Episodes

You’ll never have more opportunity for salary negotiation than you do just before you accept you job. If you already have a job and you’re happy where you work and the idea of looking for something else scares the crap out of you, there’s still hope. You can still negotiate your salary or other perks at your job. So let’s say job negotiation isn’t what you’re looking for, you can negotiate other things too, basically, everything is negotiable. If you have skills, you can also barter, which usua...

Dan Pink gave what might be one of my favorite TED talks of all time as he explained the puzzle of motivation (It’s also one of the most viewed with over 14 million views at the time of this posting). This talk made me want to read his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. This book changed the way I motivate my employees and teams. It also inspired me to use the information in the book to motivate not only the people that reported to me, but others above me, and to the right...

In Todd Henry’s book “The Accidental Creative” he talks about five elements of Creative Rhythm. As an IT Leader you’re called to make creative decisions and come up with brilliant solutions at a moment’s notice. In a future episode I’ll do a full book review of “The Accidental Creative,” but I feel the 5 elements of creative rhythm is worthy of a show by it self. Creative Rhythms are important because as leaders we must understand that we can’t go all-in 100% of the time and expect to maintain ...

If you do want to be a leader, you have to train. You have to work hard at it. It’s not just something that you can just try to do without work. Have you ever run a marathon? It’s not something that you can just go out and try. You have to put in a lot of time and effort to train for marathons. Becoming a leader is the same thing. You have to train hard. There is a difference between reading leadership books and training. Reading books is education, not training. Let me ask you this: Do you want...

We all are afraid of something. Being a leader demands bravery. In this episode I talk about getting over FEAR (False Evidence Appearing Real). I list and explain these 4 steps for dealing with fear: Play it out. What's the worse that can happen? What's the likelihood of that thing happening? How can you reduce the likelihood of that happening? If the worse happens, how can you recover? We need to understand that everyone deals with fear. The most successful people just "do it anyway." Getting o...

In this episode I talk about likability. Being liked at work is actually pretty important. A lot of people believe that being good at their job, or having some special skill will help them get ahead. But the truth is that likability plays a huge role in where you end up. People want to hire people they like and promote people they like. Don’t you want to work with people you like too? Yes, its important to have skill, but talent will only take you so far. To advance your career even farther, yo...

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. About a year ago, I listened to Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last audiobook. I loved this book. In my opinion its better than his first best seller, Start With Why. In this book, Simon Sinek tells the story of Johnny Bravo, a military pilot and how he risked his life to defend ground troops in battle. He uses this story to illustrate the idea of the “Circle of Safety.” Circle of Safety Simon tells us that we should focus on helping those around us and under us ins...

Having Difficult conversations is really important. I don’t think anyone would argue that. Many times we feel awkward and don’t want to have the conversation and things go from bad to worse… or they just never get resolved. This podcast is to give you 3 tips on having difficult conversations that I got from Ash Beckham’s Ted Talk from a few years ago. I hope you guys like this one and get something from it. Please leave me a note in the comments below and better yet, subscribe and review the po...

Distractions overwhelm us everyday… They overwhelm me every hour. This podcast episode is a short talk about how to deal with distractions. I hope that it helps you handle daily distractions that you encounter. Please leave me a comment below and subscribe in iTunes. Thanks so much. Sponsor: What’s HTML? – Learn it in 4 Hours. Amazon Link Audible Link

I’m super excited to share the TEDx Talk I gave back in March of 2015 at TEDxHickory. I gave this talk on motivation and leadership. In this talk I mentioned other talks and books by Simon Sinek, who taught us to “Start With Why” and Dan Pink who explained that autonomy, mastery and purpose are what motivates creative thinkers today. I hope you get a lot from this episode and if you want to watch the talk and see the slides used, check out the video below. https://youtu.be/w2Qaiwlu85U

I was so pumped to talk to Todd Henry. He’s one of my favorite authors and speakers. He’s the founder of Accidental Creative and the author of The Accidental Creative, Die Empty, and his newest book, Louder than Words. I’m such a fan of his work, I actually use The Accidental Creative as required reading for a class I teach at Winthrop University. You can order his books using the links below. Be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his podcast, The Accidental Creative. Lastly, if you e...

This is the beginning of my new Podcast on Technical and Creative Leadership. In this episode, I introduce myself to all you podcast fans and explain my why for doing this podcast. Please subscribe and review in iTunes and stay in touch for future episodes.