Dia Bondi went to auctioneering school as a way to support local non-profit groups with fundraising. Little did she know that amidst cowboys and cornfields she’d find strategies to help her clients, start up founders and C-Suite leaders, to make more powerful asks at work and in life.

Crucial conversations are defined as those where the stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions are strong. The bad news is that most of us are at our worst when the conversation matters most. The good news? The skill of masterfully handling crucial conversations through dialogue is skill you can learn and this book provides actionable frameworks to use.

Email is one of the primary communication channels at work. If you aren't responsive to emails, you can damage your work relationships. If you're consistently missing due dates or work requests, you get a reputation for being disorganized and it's just unprofessional.

In this episode, Kristy shares the 10,000 hour rule, the difference between practice and intentional practice, and a sports example of dramatic improvement without investing more time practicing and instead paying better attention.

In this episode, Dia shares what the zone of freaking out is and why it’s a good thing, the importance of knowing the why behind your ask, and how shaping your question to get a yes is limiting your potential.

In this episode, Kristy and Danielle talk with Todd Cherches about the importance of visual thinking and communication and explore the tools, tips, and techniques that help turn your vision into reality.

Some of the most productive and valuable meetings happen between two people. In two-person meetings the dynamic is different. Your attention is required and it would be socially unacceptable for you to pick up your phone and start scrolling during it. Here are my favorite kinds of two-person meetings and why they are so valuable.

In this book Scott describes a behavior framework where the x-axis is the degree to which you are willing to challenge others and the y-axis is the degree to which you care about them. Radical Candor is what you get when you both care personally and challenge directly.

Our socialization around gender drives our expectations around household management and tasks and these unconsciously become an unchallenged default. Until we a demonstrate a different model of gender equity at home, it will be hard for family units to change. Sometimes we do things the same way it's always been done because we can't envision another way. For International Women’s Day I'd like to normalize male domestic leadership by sharing what has worked for us.

Essentialism is the idea that you should define your highest level contribution and then protect your ability to do that thing over all else. By investing in fewer things, you get the satisfaction of making significant progress in the things that matter most.

Work-isms are words or phrases that have been popularized in professional settings. These can be a helpful and effective way to communicate, but only when they are understood by all. In this video, learn what work-isms to stop saying and what to replace them with.

According to research, people who show their sense of humor at work are seen as more motivating leaders. That's a positive. But for me the biggest reason to be funny at work is that if we're going to spend such a large portion of our lives in this place, we might as well be having fun.

We’ve all been to meetings that could have been an email, or that ended without anything being decided, or were SO BORING that we got through 20 levels of Candy Crush. You know what bad looks like. You may even know what good looks like. But do you know how to hold a meeting that doesn't suck?

The Art of Gathering is based on Priya Parker’s extensive experience as a professional facilitator. It has a very logical and chronological flow that helps the reader to understand that you can and should curate the experience of your gatherings. Doing this leads not only to efficiency, but more importantly to deeper meaning and connection with others.

A surprisingly small percentage of interview candidates take the time to write a thank you email. Once people get to mid-career, they expect that their experience speaks for itself and so the thank you note is not important. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Noise is anything that disrupts the message between sender and receiver. When people hear the word noise they first think of physical noise. There are other kinds of noise that disrupt the communication cycle and they are much more dangerous because often times the sender doesn't even realize that the message wasn't received.

There are ways that you can prepare for extemporaneous speaking. When you have phrases top of mind to use, it makes it easier to speak when you need to. Collect phrases. Observe how people say things and consider if it might work for you. Test them out in different scenarios. This helps you to know what to say. It’s like a phrase bank.

Side projects are a way to enhance skills, experience novelty, explore passions and interests, and meet some really cool people along the way. My side projects have brought me so much joy and made me a better person at work, at home, and in life.

This is an editorial about the multiple truths of working from home and why the path forward is for both employees and employers to think differently about this topic.