Posts by Chip Neidigh

A Safe Place to Fall

Leaders often overestimate how likely others are to share important information with them.  My own painful experience illustrates this truth. When my firstborn (now 22 years old) was in high school, she woke me up at 2am to share something that was intensely personal and important to her.  I got irritated at being awakened.  I…

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Feeling My Feelings

I used to believe that if I wasn’t happy, then something was wrong, and something needed to change. I’ve come to believe that life is about both ups and downs, and that there are appropriate human emotional reactions to both. Fear, anger, and sadness are every bit a natural part of the journey as joy.

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Mind the Gap

I’ll acknowledge that I can be a bit of an ornery curmudgeon, but there’s one piece of flawed leadership advice that has been floated so often in recent years, by so many, that most people are starting to accept it as conventional wisdom. I hear it all the time: “Focus on the positive.”

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Generative Disillusionment (My Enneagram Journey)

I was first exposed to the Enneagram nine years ago. I saw a one-page summary in a book I was reading, and I immediately dismissed the model; it sounded like voodoo magic or a horoscope. Then three years ago my wise friend Daniel Fuller gave me a copy of Stabile and Cron’s The Road Back to You and suggested I take a deeper look.

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Am I Naked?

I was running through the woods at Eagle Creek Park last Saturday with a good friend. I had sensed something was off in our relationship, so I asked him if there was anything I was doing that was making life harder for him. Over the next several minutes he calmly described two of my habits that weren’t working for others around me, or for him.

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