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Mindful Mondays

Putting Your Pieces Together

Earlier this month, when I was speaking on mindful leadership to the Latino Leadership Summit of one of my client companies, I shared the graphic that accompanies this post. It shows what happens when the body is in the chronic state of fight or flight that comes from being constantly overworked and overwhelmed. Chronic fight or flight impacts your leadership effectiveness for sure, but, more importantly, it shortens your life and reduces the quality of it while you’re still here.

Mindful Mondays

Five Choices That Created an Amazing Five Years

Today is my 55th birthday. Yes, I said it. It’s part of my new policy of radical transparency. From the perspective of age 55, I can identify decisions I’ve made that have changed my life for the better. I believe they helped create the conditions for many of the good things in my life. While your mileage may vary, I thought I’d share those decisions here with the hope that they may be helpful to you.

Mindful Mondays

Love, Laughter and the Meaning of Life

In the midst of another crazy, busy week it can be easy to overlook how much value there is in getting together with old friends to share some love, laughter and maybe even discuss the meaning of life. I share thoughts on all of that and how you can follow through in your own life in this week’s Mindful Monday.

Mindful Mondays

Live Your Day Really Well

If you’re of a certain age, you likely recognize the name, Dr. Art Ulene. For 23 years, he regularly appeared as the medical expert on NBC’s Today Show. While he’s long since retired from that gig, the show still runs his 30 Day Weight Loss program every year. Today he’s almost 80 years old and is a role model for the healthy lifestyle that he’s been promoting for years. I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Art for a new podcast I’m launching later this year called, At Your Best. He was a terrific guest because he had so much wisdom to share.

Mindful Mondays

Three Things They Always Tell Me

Last week, I had the nice surprise of hearing from a participant in a Mindful Leadership workshop I did a couple of years ago. He told me he’s still applying a number of takeaways from the workshop. I asked him for examples and he gave me three of them. They turned out to be three things that I almost always hear about from people when I connect them with months or years after working with them. I guess that means they work for people. I summarize them for you in this week’s Mindful Monday post.

Mindful Mondays, Personal Presence

Three Things I’ve Learned About Public Speaking

If you’re in a leadership role of almost any type, the odds are high that you have to do some sort of public speaking on a semi-regular basis. Do you enjoy it or dread it? As someone who delivers 40 or 50 speeches and presentations to clients every year, it’s a good thing that I actually enjoy speaking. There are three things in particular that I’ve learned to focus on when speaking. They’re simple but powerful ideas. In the hopes that they’ll help you too, here they are:

Mindful Mondays

Take Some Time to Connect

Last week, I had two reminders of how important it is to take some time to connect with other people and how we leave so much value on the table when we don’t.

The first reminder was when I had a group of corporate leaders in a Developing Leadership Presence program we started last week take part in a transformational listening conversation on what they’re grateful for. As they sat in trios for 15 minutes, I heard laughter and saw tears of joy and gratitude. This was among a group of people who didn’t know each other at all five hours earlier.

When, during a debrief, I asked them to describe what had just happened, one woman shared that she was struck by how quickly she went deep in conversation with someone she really didn’t know. In reflecting on the conversation, she said it made her realize how much she is missing in her daily interactions with other people she works with.

Mindful Mondays

Separating Fat from Fiction

Last month, I wrote a post about how reducing the amount of sugar in your diet can dramatically improve the quality of your life. Today, I want to share a follow-up post about what you should eat instead of sugar.

You may be surprised to learn that the answer is fat. As Dr. Mark Hyman, director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, explains in his new book, Eat Fat, Get Thin, eating the right kinds of fats can have a big positive impact on your health and well-being. Because the right kinds of fat also have positive impacts on your cognitive capacity, they can also improve your professional performance.

I didn’t have the opportunity to interview Dr. Hyman personally about his latest work but he’s provided some interesting information that I want to share with you.

Leadership, Mindful Mondays

The Character of Listening

What’s really going on when we listen to someone else completely and without any agenda other than to connect? At a conference this past weekend, I was introduced to a simple but powerful way to think about that by a new friend, Christopher Kai.

In a brief talk to the conference participants, Chris explained that the Chinese character for listening (which accompanies this post) offers an integrative approach to transformational listening.

Mindful Mondays

Closing a Chapter Gracefully

It wasn’t a great game, but it was a win. For Peyton Manning, it was, in all probability, his last as an NFL quarterback. After 18 years of the sacks, injuries and surgeries that come with a career in the League, the soon to be 40 year old Manning managed the Broncos offense well enough to enable its defense to win the 50th Super Bowl.

There are Peyton Manning fans and Peyton Manning haters. Personally, I don’t have strong feelings about him either way but I found a lot to admire in Manning in how he conducted himself in preparing and playing for the Super Bowl and what he said after it was over. There was a lot there that I think anyone could learn about how to handle yourself as life catches up with your talents and skills.

Mindful Mondays, OOTMA

Three Ways to Avoid a Wipeout

In 15 years of coaching, I’ve worked with a lot of high-performing executives. When things go well, they run like a finely tuned Formula 1 race car. But life and humans being what they are, I’ve witnessed the occasional wipeout where, in spite of best efforts and intentions, an exec spins out and crashes into the wall. In the interest of helping you avoid a similar fate, I’d like to share three best practices that are common to the high performers I work with who run at a really high speed yet avoid wiping out.

Mindful Mondays

A Life Changing Decision to Feel and Perform Better

What if there were an inexpensive pill with no side effects that would cure many of your aches and pains, spark weight loss, give you more energy, leave you in a better mood, increase your mental focus, help you get more done and extend and improve your life? You’d line up for that, right? So, first the bad news and then the good news. The bad news is, to my knowledge, there is no such pill. The good news is you can get all of those outcomes without ingesting anything new. It’s the opposite, actually. You just need to stop ingesting added sugar in what you eat or drink.

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