If you are like me and need time to process where you’ve been before you can plan where you are going to next, taking some time to reflect, harvest learnings, and think deeply about where you are headed is an important part of ending a year well.

 I started my reflection this year at a surface level thinking about what did I DO?

• I coached 12 people over the course of the year, each of them over many months
• I successfully...

Photo source: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

The media has been inundated this week with EVERYONE’s opinion about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.

Everyone seems to have a perspective on the issue they feel we are entitled to hear:

• There is no excuse for what Will did and he shouldn’t have done that;
• Violence is never OK;
• What he did was understandable and justified because of what Chris Rock said;
• What Chris Rock said was offensive and insensitive to Jada Pinkett-Smith’s...

“What is your relationship to joy?” That question was voiced a few years ago by a colleague as we were talking about work with high emotion. In my work, I’ve got a friendly relationship with some of those intense and difficult emotions; fear, anger grief and anxiety. It’s not often that joy, happiness or excitement is present in my work so the question made me pause and reflect.

I’ve always just assumed that I’ve got a positive relationship with joy and...

My grandmother used the expression”hell in a hand basket” when it felt like everything was careening wildly out of control, when despair and danger were pounding at the door to be let in. It seems an apt phrase for the events of the first week of January 2021.

This blog isn’t structured or ordered, nor is it planned to come up with the “top 3 tips or insights” so you can take the chaos of where we are and life hack yourself into...

My work is in the public arena, in the space between people. That means I spend a lot of time feeling the impacts of polarization, disconnection, fear, anger and distrust. In the last few years it has become palpable; so much so that I’ve called this time “a time of outrage.” In 2020, we layered the emotional, financial and social impacts of a global pandemic over top of it like icing on a cake. It’s not just the virus that is contagious, it is the emotion surrounding...