There will always be people who think that money and benefits and even just having a job should be thanks enough. There are also those that think they do a great job without anyone having to thank them. But study after study has shown that no one is immune from the motivating effects of acknowledgement and thanks.

Yes, CEOs are under pressure from all sides, and executives have all sorts of people pushing and pulling at them. But too often, they begin to view and treat their teams, and especially their assistants, as appliances. And a good assistant knows that the last thing their boss wants to hear from them is a personal complaint about anything.

Forget the empty platitudes; your star employee is not a 'godsend.' They are a person deserving of your not infrequent acknowledgment and worthy of appreciation and respect.

In my line of work, I frequently communicate with CEOs and their executive assistants, and nowhere is the need for gratitude more clear.

Salespeople are in the decision business. Their livelihood depends on the decisions of others.

Something I had learned from 30 years as a psychotherapist turned Fortune 500 executive coach when helping people to calm down is that it is much less important what you tell others than what you enable them to tell you and, in the process, tell themselves that results in them calming themselves down.

One word that seems to connect both leaders and employees is: 'outcomes.' Built into that word is the implicit and explicit understanding and agreement that effective actions lead to good outcomes; ineffective actions lead to poor outcomes.

It really takes something for someone to get up the nerve to share the impact you have had on them, and to them, giving you that recognition is liking giving a gift.

As a general rule, when your child, or anyone in the work force, doesn't know what he/she wants to do, they should instead always be developing skills and competencies that will qualify them for the jobs that companies are most looking to fill and increase their hireability.

Presence is in the eye and ear and gut of the beholder. When you are totally present in a conversation or in a meeting, others around you perceive you as totally focused on the matter at hand and on being of value to them.

If there was one key to happiness in love and life and possibly even success, it would be to go into each conversation you have with this commandment to yourself front and foremost in your mind, 'Just Listen' and be more interested than interesting, more fascinated than fascinating, and more adoring than adorable.

If you're fortunate, you'll meet people over the course of your career who exceed your expectations in every way. When you work or spend time with them, you find yourself wanting to be a better person.

In the first 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your listener is liking you as long as your statement is relevant to the conversation and, hopefully, in service of the other person. But unless you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for more than roughly half a minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too chatty.

In my life, I think I have had more than two hundred significant breakthroughs that exponentially accelerated my life forward. However, each and every one of them was preceded by a breakdown that was not pretty, was often scary, and often felt like something I would not get past.

When someone is complimenting you, they are sharing how your actions or behaviors impacted them. They are not asking if you agree.

Be comfortable in your own skin. Comfort and discomfort are contagious.

Despair - or as I like to call it, des-pair - means feeling unpaired in a world in which it feels like everyone else is paired with a good job, a happy marriage, loving family, caring, and hope - and you're not.

One of the most important aspects of an athlete's financial life is that he needs to be personally responsible for his own finances.

Self-esteem is crucial to how much or how little contentment you feel at the end of your life.

One of the most important keys to getting through to anyone and then influencing them is to realize that inside everyone's mind, they listen to someone or something.

Just like the athlete who has mapped out a plan to become one of the best athletes in the world by putting together a training program and executing it, he too should map out a financial plan from the beginning of his athletic career throughout every stage of his career.

When as smart as you think you are is as wrong as you turn out to be, your life can fall out from under you.

Every business needs to get out of their own mindset and into the aspirational mindsets of their customers and clients and create services and products that are beyond their customers' imagination but will be what they 'gotta have' in the future.

Gen X entrepreneurs are frequently smart, tough, tenacious, and self-made. That said, to succeed in their companies, they often have sacrificed being emotionally involved in their marriages and with their children.