Independent business blogs are blogs that aren’t supported by an organization like a magazine, newspaper, company, or business school. Those people provide lots of great content, but they don’t need any additional exposure. In this post, every week, I bring you posts of quality from excellent bloggers that don’t get as much publicity.

This week, I’m pointing you to posts by Ken Downer, Lolly Daskal, LaRae Quy, Kate Nasser, and Steve Keating.

From Ken Downer: The Leadership Eye Test: A Simple Checkup for Your Team’s Health

“We all know that it’s a good idea to get a physical checkup regularly. These visits to the doctor can help identify potential problems early, and help us resolve health issues that may come up, whether it’s with our heart, hearing, or eyesight.

But what if there were such a checkup for our leadership? Here’s a very simple one that might help highlight symptoms of leadership problems, and it doesn’t even involve a trip to the clinic.”

From Lolly Daskal: How to Be a Leader Everyone Loves to Work With

“Good leaders inspire people to stay and work and dream big and take risks and do great things. Everybody loves working with them. Here are some of the qualities they share—if you see them in yourself, great, and if not, work on incorporating them into your leadership:”

From LaRae Quy: 3 Easy Ways To Be Courageous And Take Risks

“Stories of courage have shown up in every culture throughout history. For some reason, we usually associate courage with physical prowess. We love stories about how people risk their life to rescue a child in a burning building or pull a victim from a car wreck.

We tend to forget that we also need courage in other areas of our life. We need courage to stand up for our values and beliefs. It takes courage to start a new business, change careers, or commit to a relationship.”

From Kate Nasser: Avoid These Defensive Replies to Feedback

“You can slip into defensive replies to other’s feedback. Yet the results of being defensive can often hurt you more than the feedback you didn’t like. In truth, it makes others see you as immature, selfish, and unworthy of their time. Your defensiveness reduces other’s ability to respect and trust you. Therefore, it’s important to avoid the following defensive replies to feedback.”

From Steve Keating: The Power of Focus

“If you can’t say no to many things then you’ll find it impossible to say yes to focus. In most areas of your life what you choose not to do will determine what you are able to do. If you’re trying to do too much you fall victim to what is known as task saturation. If you fall into that trap you end up accomplishing far less than the person focused on one thing at a time.”

That’s it for this week’s selections from independent business blogs. If you liked this piece you may enjoy my curation posts on this blog. Every Tuesday, “Leaders and Strategies in Real Life” helps you learn about leadership by studying what real leaders do. On Fridays you can wrap up your week with “Weekend Leadership Reading” consisting of choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms.

How I Select Posts for this Midweek Review

The five posts I select to share in my Midweek Review of the Independent Business Blogs are picked from a regular review of about sixty blogs I check daily and an additional twenty-five or so that I check occasionally. Here’s how I select the posts you see in this review.

They must be published within the previous week.

They must support the purpose of the blog: to help leaders at all levels do a better job and lead a better life.

They must be from an independent business blog.

As a general rule, I only select posts that stand on their own, no selections from a series.

Also as a general rule, I do not select posts that are either a book review or a book report.

I reserve the right to make exceptions to the above.

Here, on Three Star Leadership, I post things that will help a boss at any level do a better job and live a better life. At the The 360 Degree Feedback blog, I join other bloggers with posts on leadership development. And, at Wally Bock’s Writing Edge, I share tools and insights to help you write better.

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