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You have to be together long enough to get over the academic pose ("Heh, I’m the expert here") and learn to listen. Love is important, and often overlooked. Love makes it possible for the writer whose work is being tested to accept criticism gracefully, since she knows it is meant in love. Men don’t grasp it, usually. They are so busy competing that they don’t realize that what actually works is cooperation. Whoops — sorry: gender candor alert.

“If you're not continuously adapting and changing and embracing… if you don't have a culture of agility within your company to adapt to these changes, you're not going to be successful,” he said.

Soccer is a zero-sum, winner/loser finite game. But life, it turns out, is a magical opportunity for up, and for forward.

Here's the key question: Which feeling/experience/state do you look back on fondly? Which one engages you, challenges you, makes you the best version of yourself? When you tell yourself your story—the story of last week, last month or last year—is it about how boring and secure life has become? What you learn isn't up to someone else's curriculum or syllabus any more--it's on you, on each of us, to decide what's next, to decide who we will become. We're not in fifth grade, wondering if something is going to be on the test.

Now, they're available to those willing to make the commitment.

The related field of appreciative inquiry offers similar flip-the-question approaches but is more specific, asking us to look for and build on the positive case or “outlier.” Is there someone in the community already exhibiting the desired behavior? What is enabling them to outperform? What resources are they tapping into that others are not? Not “Why are staph infections so high in the hospital?” but “Why are staph infections lower on the third floor?” Not “Why are sales down in Regions 6 and 9?” but “Why are sales up in Region 4?” Not “Why do so few graduates of our leadership academy get promoted?” but “Why did these seven graduates get promoted?” Why is the accident rate lower in _______? Why is the turnover rate lower in ______? Why are there fewer ethics complaints about ______ division?