It’s a fact. A lot of mothers find it hard to get back to work after a break. In her book Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg says, "43% of highly qualified women with children are leaving careers or off-ramping for a period of time." If we could put it all down to a strong maternal instinct, that would be OK. But it’s not just that. The socio-cultural landscape we live in doesn’t seem encouraging ...

The other day, one of my clients told me he had ‘screwed up.’ Apparently, he was in a chat window with one of his team members. He was unhappy with some work she had done. He typed the following sentence in the chat window: “This looks like something you copy pasted out of Wikipedia. It’s terrible.” The response from his team member, one of his most reliable workers, was immediate: su...

A friend came to me yesterday with a frustrated expression on his face. I asked him what was wrong. He said his business wasn’t doing so well. “People with half my talent are making twice as much as money,” he said, throwing his hands up in disgust. “But is that happening even after you’re doing all the right things?” I asked him. He didn’t have an answer to that. He just waved his hand ...

In our culture, being ‘lonely’ is frowned upon. Loneliness is not associated with happiness; on the contrary it is associated with illness or social ineptitude or both. The only people who seem to enjoy loneliness are poets, drunks and philosophers. For everyone else, loneliness is a state to be avoided, a diseased condition from which nothing good can arise. But is loneliness really suc...

This is the third and final part of a blog series on authenticity. In the first blog we spoke of the definition and value of authenticity as a personality trait. In the second blog we spoke of how to maintain a degree of authenticity as a person and a professional. In this blog we’ll take a look at how to maintain authenticity in personal relationships. But first, what is the cost of not...