The Sphere, a finished school in Ghana, and one last call for Action Club. We had an epic trip two weeks ago: Vegas with my mom, my brother, and my husband, and the whole point was the Backstreet Boys' 46th sold-out show at The Sphere. Bonus cool: It was a white-out and everyone attending wore white in honor of the 25th anniversary of their Millennium album. I'm not even going to try to describe what The Sphere actually feels like, because there's genuinely nothing to compare it to. I've been...
9 days ago • 4 min read
A few months ago, I watched ICE agents try to manage a TSA checkpoint they weren't authorized to run. The line didn't move because the line wasn't the problem. I see the same thing in organizations. We add bodies, create new Slack channels, schedule another check-in, and call it a solution. The actual source of the problem sits upstream, untouched, because addressing it is harder or uncomfortable.The difference between solving what's visible and solving what's real is the difference between...
19 days ago • 1 min read
Closing dance floors, invisible AI teams, and the last Action Club I'll ever run. The past two weeks were filled with so much fun and goodness. I went to Austin to spend four days at my favorite conference of the year, the National Speaker Association Influence Conference. Two keynotes that stood out were: My friend Ross Bernstein documenting one year of cancer treatments while maintaining his business Don Yeager, former associate editor of Sports Illustrated, on what makes high performers,...
23 days ago • 4 min read
I've worked remotely since 2002. Led a team of up to 18 people globally, with no Zoom, no cameras on our laptops or phones, and managed to stay and feel connected. So yes...I've got some street cred ;) Here's what two decades of remote work actually taught me: you can optimize all you want, but you need to relentlessly prioritize first. Why it matters: Remote workers tend to work more hours than in-office peers, not because they're more productive, but because the transition doesn't exist....
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Two packed (and awesome) weeks over here... I spent most of them rebuilding my speaking catalog from the ground up. I love burning things down to ashes and rebuilding. What started as a refresh turned into something bigger. I retired one topic entirely, moved another into a different home, and reworked all of them. Some had been Frankensteined together over the years. I wanted each one to have a clear outcome and reflect what I'm passionate about teaching now. The bigger driver was making...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Reflections, Prioritization, and Planning At the end of each quarter, I do reflections: pull out my Powered Path Playbook pages, look at wins, lessons earned, smartest decisions, and start planning the next quarter. This round happened all over the place. Another round of Playbook Quarterly Reflections with Wendy! Wendy and I've been doing quarterly reflections together for about a decade. This time it was Yemeni coffee at Haraz Coffeehouse. My friend Lilly and I did an abbreviated version...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Deep focus doesn't happen because you decided to concentrate harder. It happens because you set the right conditions. Your environment, your mindset, and your energy level all either support focused work or work against it. Most focus advice stops at removing distractions. That's necessary but not sufficient. Why it matters: Missing even one of the three attention anchors means the other two carry more weight than they should Without intentional conditions, deep work gets replaced by the...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Mountains, karaoke, and the Hope Diamond Last week, Kevin and I joined my parents, siblings, and two nieces in Asheville, North Carolina, one of my favorite cities in the country, for our first family vacation since I was a kid. We hiked Catawba Falls with my mom (which included 535 steep steps), roasted s'mores, sang karaoke (for the record, "Islands in the Stream" and "Blame It on the Rain" are much harder than they sound...), played games, and took a ghost tour. Did you know the Hope...
2 months ago • 3 min read
How many of you feel like you are Siri or Alexa to your team? If they reach out, you must respond immediately. And if you reach out to someone and it's been 32 seconds, what's taking them so long? Why it matters: Instant replies train your team to expect them, which means you've made yourself their Siri permanently. Constant urgency raises cortisol, which compromises decision-making. Nobody solves the big problem over emails. Sometimes, waiting to respond is the most developmental thing you...
2 months ago • 1 min read