“It took a lot of courage for me to come forward and to work with a therapist to get where I am today. I’m not sure I would have ever come forward without the guarantee that my name wouldn’t be made public. It is very painful to look back at my life and see how this has manifested in so many negative ways. If my name were to be public I would have to relive the abuse each and every time I was asked about it.” — Anonymous letter from a survivor When Naomi was promoted to work in the indoor store of the lumberyard, she was proud. She was good at her job and could run the forklift in the outdoor store as well as anyone, but the indoor store team had benefits she had not previously received. She
Most of us want to feel good all the time. That makes sense – it sucks to feel fear, loneliness, shame, or grief. But, we run into problems because almost no one wants to feel good about harassment. Almost no one wants to feel good about death. Harassment and death exist, so sometimes we want to feel crappy. The people who want to feel good about those things are sociopaths. So, if you are being harassed and you feel terrible most of the time, the good news is that you are human. You probably want to feel terrible about harassment. We get stuck, though, when we think that the harassment is in control of our feelings. Your thoughts create your feelings. Nothing in the outside world creates yo
Once you have created a Cultural Health survey to help diagnose possible areas for improvement within your company, the second step is to really listen with curiosity to your responses. Often, getting negative feedback in a survey response can feel so overwhelming that particularly compassionate, empathetic employers shut down. This makes sense because we know how much time and energy we spend caring for our employees and worrying about them. To hear something negative from them can be intensely triggering. We know the sacrifices we make so that they can have a job and feed their family; we know the unpredictability of business income; we know which employees feel like an asset and which emp
When I create a personalized career defense plan with my VIP clients, one of the most important steps we take is to map out the results they want to get and what they need to do to get those results. When mountain climbers plan a huge climb or when Olympic athletes train for a major competition, they know that mapping out their results not only means specifically envisioning what they want, but it also means training their minds to think like the person who got those results. I hate all the garbage ideas that if people are homeless or poor or victims of crimes, they somehow did something wrong to deserve it or there is something wrong with them. I think you see this kind of fake “positive th
