Get Informed
Our first in-person tree planting event
GentleWays for OurPlanet's first in-person tree planting event was an awesome, memorable day! Dozens of youths and youth at heart mainly from the Lebanese-Canadian community in Ottawa planted 125 trees at Neil Nesbitt Park in Barrhaven, Ottawa, on September 24, 2022...
Leaders as Weavers and Facilitators: For a Culture of Inclusion
Committed to creating a respectful and inclusive organizational culture? Begin with these three simple, powerful practices in any meeting you host/lead in your workplace.
If You Knew The Truth Would You…?
Sometimes, we don’t ask a question because we don’t want to hear the answer. Sometimes, we look the other way, lest we see something we’re uncomfortable with. Sometimes, we say we want the truth but deep down we don’t because when we know the truth, It becomes...
How Precisely We Express Feelings Affects Our Health
A study published recently in Emotion (June 2019) showed that expressing our feelings precisely protects us from developing depressive symptoms. It’s solidly established in the field of psychology that expressing our feelings is healthier than repressing or denying...
Changing Others
Are you aware of the many ways you try to change others? Do you make requests and suggestions? Do you drop hints? Use indirect ways like sulking; threats and punishment? Do you stew over what they should have done? Whatever the way, a great deal of our frustrations...
Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples: The Way I See it
My interest in Indigenous ways of being goes back to my undergraduate years when I was a foreign student at the University of Ottawa, more than three decades ago. I still remember the day when I saw and heard for the first time in my life an Aboriginal Chief. (This is...
Civilized Leadership
I used to drive by the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Québec (Canada) on my way to work. And every day, the same fleeting question would cross my mind. What makes a civilization? One night, I found myself wondering about civilized leadership. What is Civilized...
The Leadership Capital: The leader and the led together
There was a time when I used the image of lighthouse to symbolize leadership. It represented clarity, visibility, guidance. However, some of the other implicit messages associated with the symbol no longer reflect my notion of leadership. To me, leadership is not “out...
Leadershipspeak
Many years ago I published an article on seduction as leadership competency. I argued and presented some evidence that, everything being equal, leaders who use “seduction” have greater prospects for advancement than those who do not. I defined seduction as the...
A message for frequent flyers, and others…
According to an article by Steve Westlake, a Ph.D researcher in environmental leadership, the wealthiest 10 per cent of the global population are responsible for 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and part of that is due to flying. The report indicates that in...