How much time, effort and money would be required to bring this pool that had been completely neglected back to life and why should you care? Goals. Achieving. Success. Leadership lessons. 

Leadership. Planning. Strategy. All from learned from asparagus. 

We are mostly all busy and overcommitted. Taking a pause and reflect approach to the messages we receive is more productive than jumping to wrong conclusions because you incorrectly decipher a message’s meaning. Take control of your reaction to avoid overreacting. This will lead to better outcomes.

Feedback is a gift. That is what I believe. It is a gift that pays tremendous dividends for individual and team performance.

But feedback is often avoided because people don’t always experience it as a gift. Often it feels like a weapon used against them because people aren’t good at giving it or because a cultures treats it that way.

What it might cost you to live intentionally is far more tolerable than the cost of experiencing an avoidable tragedy. The cost of being intentional is a positive multiplier; the cost of an avoidable tragedy is far less positive. Here is a plan to learn from bad outcomes to avoid tragedy.

When deciding if a new job opportunity is a wise change. The goal of is to try to ensure you are going after the opportunity as an intentional part of your life’s goals/plan with your eyes wide open to the good, the bad, and the ugly. Here is a plan for how to do that more often.

If when you hear authentic, you hear something of Freud and a call to follow your desires and appetites to find and fulfill your pleasures, then chasing after and becoming authentic will not serve its ultimate purpose in your life. You may feed your appetites and achieve happiness, but appetites are never fully quenched, and happiness is based on circumstances. So you may have fleeting moments of success in being authentic, but you will never be truly full or fulfilled. There is an alternative way.

Injustice, hate, and indifference don’t get better by talking about them, they only get better when action is taken to correct them. Here is how you can do that. by stopping the lies and taking more tries.

A healthy marriage is one of the biggest blessings that you can experience. An unhealthy marriage can be one of the most significant burdens you will ever endure. You get to choose.

A hard reality is that your marriage will impact the lives of generations of individuals, some you know and some you will never meet. The question you must ask yourself is what do I want that impact to be (positive or negative), and am I living out my marriage in an intentional way to get there?

Here are 7 factors that if you apply them intentionally to your marriage, you will achieve lasting positive impact and leave a legacy worth repeating.

I had a discussion the other day about the line between courage and recklessness. This conversation led me to conclude that it might be helpful to share brief generalizations on what it looks like to act courageously versus settle for mediocrity versus acting recklessly.

Effective communicators will rule the future. The mediums will change but the basic blocking and tackling (or scale for my musical friends) will stand the test of time. The best communicators share content in ways that bring others into the story. They are able to influence others into action by making sure the value is felt. They are willing to learn about and then be empathetic to the experience that others filter the message being shared through.

The books on culture, leadership, and success I read last year provided consistent advice for teams, leaders, and companies that want to be great. Get exceptionally good at knowing what the most important things are, talk about them constantly, execute against them flawlessly and measure success. The advice is basically: Be more intentional.

As I was reflecting on my reading list from 2021 , two things stood out. First, it’s a much shorter list this year. I only read 27 books. This was mainly because my family bought a farm, which required me to divert my time resources for three months away from reading and towards packing, moving, unpacking, and then restoring our full of potential fixer upper.

It is not uncommon for our family to receive solicitations from organizations asking for help in doing good. Donate here, give to this cause, make a difference in these lives. Not going to lie; most of these get recycled with no action taken. However, on one occasion, it was our daughter Jenna who intercepted the catalog from a group called World Vision.

My family completed our holiday tradition this past weekend. We gathered as a group and gave back by handing out Thanksgiving Meal kits at a local charity. We then broke bread as a family celebrating relationships and then headed to the grocery store to check the items off a secret Santa list.

Change and personal growth are the keys to life. There is no stagnation you are either growing or atrophying. Don’t overcomplicate what it takes to grow. Start with a simple process.

In part one, I focused mostly on the personal impacts of moving, so in part two, I will talk about what I learned about getting work done. I learned a lot about executing and bringing a large project to life. In no particular order, here are five things that you can apply in life or on the job.

Having experienced the reality of barely surviving (more truth than hyperbole in that statement) the stress, discomfort, lack of control, and fatigue of moving. I on fully on board with the research that concludes the physical, mental and emotional demands of moving lead it to being one of the most stressful events in your life.

If you are actively engaged in living, you will encounter problems. However, especially in the workplace, some people choose to live life as if one of the definitions of success is never letting anyone know you have encountered a problem. Success looks like being so buttoned up and so over-prepared that things appear always to be going as planned. There is a better way.

We all receive feedback continuously. Everything from projects we are working on to teams we are a part of to the apps we use involves feedback loops.

Since feedback loops are everywhere, it is not whether or not they exist that dictates the effectiveness of the feedback, but how we choose to engage in the loop and react to the feedback that dictates if we move closer to or further from achieving a new future state with better outcomes. Meaning YOU own if the feedback becomes a tool or a weapon.