We once worked with a real estate agent who said to us, "buyers are liars." She explained that we’ll tell her we absolutely need to have a two-story front porch, a finished basement, and a separate laundry room in our next house when in fact, the home we’ll end up purchasing will have none of those [...]
“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” ― John Muir Who is feeling exhausted? A year ago, we were using every ounce of our creativity just to get groceries or figure out how to keep working. Now, fatigue is [...]
I’ve been thinking about questions, mostly about asking them. We were in Nashville two years ago for a long weekend and took Lyfts everywhere we needed to go. Every trip was $6.15, no matter how far we went. Sitting in the backseat I was relaxed and chatty, interested in what was attracting so many different people to [...]
The thrill of dumping 2020 and starting a new year has us looking for new ways to refresh. This means refilling our creativity buckets and using a sense of fun and play to get there. Story Mode programs are crazy fun because we believe that playing at work is one of the best ways to open [...]
Katie doesn’t know what to do with me. There are seven of us here today and as she rattles off assignments, I hear everyone’s name but my own. “Randy, you’ll be in the loading dock. Sue, you’ll be a shopper.” Everyone gets up to start work and then it’s just Katie and me. She’s looking a [...]
Raise your hand if you’ve been in therapy. Thank you, everyone. Put your hands down now. Like many of you, I am no stranger to psychotherapy and owe my life to some amazing therapists. However, their insistence on talking about emotions makes me crazy. I am much more the cerebral type and would prefer to talk [...]
It begins with love at first sight. Maybe the thought surprises you, waking up with you in the morning after a night of heavy dreaming. You date for a while and the words flow easily. You have finally found your story. But then little things begin to bother you. Your fingers move more hesitantly and eventually, [...]
You do not want to have me next to you in a yoga class. I’m terrible at it. No flexibility or grace. In fact, I don’t even like it all that much. Give me some dumbbells and the world floats away while I count reps and grunt. But even if I can’t do the poses correctly, [...]
MISSION STATEMENTS SUCK. At least that’s what I thought until recently when Beth and I had to coach our leadership development students to write their own personal mission statements. My job was to help them to decide what their statement should be. This entailed long discussions of how we spend our time at work, versus how we wished we spent [...]
Who doesn’t love a good metaphor or simile? They may not be as fun as a barrel of monkeys and perhaps you find them dull as dishwater. Now because time is money...I’ll move on. (See what I did there?) We talk about these two language tools all the time with our Story Mode community. But one student [...]