Category: 1-Minute Strategy

One of the most subtle ways to undermine your own credibility is to be an interrupter. At a meeting or presentation, make sure a clarification is something you truly require in order to keep from getting hopelessly lost, and refrain from offering anecdotes to either support or challenge the speaker in mid-speech. Chiming in with […]

It’s another groggy Monday morning and the coffee’s barely started brewing in the kitchen. When you first come across a co-worker who you know well, what do you say right after “Hello”? Immediately springing into anecdotes of your weekend struggles at Costco, or exhausted sighs about your workload, is not a good pattern to fall […]

Got a stressful phone call to make, maybe one to a new vendor or client? Try making your sitting position as casual and cozy as possible, almost as if you’re chatting with a friend on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Putting your body into a state of maximum ease will come through in your voice and […]

The question always seems to come up, whether it’s at a party, a job interview, or just chatting with co-workers: “Read any good books lately?” More and more of us are having trouble answering this question, but if you want to appear credible and intelligent, you might want to always have a fallback answer ready […]

If you absolutely must show up at work suffering from what’s going around these days, remember the etiquette of being sick in the office, which includes this: Don’t talk about being sick in the office. Volunteering information about your condition—unless it’s just to briefly assure others you’re not contagious—only comes off as a pity party. […]

What you bring to a meeting indirectly telegraphs your status to the people sitting around you. Arriving with a legal pad is fine, but it says you’re mostly there just to write down others’ ideas—you’re a follower. Arriving with nothing at all says you’re a thinker, an absorber, a contributor—and you intend to take away […]

Did you just spill soda or coffee on your keyboard? Running a paper towel frantically over the keys right away makes it feel like you’re doing something constructive, but the best maneuver is to quickly flip it over and just let the liquid drain. If that keyboard is part of your laptop, there’s something you […]

Bracketing slang or a supposedly humorous aside with quotation marks often tells the reader, “I have it on good authority that the cool kids these days use this kind of lingo, but I wouldn’t want you to think I would ever compromise my dignity by stooping to such informality, so take these marks as a […]

2015 is just around the corner, and you know what that means—a regrettable moment or two in January when you leave ‘2014’ on a report, a form, a newsletter … Let’s face it, only the superhuman can avoid making this most common of mistakes. It might be worth setting up an Outlook reminder for late […]

It’s possible to become so organized and efficient that you drain any sense of improvisation from what you do, making it painfully predictable. If you feel like your job is becoming too tedious to bear, try actually preparing less, taking fewer notes, setting fewer reminders. Displace things in your schedule that have always been done […]