Celebrate Every Age

by Denise Green | Coaching, Energy, Health, Optimal Results, Personal Development Comments | 0

Dia de Los Muertos

On this Day of the Dead (aka All Souls Day), I celebrate another birthday.

I love my birthday.

I often marvel when people lament their birthdays. It’s not that I don’t understand where they might be coming from. I don’t romanticize growing older.  I know that birthdays can remind us that we’re drawing closer to our death. But that’s true of every moment, and you don’t hear people complaining every 5 minutes that they’re closing in on death.

Reflecting on why I might have a somewhat unusual context about aging, I recall my Grandma Dori’s frequent saying about birthdays: “It sure beats the alternative.”

My context is influenced not just by my family, by my own health history which has a bit of a Benjamin Button quality about it so far. I began life needing to have my hip rebuilt. At age 6 my vision got bad enough to warrant thick glasses. At 22, I was in an car accident and broke my back, which led to over a decade of pain and sciatica. At 27, I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis.

So, while my contemporaries were thriving physically in their 20s, I was trying to heal physical conditions often associated with old age.*

Seeking treatment for these conditions led me to a world I would have never sought had I been pain free. As a result, I discovered healers and treatments–Western, Eastern, Ancient, and High Tech–that many people don’t know exist. And I discovered this truth: [Read more...]

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Facing the Thing that Scares You

by Denise Green | Coaching, Leadership, Optimal Results, Personal Development, Relationship & Trust Comments | 2

“What are you pretending not to know?”

- Susan Scott, Fierce Conversations

Cracks in the Foundation

My house in Oakland was built in 1924 on a steep downward slope. When someone would ask if my house had a bolted foundation, I’d say something like “Oh, I’m sure it must” and would change the subject. I liked to assume that, since a lot of renovations had taken place before we moved in, someone must have fixed it.  The fact that someone had actually sealed off any access to the foundation made it easier for me to ignore it: can’t assess what you can’t see.

For a while, this avoidance strategy saved me money. Then, a crack in the foundation revealed itself. And over the course of a year, with a few minor earthquakes, and good ol’ gravity, the crack grew. It grew until one day, I decided to pull my head out of the sand and bring in an expert to tell me what I had.

Expert Deniers

We humans are really good at ignoring cracks in all sorts of foundations: the body that we keep pushing until we suffer a debilitating injury or illness; the resentment that we allow to fester until the relationship is beyond repair; the key employee that we ignore until they quit and sign up with the competition; the waistline that grows until we can’t button our skinny pants…then our fat pants.

The laundry…

Just in Time [Read more...]

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Recipe For Brilliance

by BrillianceInc | Building Teams, Career Satisfaction, Coaching, Developing Others, Employee Engagement, Leadership, Management, Newsletter Archives, Optimal Results, Personal Development, Science of Leadership, Strengths Comments | 0

Are you in the zone? You know..that place where you feel energized. Where you like going to work, where you feel a sense of fulfillment, satisfaction, and gratitude. If you’re not living there, how far away are you? Around the block? Next County? Neighboring planet? For managers, how would your employees answer?

When we ask program participants and clients about times when they felt in the zone, nearly all can name one. Barely anyone claims to there now. And survey research supports this observation. According to a Gallup poll, more than 70 percent of people are disengaged from their job.

There are several key ingredients to peak performance. Knowing them can make it easier to diagnose what’s missing.

Recipe at-a-Glance: One part S (Strengths) to four parts P (Passion, Purpose, Preferences, Progress).

One Part ‘S’

1. Strengths:
In every peak moment, you will find that you are doing what you do best. Strengths may be learned skills or innate abilities. Either way, they are things that you excel at. Sometimes it’s hard to notice your own strength because it comes easily to you. What comes easily to you – public speaking, playing music, interpersonal skills, listening, remembering and using data – is terrifyingly difficult for others. Where you exhibit grace, others stumble or exert more effort for the same or less outcomes.

Ways to determine strengths:

  • Take an inventory assessment: Gallup’s StrengthsFinder or Highlands Ability Battery are good options
  • Recall what tasks at work you do most effortlessly

Four Parts P [Read more...]

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Choose Your Mood

by Denise Green | Coaching, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Neuroleadership, Neuroscience, Optimal Results, Personal Development, Science of Leadership Comments | 0

Which mood will it be?

Had any negative thoughts recently that you just couldn’t seem to shake?

Maybe someone cut you off in traffic and it bugged you the whole commute. Or maybe the company issued yet another dictum that had you steaming all day. Or maybe you keep running a frustrating conversation over and over again in your mind. Ever get home and dump accumulated frustration on the closest innocent victim?

Blame it on your left brain.

Actually, make that a peanut-sized area of your left brain.

Our left brain is our story-teller. Its job is to make sense of moment-by-moment inputs. And since it never has all the data it needs, it fills in the gaps, weaving so seamlessly that the story in our head feels like the inescapable truth. The cells that comprise this story-teller part of our brain are about the size of a peanut. Yet, they do their job so well, we ride along as if we had no choice, letting it loop and continually flood our bodies with cortisol and other stress-related chemicals.

According to Jill Bolte-Taylor — brain scientist, stroke survivor, and author — getting hooked on emotionally charged narratives of anger, resentment, guilt, shame, or fear for long periods can have devastating consequences on our physical and mental well-being because of the powerful ways they affect our emotional and physiological circuitry.

It’s vital to our health and relationships that we learn how to experience the emotion and then shift away.

And if you’re in a leadership role (at work or home), it’s vital to the mental and physical health of everyone around you because a leader’s mood is contagious.

90 Seconds of Pain [Read more...]

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An Unnecessary Disadvantage

by Denise Green | Authenticity, Career Satisfaction, Coaching, Energy, Leadership, Management, Neuroleadership, Neuroscience, Optimal Results, Personal Development, Science of Leadership, Women in Leadership Comments | 2

Advice You Won’t Find in Just Any ‘Ol Leadership Blog

There’s a lot of great advice to women about how to get ahead: how to have it all, do it all, and look great all the while.

I would like to add one more piece of advice to corporate women: wear comfortable footwear.

That’s right.

Think DSK Could Work in These?

Gorgeous Torture

For some time, this topic had been a niggling thought. Then I went over the edge into official annoyance after reading an op-ed piece by one of my favorite journalists, Maureen Dowd, when, in a piece about France’s Christine Lagard — Minister of Economic Affairs, Finances, and Industry — she found it necessary to describe her beige patent Christian Louboutin high heels (pictured right). It’s not just Dowd: it’s the norm. Once I began looking, I noticed that reports of women in leadership often include descriptions of their appearance.

Watch the news and you’ll see female politicians striving to strike just the right balance between power and femininity. They are subjected to scrutiny that their frumpier male counterparts rarely get. Can you imagine Newt getting reamed for big ankles or Obama for wearing last year’s suit? And can you imagine any of them stumping in stilettos?

My beef is actually not with the journalists. It’s with the shoes.

Here’s why this matters. [Read more...]

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