For some companies, the usual Monday morning meeting is becoming unusual. It is revamping itself, becoming a stand-up, short-lived check-in. For those who still endure the old sit-down conference table version, the format is unbearably predictable: the boss unceremoniously starts the meeting by reading the agenda, reciting the latest sales...

You've been waiting for this day for so long -- a big promotion, award, or accomplishment! You thought you'd feel on top of the world, but for some reason, you don't. Not only are you not in any celebratory mood after you've realized this achievement, but you notice that you...

As a candidate for a job, boost your success rate by figuring out who and what the interviewer is seeking. Give up the idea that an interview is a test where "right answers" are the ones given by experts and "wrong answers" cause you to fail. There is no perfect...

So, you're no longer the young one on your team at work. Time speeds up so suddenly that after a decade or two, you find that you are working for or with others who are closer in age to your children than they are to you. And the longer you...

Moving, as anyone knows, is one of the top stressors -- along with family death, divorce, or the loss of a job. Having experienced them all, I have often thought that I'd become more practiced, maybe even immune to their emotional toll. But quite the opposite happens; it gets harder....

In these tough economic times, we need something to spur us on. Our own American exhortations -- Yankee ingenuity and "where there's a will there's a way" -- can be used to ignite the holiday heralding of the possibility of renewal. Renewal forces you to confront your own situation.

You are either going to be busy up to your elbows cooking the bird, or driving somewhere to eat it with family or friends. Either way, you probably have mixed feelings about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. No surprise. Like all of us, you are thinking about yourself. Have you gained...

When you think of visual artists, you expect them to be working from flashes of inspiration, totally expressive, struggling and poor, sometimes even stoned or promiscuous. You don't expect profound thinking, great discipline, political activism, guerrilla training for protégés, and the creation of new techniques. You don't expect someone like...

Your investment of time, hope, and money is about to pay off -- even in a still terrible economy, when your kid may prefer heading to graduate school over facing a still-tight job market. Take heart: employment is up a bit, according the latest National Association of Colleges and Employers...

Creating your own business is the latest slogan in this unemployment quagmire. But even if we want to, we don't know how to switch from being an employee to an instant entrepreneur. Made by many, this transition is often deceptively easy, like any great art. Let me share the back...

For my birthday in December 1976, my late husband, Sam Scheele, took me to New York City for dinner at the great Midwestern architect Minori Yamasake's renowned World Trade Center. While I had heard about these immense twin towers, I had no idea what looking at them, each 110 stories...

The junior year is when college turns serious. Most colleges require your child to choose a major and stake a claim in a future career. For some of you, declaring a major will be an obvious step for your child, one you hope to agree with. But for too many...

As a parent, your job is to help your child use college as a laboratory to discover his or her interests and develop a full set of academic and life skills.

In the freshman year, your child began the process of learning to separate from you, get oriented to...

You have rallied for your child's success at college. You've bought them books, a new comforter, and a fancy laptop, and you've mailed off the tuition check. So what's your role now? Encouraging advisor. And the best advice you can give is the advice you'd give yourself if you were...

Boring tasks at work plague us. We stagger under their weight every day. Every so often we get lucky enough to delegate them to someone else, but usually we just have to learn to cope. It's one of the lesser lessons in life. I understand. I have had more routine...

I don't know about you, but I still sometimes get them -- those Sunday night blues. They started in junior high, got worse in high school, and progressed until I could hardly stand it in college. The anxious feeling of anticipating the week ahead somehow never left.

I find I...

I have interviewed a number of achievers whose lives provided data to demonstrate a model of life-long success skills which had been developed in college. These stories were published in Making College Pay Off (and later in Launch You Career In College), but I remember some of the...

If you lie on a beach, you'll come back with a tan guaranteed to fade. But use your vacation to learn something new, and you could change your life.

A client of mine was struggling with the hard choice of giving up something he had trained for -- being a...

If it's your first day on the job, being the new kid on the block is always tough, no matter how experienced you are. Newness brings back all sorts of memories of trying to join in and be accepted. It regresses us back to grade school, reliving the pain we...

Once you've got an interview scheduled, what do you do next? The common advice is to do your homework, but the term homework is a misnomer. In school, it means answering an assignment for which there are right answers. But in real life, particularly in an interview, you have to...