As a child, we had a ritual around the family table at Thanksgiving: my grandmother would ask us kids to say something we were grateful for. After much eye-rolling and squirming, each of us would come out with… something. Rather than being a real moment of introspection and appreciation, “saying what we are grateful for”
Someone tried to assassinate Trump this past weekend. I read the headlines and watched the news coverage of what little was known in the immediate aftermath. Within hours, lurid speculation and accusations began to circulate online in a nauseatingly familiar way. My dad was an old-school TV news anchor, and he drummed into his staff
Recently, I was listening to Brené Brown’s podcast on AI, with futurist Amy Webb [“What’s Coming, and What’s Here” https://brenebrown.com/podcast/whats-coming-and-whats-here/] What struck me most about their discussion was a comment Amy made about the huge changes barreling our way: “Where I grew up, we had terrible wind, terrible cold. And when you learn how to
One of the most important things I learned in coaching school was the impact of a powerful question. A lazy or unimaginative question doesn’t spark much, but a powerful question can break open entirely new vistas of action and inquiry. It is one of my favorite parts of being a coach. When my clients are
It has come to my attention that I live for the future. Since I was a child, my focus was always on a goal, or an experience, or a reward situated in a time yet to come. That Future Thing was what motivated, beckoned, and teased me forward, out of my humdrum or challenging present
I’m one of those people who typically takes stock at the end of the year, looking back over my challenges and goals and seeing where I made progress—or where I stalled or even regressed. Usually I set intentions for the upcoming year, and try to greet the new year with some sort of hope, optimism
In February 2020, I unknowingly wrote my last blog post during what I now think of as “The Before Times.” In it I wrote, “The old way of living and working is gone. The new way is emerging but has not yet arrived.” Boy, was that an understatement. Three weeks after that post, the whole
We live in a “VUCA” world: an environment characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The stakes are high and nothing seems simple or clear-cut; the effective way forward is not known. The world seems to be collapsing around us: at the macro level with a global climate crisis, right on down to the micro
Unless you’ve been under a rock in recent years, you are achingly aware that our nation is polarized. We are told that with each passing day, we are becoming more and more vehemently divided. I don’t know whether this is a fact, but since it is a widely-held perception, it deserves our careful consideration and