In 1500 words or less, each post will give you something you can use TODAY to build yourself, your people and your organization whether your organization is a "for-profit" or a "not-for-profit."
Sometimes the problem isn’t what someone said.
It’s the story we told ourselves about what they meant.
Before we judge the person in front of us, perhaps we should turn the lens around, and question what our own assumptions are telling us.
A job is an exchange … not a one-way street.
Employees owe employers something.
Employers owe employees something too.
The workplace has changed. The responsibility hasn’t.
What do we owe each other at work?
We move at the speed of trust.
I may be one of the few career advisors who regularly encourage job seekers to break the rules.
Not because I don’t understand them.
Because sometimes what we call conventional wisdom is simply something we’ve repeated so often that we stopped questioning it.
I tell people to stand out: Contact employers before jobs are posted. Build relationships. Challenge assumptions. Stop making their résumé look like everyone else’s.
But there’s a catch: You can’t ask someone to take an unconventional path without first giving them a reason to trust you.
Resistance isn’t always stubbornness. Sometimes it’s fear, self-protection, or the weight of years of rejection and being told what they should do.
My job isn’t to convince people that I’m right.
It’s to help them become confident enough to question advice, including mine.
Because the goal isn’t to create followers. It’s to help people trust themselves enough to find their own way forward.
And that’s why: We move at the speed of trust.
AI can make hiring faster. But faster doesn’t necessarily mean better.
As employers and job seekers increasingly use AI to navigate the hiring process, we may be creating an unintended arms race, one where both sides become better at optimizing for the system rather than discovering genuine compatibility.
The real opportunity isn’t to use AI to replace human thinking. It is to use it to challenge our assumptions, expose our blind spots, and help us recognize people the traditional hiring system might overlook.
The question isn’t whether we will use AI in hiring. We already are. How do we use it better.
Sometimes the best stories come from the moments that don’t go as planned, the detours, the surprises, and the little realizations you didn’t expect to have.
That’s where the experience becomes real, and a lot more memorable.
Everyone in the room knew the truth. I had heard it in conversations, one-on-one, behind closed doors. But when it was time to say it out loud, to stand behind it, there was nothing. No questions. No pushback.
Just silence. That’s when it hit me: culture isn’t defined by what people say in private. It’s defined by what they’re willing to risk saying when it actually matters.
I was lying on the ice, staring up at the lights, knowing I didn’t belong.
Everyone else was faster. Better. More natural.
I had no business being out there, and I knew it. In that moment, I made a decision: I was done.
I started to pull myself up, already planning how I’d leave, what I’d say, how I’d explain that this just wasn’t for me.
And then someone skated over.
Most people don’t go to conferences to change anything.
They go to feel like they are.
They take notes. They nod. They leave inspired. Then nothing changes.
A smaller group does something else. They pick one idea and act, when it’s inconvenient, messy, and unpopular.
That’s the edge.
It’s not access to ideas. It’s the courage to use them.
The difference isn’t what you learned. It’s what you chose to do with it.
Rigidity doesn’t usually announce itself.
It shows up as discipline. As process. As “the way we’ve always done it.”
But underneath, it’s often something else entirely: fear disguised as control.
And the longer we hold onto it, the more it quietly limits what we, and the organizations we are part of, are capable of becoming.
This is a longer read than usual, but it’s written that way intentionally.
Because the way we think about accommodations, fairness, and performance in the workplace is often oversimplified, and those oversimplifications shape how people are supported, evaluated, and sometimes misunderstood.
If you’ve ever questioned whether “treating everyone the same” is actually fair in practice, this is worth your time.