Exercise 18 of Leadership Step By Step was to have another 10 conversations with a goal of making people feel understood. Again, a script was provided and the short version is: The idea with this script is that you ask someone about their passion, then give them the space to delve into their passion and really explore what it is […]
Learning to Enjoy the Moment – How my 2-year old son taught me to slow down and appreciate life
This week, while mommy had a hair appointment, I spent a couple hours with our son at the nearby shopping mall. We had 2 hours to burn, with nothing in particular to do. And me not being particularly interested in shopping, I decided to just let my 2-year-old explore and wander the mall. One of the first things he discovered […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #17: Meaningful Connection
For exercise 17 of Leadership Step By Step, I had to have 10 conversations using a script designed to encourage meaningful connection with others. In short, the conversation goes as follows: I found the formula to be simple and yet very effective! Asking someone about what they enjoy doing is great, but often the conversation just ends there with a […]
Use It ‘Til You Can’t: Finding Meaning in the Things We Keep
Today I filled out an online pledge to “use things until I can’t” for one year. It was a super easy pledge for me to make, because that’s pretty much what I do already. The implication was that you should use things for as long as you can before buying a new one, because you maximize the use out of […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #16: The Method, More Challenging
Exercise 16 of Leadership Step By Step was probably the most challenging one I’ve had so far. For this exercise, I had to do the exact same thing as in exercise 15, but now with something more difficult. Going through The Model and The Method itself was easy enough, but I found the actual new behaviors to be really difficult, […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #15: The Method
This week’s exercise from Leadership Step By Step was to build on the previous exercise (“The Model”) and to try to influence your own environment, beliefs, and emotions in order to elicit a rewarding feeling from something that you’d like to improve at, but haven’t been able to. For this exercise, Josh asked us to form groups to brainstorm new […]
Shopping Hurts Your Wallet, Happiness, and The Planet – How I Escape the Dopamine Trap
It’s 6:13am. I’m in my living room laying flat on the floor on my stomach. Chest heaving up and down as I take quick, gasping breaths. My legs and arms feel like they’re burning. My forehead is slightly damp with sweat. I just finished my second set of burpees for the day, and as usual, they kick my butt. Like […]
My Third Pillar of Sustainability – Connection
We covered my three pillars of sustainability, went into detail on how I use the lens of health and the lens of happiness to shape my behavior, and now it’s time for the final pillar and lens: connection. In a way, I feel like connection is the pillar that really ties everything together – I can be at the top […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #14: The Model
This week’s exercise from Josh’s Leadership Step By Step was called The Model, and the assignment was to watch a few of Josh’s videos on The Model, which showed me a system to begin to analyze my own emotional processes surrounding something I’d like to improve at, then try to do the analysis for a couple things I want to […]
Productivity, Distraction, and the Hidden Cost of Convenience
3/8/25 Note: This week I was hit by some kind of stomach bug which made it really hard for me to get to my computer to write a blog post about my third pillar of sustainability, connection. So, I decided to interrupt my scheduled blog post for one that I wrote a week ago that I planned on posting at […]