Leadership Development Archives | Disaster Avoidance Experts

The people close to you influence your spending choices more than you think. To make wiser shopping decisions, be aware of how your choices are influenced and commit to only purchasing things for their practical value.

More buying choices lead to less happiness. To make better shopping decisions, satisfice and limit your options. Look for products that are good enough.

Form lasting connections to stakeholders and help them feel understood by using the three social intelligence methods of empathetic listening, echoing and mirroring, and building rapport.

Startup founders can defeat mental health challenges and avoid burnout by paying attention to their mental health, seeking help, and standing up to pressure from major investors and Board members

We intuitively overestimate how well others read us and how well we read others, a dangerous judgment error called illusion of transparency. This mental blindspot leads to disastrous results in negotiations and communications.

Because we usually feel that everything is going to go according to plan, we don’t pay nearly enough attention to potential problems and fail to account for them in our plans. This problem is called planning fallacy.

Maximize the value that pessimists and optimists bring to your enterprise by helping them work together well. Optimists should generate half-baked ideas and give them to the pessimists, who would select the most viable notions and finish baking them into full-fledged plans.

To prevent disasters in transitioning to working from home, imagine that your transition completely failed. Then, brainstorm all plausible reasons for failure, and generate solutions to these potential problems. Do the same to maximize success.

Using the three social intelligence methods during a stakeholder meeting will help you learn the truth about your stakeholders’ needs, which will empower you to solve their problems and foster stronger relationships with them.

Your relationships will be undermined or even destroyed by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, unless you take proactive steps right now to save them by treating our current conditions as the new normal.