ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kerry Patterson is coauthor of four New York Times bestsellers, Crucial Conversations, Crucial Accountability, Influencer, and Change Anything. READ MORE Listen to Kerrying On via iTunes In January of 1965, after living their entire lives in soggy Western Washington, my mom and dad packed up their belongings and moved to sunny Arizona. …
Dear Crucial Skills, We’ve been through Crucial Conversations Training, have returned back to work, and aren’t changing all that much. Everyone liked the ideas and wanted to do something new, but we haven’t been very good at transferring what we learned in training to how we behave at work. What can we do to kick-start …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kerry Patterson is coauthor of four New York Times bestsellers, Crucial Conversations, Crucial Accountability, Influencer, and Change Anything. READ MORE Listen to Kerrying On via iTunes I’ve often heard that on our death beds, none of us is likely to look back on our life and lament, “I should have spent more …
The following article first appeared on August 23, 2006. When I’ve finished conducting a training session, it’s common for people to approach me with a series of questions about the training’s underlying philosophy. At the top of the list is: “What philosopher influenced you the most?” Sometimes people will insert a guru of their choice. …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kerry Patterson is author of three bestselling books, Influencer, Crucial Conversations, and Crucial Confrontations. READ MORE Dear Crucial Skills, I am a relatively new supervisor, and several of my former peers are now my direct reports. One has been with the company for twenty-five years and her attitude has become increasingly …
Listen to Kerrying On via iTunes You can’t live in a community nowadays without it happening to you once in a while. Of course, how you respond to the assault depends on where you reside. Comedian David Brenner describes the difference in approach. He says that if you live on the east coast, you say …
Dear Crucial Skills, I read Crucial Conversations and Crucial Accountability and have tried to implement the skills in the books, but I still have a hard time dealing with accusations. The problem is that the first instinct when someone accuses you is to restore safety or use contrasting to solve the misunderstanding, but the accuser …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kerry Patterson is coauthor of four New York Times bestsellers, Crucial Conversations, Crucial Accountability, Influencer, and Change Anything. READ MORE Listen to Kerrying On via iTunes Last month, I wrote about the Patterson family Christmas of 1956. I shared how I was able to find joy during a time when we had …
1956 was a hard year for the Patterson family. One evening Dad came home from work at the lumber mill in so much pain he could scarcely drag himself out of the car. He had tripped at work and hurt his back. Worried about his paycheck at the end of the week, Dad pulled himself to his feet and gutted it out until the end of his shift, despite a pain that (we later learned from a coworker) was so gut-wrenching he almost passed out several times.
Dear Crucial Skills, I just left a job I loved because I am older and the young team I worked with never seemed to accept me. Unfortunately, even when the manager said I was a victim of new employee hazing, the problem was not addressed. Since I made the choice to leave, would it be …
