When you think of luxury, what does that word bring to mind for you? It instantly gets me thinking about 2,000 thread count sheets and a mattress that feels like sleeping on a cloud. The time and ease of mind to luxuriate in them. Food […]
All posts filed under: Growth and Transformation
Making Room for the Unwanted
Some new neighbors moved into the neighborhood a few weeks ago. They are loud. They disturb the peace. They set off firecrackers. Illegally. I regarded this as a big problem. I wanted the old neighbors back, the formerly invisible ones. These new ones need to […]
Cat or Dog?
Growing up, we were a cat family. This didn’t work out well for my younger brother, John, who was a dog person through and through. He solved the problem by simply pretending Winklemeyer was a dog. He never once let up on the claim. Much […]
Coming Back to Our Senses
Being able to navigate the overwhelming nature of distress is complicated by the way it focuses our attention right down to a pinpoint, confining us to a very small parcel of real estate in our mind. In this reduced space our entire field of vision […]
The Theology of Thank You
During a leadership team meeting at an earlier time in my life, we’d been asked to go around the table and offer observations about where each of our colleagues could improve. It felt like a set-up of some sort so consequently I felt myself becoming […]
Getting Schooled
Putting the house to order before work, I pick up the packaging tape dispenser left on the dining room table and notice the tape has slipped out from the slot it threads through. Oh yeah. That’s why I didn’t put it away. It happens all […]
Riding the Horse
Are you the person you were a year ago? Did you mean to be different? It’s actually strange to think of who we were one year ago and in what ways we may or may not have changed, either by happenstance or by design. I […]
Drop the Mic
Sometimes the only thing to do is be quiet and get out of the way. Such is the case with this lesson in astonishment, a spoken word poem entitled, “Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps.” As Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson recommends, […]
Energy Rising
There was a period in my life when I was so edgy and wary it felt like I was having a million tiny little heart attacks every day as I tried to suppress all the zings of feeling I didn’t like and didn’t want to […]
Dialing it Down
In a culture that applauds giving your all, it almost seems against nature to sanction anything less, which is why I’m a tad leery to bring forward a concept that does exactly that: The 85% Rule actually proposes dialing back our effort to 85%. Yes, […]
Calling Time-Out
Pilots do it. Astronauts do it. Surgeons do it. Taking a two-minute timeout to run through a checklist before undertaking a critical endeavor is a proven way to minimize errors, including life or death ones. It’s why the Joint Commission instituted a universal protocol for […]
Going With It
Mastering ChangeYou may not have asked for it, but it happens anyway. Being a human being is to be in constant conversation with change. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus kind of said, our lives are like rivers. You never step in the same river twice. […]
Be cool. 