Originally Published: June 30, 2022 Note: Today I’m sharing an excerpt from Chapter 2 of my new book, Dancing the Tightrope, What Falling Off a Horse Taught Me About Embracing Pressure, Fear and Uncertainty. In the following excerpt, we pick up the story soon after I fell off the horse. In this segment, I’m beginning […]
I’ve had several coaching encounters over the last few days where I recognized a theme of resentment. It’s a mindset that I am prone to cultivating myself – if I’m not aware. When things are not going my way, I have a “rule” that says “rather than confront what’s going on, let’s hope it goes […]
When I got my first job in banking, I soon realized that I had entered a world full of rules. Our hometown bank had a small lunchroom with unremarkable tables and stacking chairs scattered about. I was pinching pennies, so the this quickly became the place to eat my sack lunch. Next to the lunchroom […]
When I was in midst of editing Dancing the Tightrope, someone told me to hang on to the many stories that were landing on the cutting room floor. “Just because it didn’t belong in the book doesn’t mean it’s not a story worth telling,” they said. The following story is one of those that didn’t […]
Searching through my blogs last week for a post on resistance, I ran across one I wrote 18 months prior to the horseback riding accident that set me on a journey of a whole new understanding about operating effectively under pressure. Reading this piece was almost eerie. It was a little bit like entering another […]
“Don’t shrink. Don’t puff up. Stand your sacred ground.” Brené Brown One of the most common requests I get as an executive coach is this: How do I develop “executive presence?” It’s one of the most elusive traits we can choose to develop. The distinctions are subtle. What one person calls gravitas, another might call arrogance. The difference […]
Three years ago, I posted this blog as we entered into a new reality called COVID 19. At the time, we could have no idea what was ahead, whether the next 3 weeks, months or years. Looking back, I can see many things that were not nearly as bad as I feared at the time. […]
This last week, Hannah Paquinzo, a podcast guest from last month, took me through a Human Design session. She had mentioned it in the podcast, and I was curious. I’ve learned that self-awareness is not that easy to come by. We humans are complex. Over the years, I’ve done everything from the Herrmann Brain Dominance […]
In Dancing the Tightrope, I tell the story of “finding the middle”, a maddening exercise devised by Natural Humanship trainer Bruce Anderson. At one point in the experience, he asked me to move away from the spot that I had declared the middle, while being consciously aware of the uncomfortable feeling of doing so. He […]
When I teach leadership programs, inevitably the topic of control comes up. In general, the leaders in the room want more of it, and that’s often why they seek higher positions in their company. When this conversation comes up, I prepare myself, because we are about to start confronting some beliefs. Why prepare myself? Have […]