The Conscious Newsletter

I didn't learn this lesson the hard way. I learned it the expensive way. We once hired a finance executive with flawless credentials. He had all the right boxes checked on paper and he was a great fit. But within weeks, complaints started rolling in. His bluntness. His dismissiveness. His unwillingness to hear out people (he once stopped a team from presenting an hour-long presentation because he thought he knew where it was going after the first 5 minutes). He had a remarkab

We all know no one got their big break as an island onto themselves. And most of us never forget the ones who fight for us when we can't fight for ourselves. It only happened because someone, somewhere, spoke their name in a place they weren't there yet. That's one of the most underrated aspects of leadership: advocacy. When your voice carries weight, you can use it for those who aren't yet in the room. And that requires something rarer than skill or strategy. It requires gen

The girl in this picture doesn't know it yet but she's a day away from making a decision that will change her life forever. See the next day, I decided I couldn't be a CEO anymore. It was one of the hardest decisions of our lives. I'd worked my way up to that role with a lot of sacrifice. And just two years in, I was already realizing I couldn't keep up. The ascent was too rapid and I burnt too much fuel. My health had taken a massive hit (you might not be able to tell but my

"You got so lucky." That's what people said when I became CEO so young. And maybe they were right. But here's what they didn't see: The board meetings where I made sure I was remembered, not just present. The moments when everyone around me was freaking out, and I stayed calm. The failures I got back up from immediately, because I refused to let one setback define me. The years I spent overcoming my terror of speaking in Sinhala (it's not my first language, and I was bullied

I've rarely seen someone look so confused. Christoph Waltz simply couldn't understand the question. He'd just won an Academy Award for playing one of the most despicable characters in modern cinema: the Nazi colonel in Inglourious Basterds. He was so happily and contentedly evil that it was bone-chilling. Image by LucaFazPhoto , via Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 On the press tour for this movie, a journalist asks him: "How did you tap into the evil for that character

In my late 20s, back when I worked a corporate job, I once called in sick early in the morning with a wicked migraine. The sort where you can't have your curtains open. Where your head feels like someone has tied a thick elastic band around it, pulling tighter by the minute. If you know, you know. So I made the call, told my boss briefly what was happening. She said "no problem." I went back to bed, relieved. By 11 AM, I hear my phone (which shouldn't have been anywhere near

Psychopaths (not just the ones in your true-crime documentaries) have a way of getting people to do exactly what they want. And given the statistics, the odds aren't in your favor. There are more psychopaths in business than there are in any other field. So you've almost certainly worked with one. This series is about what to watch out for, how to safeguard yourself, and learn a thing or two from them (to use for better causes, of course). One of their favorite tricks to get

Have you ever told someone more than you meant to? You probably have. And it might not have been an accident. They might have been (knowingly or unknowingly) using a technique the CIA (and a few business psychopaths I've met) love to use. This method is called Elicitation. Its beauty is in its simplicity. Instead of asking a question, you drop a statement that begs to be corrected. How Elicitation Works in Real Life Visualize this. You're at a networking event. You want to kn