Empowerment

Some of our best lessons are learned by just listening to other’s stories.

Alex Borstein who plays the opinionated manager Susie Myerson on Amazon Prime’s "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel", won the Emmy this year for best supporting actress in a comedy series.

She dedicated her award to “the strength of a woman” and paid tribute to several women including her grandmother.

She said “to my grandmother, Nudgy, (they) are immigrants, they are Holocaust survivors. My grandmother turned to a guard. She w…

"Pura Vida” (pronounced poo-rah vee-dah) is the phrase that greeted me on the ‘Welcome to Costa Rica' sign at the airport in Liberia, Costa Rica. I arrived there for a week-long retreat at Blue Spirit in Nosara. 

Before I left home, several people who had visited Costa Rica wished me “Pura Vida”. It means “simple life” or “pure life” and is known as a way of life in Costa Rica. Instead of saying “hello” or “good morning”, one says “Pura Vida”.  

I’ve found that Costa Rica has been named one of…

After writing my blog about leadership lessons I learned from the 2019 U.S.A. Women’s Soccer Team, I kept reflecting on the impact of women sports teams and their coaches which led me down the path of my first athletic team coach. 

I attended a co-ed Catholic grammar school in Chicago where sports were generously offered to the boys from early on: football, basketball, softball, floor hockey. Girls, of course, were offered cheerleading for the boys' teams. 

As one of the male alum said,  “The …

“Eureka! - I have found it!”  - Archimedes

I don’t know about you, but I really love those “Eureka!” moments.  I love the rush and the hit of dopamine I get when I realize I have just brilliantly solved a problem, imagined something very creative or found the answer to a question that I’ve been noodling and loosing sleep over.

It’s these moments of insight that I’ve always wanted to understand and recreate and now I do and I can…at least a little bit. 

Insight is a very different process from…

I was ready. I walked on stage and confidently took center stage. I stopped, looked out into the audience took a deep breath and began my talk.  

The lights were low enough I could see the faces and expressions of my audience. I read that Brené Brown asks for the lights to be lit at 50% of capacity so she is able to see the faces of her audience. I figure if it’s good enough for Brené, it’s good enough for me.  

I began my talk. As I usually do, I focused on the individual faces in the audienc…

I’ve been working with a physical trainer on and off for several months. Charity helps me focus on the proper form and provides me with a structured exercise plan that I can challenge myself with by increasing weight or repetitions. She was the one that really shook up my routine by introducing me to Tabata training or High-Intensity Interval Training, HIIT.

HIIT training was discovered by Japanese scientist Dr. Izumi Tabata and a team of researchers from the National Institute of Fitness and S…

“I choose bold. I choose action. I choose what's right for the people. I choose to make a difference.”     - Bill Richardson

Most of you are aware by now that I work with a change and innovation model called The Bigger Game.  I even wrote a book about it. 

The word “Game” just means what we are up to in life.

The model is simple, but a very powerful one. It changed my life and I’ve witnessed it changing other lives. I’ve even presented this model to a group of scientists and technologists who…

“Define success on your own terms, achieve it by your own rules, and build a life you're proud to live.”

-- Anne Sweeney

I recently joined a new mastermind group and they’ve been stretching me to seriously evaluate what the next steps are that I must take to up my game in both my professional and personal life.

I’ve always believed it is critical to define success for myself. What has taken me longer to realize is that deciding what I’m willing to give up for success is …

How many times have we asked someone “How are you?” hoping that we don’t get more than a one-word response such as “Fine” or “Good”? How often do we just continue to walk on and not stop to acknowledge the person answering—or perhaps asking—the question, just so we’ll be able to continue with whatever we were doing with minimal disruption.  

For me, there is a depth of validation for each other as human beings that is missing in our current world. 

I have often wondered how other…