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As we enter the holiday party season, someone inevitably will ask you the question:

How was your year?

For many, this has been a tough year.  Endless pandemic news.  Lockdowns.  Cancelled vacations.  Turbo-charged cabin fever.  

You can respond to the question with all your trials and tribulations from the year.  It’ll feel good to let loose.  Perhaps they’ll feel the same and you can relate to each other’s difficulties.

But where do you both end up at the end of that Story of Your Year?

Turn it around 180 degrees.  After you’re finished telling the person the Story of Your Year, 

How do you want them to feel?

Here are 3 Steps to build an engaging and positive Story of Your Year for holiday parties.  

Step 1:  What One Word describes how you want people to feel after you tell them the Story of Your Year?

Step 2:  Journal all your...

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Do you ever think about where you’ll be in 10 years?  

What will your children be doing?  Who will they be?  Where will they be?

What about your career?  What will you be doing?  Who will you be working with?  Where in the world will you be?

Want to get peak into your world ten years from now?  

There is a way.  It’s simple and doesn’t require a crystal ball.

Ready?

Be patient as I lay the foundation.

In choosing someone for a new job or new role, I often heard the phrase, “past performance is an excellent predictor of future performance.”

Reviewing a person’s past performance across years, roles and supervisors is an excellent way to evaluate how a person will perform.  Sure, there are anomalies.  People make severe right or left turns in their career.  I certainly did.  For the most part, though, people are pretty...

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I saw an intriguing advertisement for today with the phrase, “Commitments aren’t made with words.  They’re made with Actions.”

That phrase got me thinking about how commitments work.  At first, you make a commitment in your head.  

•  To go to the gym more often
•  To grade papers this week  
•  To clean the garage this weekend
•  To volunteer more next year

What commitments have you made to yourself?

The ad differentiated between commitments made by Words vs Action.  In a former life, I was an engineer, so I started thinking how physics might shed light on the concept of Commitment.  

Let’s begin with our science metaphor.  (don’t be scared, I’ll keep it easy) 

Commitments build the Potential Energy needed to overcome Inertia.  Inertia is an object’s tendency to stay put.  

•  Ever feel inertia to do...

Imagine the sound of a HUGE motor of your garbage truck, roaring in right front of you.  Try to imitate it's sound.  Go ahead, do it out loud.  You stop in front of the house and load up their garbage, wondering, 'what treasures are they throwing away?'  With just a twitch of your finger, you push the button and all that stuff mashes into mush.  Power, Baby!  And you get a whiff and wrinkle your nose.  Smell it?  You hit the gas and rev up that engine as you go to the next house.  Put on the brakes to slow down and stop this massive machine.  As you hit the brakes, they squeal with a high-pitch that makes you wince.  Can you make that sound?

If you followed along, you just entered the world of a 5 year-old, playing with his garbage truck.  It's a sensorial experience!

When I was a kid, we collected and played for hours with our Matchbox cars.  Matchbox cars came in little boxes that actually look like matchboxes. ...