Blog

It happened again this week, as it does way too often. I was sitting in a leadership coaching session when my client proclaimed “I’ll just distract myself like I usually do.” To some, her solution to being spoken to disrespectfully may sound rather innocuous, it was no biggie. But in reality, distracting ourselves from something… Continue reading Empowerment Comes From Checking In, Not Checking Out

Parents often wonder what they can do to boost the likelihood that their kids will grow into successful adults. One thing for sure that doesn’t help is when parents get fearful of dealing with their children’s emotion and instead give in to quick fixes for getting a child to be calm or happy. Author and… Continue reading Success Requires Grit and Resilience

At Thanksgiving I got a card from my very first student — someone I taught eons ago, back in my professional ice age. He told me how I’d opened his eyes to possibilities he hadn’t seen before and how important I’d been to him. While I remember him well (and can still see him, frozen… Continue reading Creating Resilience by Savoring the Gifts We Have Received

On November 1st I attended the 10th Annual Pennsylvania Conference for Women and spent the day with 7,000 women! Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright delivered the key-note addresses and there were many other extraordinary women leaders who spoke through out the day. It was a conference alive with waves of energy that kept surging. While… Continue reading On Being With 7,000 Women at the Pennsylvania Conference for Women

Last week I was sitting in a workshop on courage and leadership at the Pennsylvania Conference for Women when the panel moderator asked “Does fear ever go away or do you need to be willing to take the leap and be fearful while taking action?” Suddenly my mind flashed back 27 years to when I… Continue reading Taking on Fear Advances a Career

While listening to an NPR radio interview with Debora Spar, President of Barnard College and author of the newly-published book Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection, it became all too clear that the ideas I grew up with about being a girl and achieving as a female were really different from those… Continue reading Dispelling Notions About What it Takes for Women to Achieve and Thrive

In his new book The Gift of Adversity: The Unexpected Benefits of Life’s Difficulties, Setbacks, and Imperfections, Norman Rosenthal, M.D., shares his belief that adversity is by far the best teacher most of us will ever encounter. To make his point, he draws on case studies, his upbringing in apartheid South Africa, and the experiences… Continue reading It in Adversity that We Learn are Biggest Lessons

“Don’t expect the clarity to come all at once, to know your purpose right away,” urged Oprah in her May 2013 commencement speech to Harvard graduates. After several years in the media business, Oprah said, “it became clear to me that I was here on earth to use television and not be used by it.”… Continue reading Lessons from Oprah and Mika Brzezinski on Being Authentic in the Workplace

There’s a firestorm brewing in reaction to Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In, and it makes me wonder what Happy Fernandez would have to say about it. Unfortunately, 74-year-old Happy died in January so I’ll never really know, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering what ways she’d add to the conversation. I… Continue reading How would Happy Fernandez Lean In on the Current Conversation about Women & Leadership