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 Lolly Daskal, Mary Jo Asmus, Scott Eblin, Steve Keating, David Dye, and Karin Hurt.

From Lolly Daskal: How to Ask for Help When You Need It

“If you’re reluctant to let anyone know you need assistance—whether it’s because of pride, fear of being judged or just not wanting to draw attention to yourself—it’s time to get over it. Here are some things to keep in mind when you’re learning to ask for help:”

From Mary Jo Asmus: Take the pause that refreshes

“For many years in the last century, Coca-Cola had an advertising campaign called ‘It’s the Pause that Refreshes.’ Let’s borrow those words to consider the importance of a pause for your leadership and ways that you can refresh yourself.”

From Scott Eblin: Three Reasons Your Change Initiative Will Fail

“When you stop and think about it a big part of leadership is about convincing people to do things differently. It could be persuading customers to buy your product or try your service. It could be getting employees or vendors to raise their game. It could be convincing regulators and other rules makers to support what you want to do. In each of these examples or a dozen others that you could come up with, success depends on getting people to change their behaviors.”

From Steve Keating: The Trouble with Managing People

“For those of you who refuse to acknowledge the difference between managing and leading I say this: you are doomed to a life of limited leadership. Worse, you have sentenced the people you are supposed to be leading to a life of limited potential.”

From David Dye and Karin Hurt: What No One Tells You About Leading But You Desperately Need to Know

“But you know as well as we do, leading well isn’t JUST about mastering tools and techniques. It’s a mindset. So today we bring you six leadership realities we wish we learned sooner.”

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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