To be comfortable in one’s skin
For a while, I couldn’t figure out how I wanted to be as a leader. I thought of “self sufficient,” but good leaders are at their best when they can ask for help. I thought “confident,” but there is so much I don’t know that confidence seemed like the wrong word. (So many confident leaders […]
Notes on Apologies
“Apologize to your sister.” I remember being small and getting in fights with my sister, four years younger than me. The grownups would insist that I apologize, which I did through gritted teeth, fists by my sides. I’m sure you’ve been there or seen this in your kids. It always felt unfair even though I […]
Delegating with Dignity
Several years ago, I realized that one reason I always felt like I was drowning was because I did everything myself. I did understand that we are supposed to handle email and paper items only once–delete, do, delegate, blah blah. I could do and I could delete, but delegating was an insurmountable challenge for me. […]
Disrupting Cultures of Overwhelm
The extent of overwhelm in our workplaces is, well, overwhelming. The proportion of people reporting feeling overwhelmed is rising–we are living in what has been referred to as the “age of overwhelm.” I’ve written recently about strategies we can use to decrease our personal sense of overwhelm. What about those of us in leadership positions? […]
Notes on Overwhelm
Last Thursday, in appraising my day at its close, the word that arose for me was overwhelm. Many of the people with whom I work have expressed a similar feeling. Overwhelm is not comfortable although each of us has our own tolerance for overwhelm. I personally like my feeling of overwhelm to be at about […]
Why I coach on Sundays
At the closing of a recent meeting with my coaching mentor, she spoke out loud something I’ve thought for a while–that coaching is a spiritual practice. I sat and breathed that in. Yes, coaching is a spiritual practice. What do I mean by a “spiritual practice”? To be clear, I do not call myself a […]
Please Unmute
This morning at our team meeting, one of our members sneezed. Several people said, “Bless you!” Not particularly noteworthy except that we meet by Zoom. Since early 2020, some of the most commonly uttered phrases emerged: “You’re muted,” “Please stay on mute until called on to speak,” “Could whoever has a lot of background noise […]
Notes on Staying
Every spring, a pair of mallards appears on a small stream we pass during our morning walk. For a week or so, they fly away when we pass by, their wings lifting them up and out of the water and carrying them over the nearby field. After some days, however, they stay put. This behavior […]
Notes on Trying & the Limits of Expertise
This fall, I served as a reviewer for a series of grant applications for the National Institutes of Health. This is something that we do in my line of work to serve the scientific community, and I’ve always loved this part of my work. In their applications, investigators describe research projects they hope to conduct […]
Ways of Finding What We’ve Lost
My husband and I spent a weekend in Dublin earlier this month. We saw The Weir, an Irish play set in a small Irish town, had a backstage tour of the Abbey Theatre, learned Irish history from Irish people, went to a red-velvet-walled speakeasy, had afternoon tea, and spent a day near the Martello Tower […]