Tag Archives: Courage

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Dealing with Change: Both Wanted & Unwanted

Will it kill you? Or will you thrive?

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Once upon a time, I hired a fun-loving woman with great recommendations, strong experience, and impressive tenure. (True Story!)

Not long after she joined our team she began to struggle.   Things that she thought would be easy to learn were harder than normal, which chewed away at her confidence, which made it even harder to learn, which ate away even more confidence. Sometimes when we spoke privately, tears flowed.

At one point she shared that in her last role she was so confident that she would put on a pink feather boa. And when she wore it – everyone knew a special announcement was going to be made. Here she wanted to be her authentic self, but was afraid…

Each time we spoke, I would remind her:

  1. She was grieving. (She had just left a role that she knew backwards and forwards and upside down in a place where she felt understood, appreciated and loved and moved and started a new job.)
  2. She really was smart, capable, fun and wanted!
  3. She was focusing more on her mistakes and emotions than on what she knew she could bring and that was causing her to struggle harder.
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How to Refocus & Recharge – With or Without a Vacation

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Several years ago I was in a role that was getting busier and busier. As the demands and distractions poured in I began to feel less energized and lose my focus.
 
And as my focus shifted, so did the focus of the entire team that I supported.  With no corporate retreats in our future we needed to figure out how to refocus and recharge. 

Create an Experience1.  Create an EXPERIENCE:  

  •  I brought some tiny matchbox cars to a meeting and asked everyone to take a car and personalize it.
  • Then I gave them a bunch of foot-long crepe paper streamers and asked them to use a streamer to list one thing that was causing them to lose focus.  (And they could use as many streamers as they needed to.)
  • There were so many that the streamers quickly covered the cars and we talked about how hard it is to drive forward when you feel so covered up that can’t see the people you are working with, let alone where you are going.
  • Then I brought out a rocket.  (The kind you buy in a toystore that you can actually launch.)  The rocket was “beautifully decorated” with each of our objectives, and we talked about how looking up and focusing on where we were going could help us prioritize the demands and distractions, decrease our confusion and stress and increase our focus and results.  

And yes – when we achieved all of our objectives we drove to a field and shot off that rocket!

[Tweet “If you don’t have time to go away – How do you refocus?”]
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What does FREEDOM mean to You?

Is there a gap between "what is" and "what could be"?

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I published this post this summer just before the U.S.A. celebrated Independence Day!  

  • I am republishing now because January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month.  Human Trafficking is modern-day slavery and it is the fastest growing crime in the world.
  •  And January is also the month that we honor the life of Martin Luther King Jr. for all of the work he did to bring freedom to others.

As a U.S. Citizen, I grew up being very proud of:

  • My country – where people came to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
  • My family – who left everything behind in their countries of origin because of oppression and poverty and came to the U.S. to pursue those ideals.

And even prouder of:  My relatives and friends that served to defend the freedom of others.

Moving to the big sandbox we live in now took lots of prayer and courage because many of the freedoms I always cherished don’t exist here.  …But we came believing that we were supposed to seek to understand and to learn.

We weren’t here very long when a neighbor challenged me to consider that Americans don’t have a corner on the market on freedom.  I accepted her challenge and have been listening and experiencing for a little more than two years. And although we don’t have it all figured out yet, this is a bit of what we are learning…

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4 Ways YOU Can Decrease Bullying and Division

And Create More Understanding and Unity...

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I grew up in a little town in North Dakota, where we had four very distinct seasons. My favorite as a child was summer – because I absolutely love being in the water!

It was refreshing, peaceful, freeing, great exercise and fun!

Unless we were camping by the lake…  We would pedal our bicycles to the pool multiple times every single day.  In the morning for an hour of lessons, then for three hours of open swimming in the afternoon and occasionally in the evening for another two – three hours of playing in the water!

If gills or a mermaid tail had been an option I would have them!

A few years ago I met a young woman that loved being in the water even more than I do. As a child she was on swim teams and lived in the pool. But at a very young age she was diagnosed with a disease that has impacted her body a lot like ALS.

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Learning to Leverage Your Strengths

...That often show up as a weakness

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Have you ever struggled to figure out how to leverage a strength that is coming across as a weakness?

If you’ve ever watched popcorn pop, you’ll understand one of mine.

One little kernel heats up, flies into the air and explodes into light fluffy happiness. POP!

Then a couple more kernels join the fun! POP! POP!

Then a few more! POP! POP! POP! POP! POP!

Soon the party is in full swing, as the noise, chaos, and joy increase rapidly! POP! Pop! POP! Pop! POP! POP!!! POP!!!!

That’s me and…My popcorn brain

 

For many years I sat in meetings:

  • Excited by the challenge of problem solving.
  • Fueled by the opportunity to be creative and to collaborate.

And frustrated because I could not clearly articulate what was happening inside my brain.