I’ve described boundary setting in both ConCom and Scaling Force, but I was recently informed that I haven’t written it down quite the way I teach it. So here goes. Setting a boundary is not a negotiation or a conversation. It is a very different communication mode than most people ever use. This is why most people find … [Read more…]
The last post was laying the groundwork for this one. I thought starting with the universally acknowledged evils of micromanagement would make this post more palatable. Instead, Danny Martin gave a very capable defense of an unpopular and nearly indefensible position. Truly well done. Jumping into this anyway, because it is important. Criticism is … [Read more…]
What you see controls how you think. And how you think controls what you can see. Lots of people are shopping for the holidays right now and I can bet that someplace in the world a busy executive, a teenager and a retired cop are all walking through the same mall… but they aren’t walking … [Read more…]
Sometimes I hate not thinking in words. Usually it’s a superpower. But right now I’m struggling to explain something that I see as…gestalt is the best word I can come up with. Stayed up all last night trying to find the words. Sometimes words would bubble up and I can explain a piece of it, … [Read more…]
Anything in the human world is a complex interaction. I have a history, a set of assumptions, a suite of facts and things I want to believe are facts, communication habits and patterns, etc. And so do you. Somewhere in the interplay between our complexities, we communicate. To a degree. And almost everything is on … [Read more…]
Saw an ad offering “No Bulls**t” self defense training. That’s laudable. That’s the goal. For that matter “No bullshit” should be a goal for training and talking and thinking and living. But it’s not that simple. The no-bullshit life is a goal, but if you ever think for one second that you’ve achieved it, you’ve … [Read more…]
In combatives, you’ll hear people talk about the principles of a system, or principles-based training. That’s fine and dandy right up until you ask a senior practitioner exactly what those principles are. If you’re lucky, you’ll get crickets. If not, you’ll get the normal word salad of someone who has been pinned down in … [Read more…]
I use Maslow’s pyramid in a lot of my books and classes. Not because it’s great science, there are holes in it you can drive a truck through. I use it partially because it has great predictive power, but mostly because it is so common and universally accepted (which is not the same as ‘understood’) … [Read more…]
Got to watch an interesting specimen. In retrospect, I’ve seen them before, quite a lot actually. But this one was blatant enough to draw attention. Attention brings analysis. Have to unpack the language here, and talk about a couple of categories and some background concepts. Creepers are low-level sexual predators. The kind that harass and … [Read more…]
Hopefully, this will be the last of the introspection posts for a while. But I committed to writing close to the bone: Another reason the new book hit me so hard was that the process (my life process for the last several years) has violated my own epistemology. My society has a common belief about … [Read more…]