they don't follow through. When this happens how do you respond in a way that's true to your own feelings, but doesn't alienate the other person by having your frustration infect your communication with them. Want to learn how? Give a listen to this cast and we'll show you.
Want to learn how to get a better handle on your emotions and gain more fulfillment at work and in your life? Give a listen to my interview with Joie Seldon, who’s an expert in Emotional Intelligence. She has helped thousands of executives & professionals have greater career success and satisfaction through her in-person coaching and instructor-led online course, Emotions at Work. She holds a master’s degree in Somatic Psychology, and is the author of Emotions: An Owner’s Manual.
Give a listen to my conversation with Dr. Ginny Whitelaw in our new Interview series. Dr. Ginny is a Zen master and founder/CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership. She holds a doctorate in biophysics, degrees in physics and philosophy, and a 5th degree black belt in Aikido, and was formerly a senior leader at NASA, where she led the integration of the Space Station Program. She is the author of 4 books, including her latest, Resonate.
How to Deal With an Unspoken Vibe Without Either Ignoring it or Having it Blow Up Into a Big Confrontation.
Communication glitches where something is sensed, but is not being spoken happen all the time and they rarely resolve themselves. We’re big advocates of living in reality as the further away you get from dealing with the full facts, feelings, and reality of a situation the more you invite confusion, conflict, and ultimately failure into your life. Do yourself a favor and make a commitment to find a way that works for you to deal with what you sense, but that is not being spoken. Listen in to this cast and we’ll show you how.
Leadership Lessons Learned From Being Trapped in New Orleans During Hurricane Katrina.
It was the fourth day since Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans, and as I walked out of the elevator in my four-star French Quarter hotel I was met by a scene that stopped me dead in my tracks: the lobby was completely empty and the front doors were chained and padlocked. Just the night before there had been so many sweaty, desperate people in that lobby that I could hardly walk without stepping on someone. Now, just eight hours later, I was the only person left in the entire hotel. I had been abandoned.
Standing in that lobby alone and locked in, it became instantly clear to me that if I was going to get out of New Orleans, it would be the result of my own efforts. I would have to take the leadership I’d been expecting the local authority figures to assume and find my own escape from that hotel and New Orleans. Want to hear what Katrina taught me about leadership? Listen in.
There are two key, almost secret, psychological ingredients involved in building strong, trusting relationships based in research on childhood bonding. Whether we’re talking about coworkers, clients, or prospective clients, the ability to establish strong trusting relationships is one of those keys to success and satisfaction if life.
I Sense a Disturbance in The Force.
How to Trust and Act on Your Intuition in Real Time When an Interaction Takes a Turn You Didn’t Expect.
Developing your ability to pay attention to, trust, and act on your intuition in real time is one of the absolute most powerful communication skills you can learn. By doing so you move yourself away from reacting without full awareness to people and events, which usually leads to a need to clean up messes that you’ve inadvertently created, to responding in a mindful manner, which enables you to be more successful in all your communications. There is something magical about being able to communicate your intuition or what you sense and call out an issue in real time that’s not being spoken about, but that everyone senses. If you’d like to learn how to do this just give a listen.
Centering is a technique for grounding and calming yourself and regaining your composure and sense of control once your emotions or stress have driven you off course and started to consume you. It can help you be in the present moment to bring your full focus and critical thinking to bear, and it can improve your self-awareness, but it’s much more than that.
Building Your Self-Awareness is the Absolute Best Skill You Can Develop to Ensure Your Career (and Life) Success.
If the reality of our actions and how others perceive us don’t match how we see ourselves we risk coming across as phony, out of touch, and not to be trusted. It’s relatively easy and common for people to get into a mindset of believing that they are self-aware when that’s not the case as that belief can exist on a purely conceptual or intellectual level only. Believing that you are self-aware when you’re not is itself evidence of a lack of self-awareness. If you’ve not done the work to build self-awareness you’ll have blind spots that only others can see about who you are and this will seriously diminish your leadership potential. Listen in to learn about the two key steps you can take to build your self-awareness.
As Weird as it Sounds, Applying Principles From Quantum Physics Can Help You Vastly Improve Your Relationships
In the world of quantum physics you can never factor out the impact that your actions have on the experimental results you get. Set up an experiment to investigate light in one way and light reveals itself to be a wave phenomena. Set up a different experiment and it shows itself to be a particle phenomena such that light can never be defined outside of the relationship that one establishes with it in an experiment. Thus, we don’t create reality, but rather depending on how we interact with the world we evoke the reality that we get. In the same fashion, the behaviors, attitudes, and feelings you get from other people are connected to how you interact with them and what your behavior evokes from them. I know it sounds a bit out there, but listen in and we’ll show you how it can help you improve your relationships and ultimately your success.
It’s Time to Scrap the Idea of Balance and Instead Strive For Integration
With the many changes Covid 19 is bringing to the way we work there's one idea in particular that the pandemic has shown us was never going to work. That is, the concept of work/life balance is both unrealistic and potentially harmful.
Instead of balance, we recommend work/life integration, which means that employers take a wholistic view of staff and recognize that they have a role to play in helping them integrate the different parts of their lives into one whole life. It means organizations understand that the stress of managing both home and work realms can have a negative effect on staff morale, productivity, and engagement, and that they can’t leave this challenge on the shoulders of staff alone to manage.
Empathetic Understanding of Your Staff’s Psychological Needs Now Will Make Reopening Much More Successful.
In this podcast we talk about reopening workplaces during this Covid 19 pandemic. In particular, we look at the psychological state of your employees and the very nature of the relationship between you and your staff. We’re currently involved in a grand global social experiment and your employees are experiencing stressors like they’ve never faced before along with a completely different way of doing their jobs. When they return to the workplace they’ll have very different expectations of how their work and home lives fit together. Our main message to organizational leaders is this: If you want to increase the prospects of a successful reopening make it a priority now to address your staff’s psychological needs and do it in an empathetic manner.
That’s a Great Idea! Now Let Me Tell You Why it Won’t Work Here. Leading Change: Identifying and Overcoming Resistance.
You’re leading a high profile change effort and despite the fact that all of the key players say they’re totally on board you keep running into resistance. In this cast we show you not only how to identify the source of that resistance, but more importantly how to overcome it with grace and style. What more could you ask for?!