Category Archives: Blog

Heard poet David Whyte say this phrase.

At a funeral the tears don’t really start flowing when people recount the deceased’s accomplishment – pilot, mountain climber, businessman…

But hearts open when someone talks about his or her qualities. Giving, determined, committed, authentic…

What will you be remembered for?

We pick our kids up from summer camp this weekend. They have been gone for a month.

At ages 16 and 14 the empty nest years are visible on the horizon. I have little doubt our kids will be ready to fly the nest. The question is, “What will life look like for my wife and I once they are gone?”

There are a lot of ingredients that make for a strong relationship including effective communication skills, emotional maturity, an understanding of the influence of your family system on your relationship, and more. Yet one simple thing everyone can do is create time for the two of you to be together.

Before we had kids, my wife Tricia and I swore we would not be one of those couples who, after having kids, never went on dates or vacations apart from the kids. We swore we would not let our marriage or family revolve around kids’ sports calendars either. Well, along came those cute, well-above-average little ones and we stuck together as a family unit like a herd of elephants.

Add Blagojevich to the list of people in powerful positions that thought they were above the law.

What I think is missing in leadership development is training in humility. This is a tough one because the developed world’s academic, athletic and business systems breed entitlement. No one wants to hold the superstars, the ones generating all the sales, big investment returns, and trophies accountable for bad behavior. The tendency is to look the other way and send the message that you are special– for you we make exceptions. The result: the behavior continues and we breed entitlement.

If you are a superstar and did not get trained to be humble and to be grateful for your natural talent then it’s probably too late.

June will be over next week. What do you want to make sure you do before Labor Day?

What I love most about summer is the weather and a lighter schedule.

In addition to the fun stuff I’ve don already what I want to be sure I do is:

•  backpack with my family.
• swim in our lake and maybe a couple of others.
• Take a week or two road trip with my family.
• Eat outdoors as much as possible (including with friends).
• Mountain bike.
• A day of one-on-one time with my son and daughter.
• A romantic staycation with my wife while my kids are at camp.

Seems simple and yet I want to put these intentions out there.

What’s on your list?

Success has little to teach you after age 30, at that point you only learn from your failures – I learned that from Franciscan Priest and writer Richard Rohr and have found it to be true for me yet even when it comes to failures I’m a slow learner.

In a number of ways Rory McIlroy, who shattered all kinds of records last weekend when he won the US Open golf tournament, is precocious. He learned a lot from his experience at the Master’s tournament two months ago.

Thank you Dad for:

 Giving me life – the rest is all a bonus.

1. Sharing your life, especially the vulnerable times.
2. Being curious about my life.
3. The time you spend with me.
4. Listening to me share my accomplishments.
5. Taking care of your physical, financial and mental health..
6. The times you helped me financially – the money was secondary.

Well beyond words, these are the ways I know you love me. The affect you have had on my life is greater than anyone’s. Thank you. Happy Father’s Day.

 I was so insecure in middle school and so ready to be done with high school I didn’t play organized sports when I was young.

Now, when I make a good jump shot, hit the green from 180 yards out or finish a triathlon, I have to tell myself, ”Brian, you’re athletic”. At 51, I am still discovering that I have a lot of athletic skills and learning how to appreciate them – I always thought other people were athletic, not me. Maybe that’s why I don’t understand youth sports today.

First, what’s the point of youth sports? What are the guiding values and principles and the long-term benefit we hope the kids will get. I hope it’s to have fun, connect to peers and to their own bodies, and learn skills that will help them in life. I don’t hear much about values from coaches, they focus mostly on the game and winning, I don’t hear a lot about much else. The parents either keep these coaches in their jobs or they are the coaches.

I love my doctor. Monique Martin is a internist who is a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has wonderful combination of traditional medicine, holistic healing and illness prevention.

Dr. Martin doesn’t just tell you what’s not working, she tells you about the signs of things that, if not tended to, will create problems down the road.

She includes blood work focused on your DNA and nutrient analysis. For example, my cholestrol typically runs around 200 or 215. That can be a problem if there is a history of heart disease or if the DNA work says you may have some cardio issues – it’s a way to dig a little deeper under the numbers.

Dr. Martin asks all kinds of questions in her intake form: rate your stress, rate your anxiety, how are sleeping, how is your sex drive, how is your sex life (and what would your partner say if he/she were asked the same question). Then she had a broad-ranging discussion about your life before digging into physical symptoms and vitals.

I had lunch with a friend this week. Raylene Decatour used to run the Nature and Science Museum in Denver – she did a spectacular job rasing and investing $100 million and quadrupling revenues while there. Such a good job, in fact, that she is a sought-after consultant to other non-profit boards.

Like any pro, Raylene knows what she’s good at and stays focused on that – for her, it’s startegic planning and CEO succession planning. In her work recruiting and screening candidates for top jobs at large non-profits, Raylene finds most mid-life execs flat-footed when it comes to career planning.

I agree, for all the planning skills it takes to run an organization, most CEOs and top execs are lousy at strategic planning for their life. As Raylene says, unless you are unlucky or stupid, chances are most 50 to 60-year olds will live to 100. So why cram all the 80 hour work weeks and financial focus into a 10 to 20 year window?

When I work with top teams I am helping the team become more aligned and effective and I am helping the team members be better leaders of the teams they lead. The two goals are interrelated because the first step to becoming a strong leader is being a strong team member.

Team members who lack relational and conflict resolution skills or who are not accountable to others make lousy teammates and weak leaders.

Do your own self-assessment of your team-play skills? If you were on Survivor, how quick would your team vote you off? Do you step into conflict consistently and with empathy and vulnerability? Do you do what you say you are going to do? What do you do when you break your agreements-i.e., how do you convey you care about others? Do you take the time to include others to enlist their feedback, debate and support? Do you answer all these questions on your own or do you get honest feedback from others on how well you do these things?

Well I guess I ought to report in on what actually happened on my Zen retreat last week.

It had been almost four years since I attended such a retreat. I was out of practice. My mind seemed like it was filled with jumping bean for the first three days. I noticed how much time I spend indulging in judgment, comparison, useless analysis, and self-criticism.

Part of the problem was that this retreat involved less meditation than usual. A few hours each day, instead of meditating, we were learning how to guide others in a process called Mondo Zen. Mondo Zen helps people clear up mental and emotional confusion by enabling them to quickly drop into a meditative state in the face of interpersonal conflict or self-judgment.

Back from my Zen retreat. Just the simple act of sitting still, not talking and focusing on my breathing put things back into perspective.

I left with the thought that there is so much unnecessary suffering in me and in the world. The corporate world is no exception. The corporate world is full of unnecessary drama that saps creativity and productivity.

The problem is confusion, confusion about how the mind works and who we are. As a species we have evolved intellectually but our great strength has become overused and is now weakness. We not only believe our thoughts and feelings, we believe we are our thoughts and our feelings.

To start clearing up the confusion, ask yourself “who am I, who are we, beyond our thoughts and feelings?” Can you listen and see without analyzing and judging? Can you access that part of yourself skillfully? If not, you most likely behave reactively and, just when a situation calls for you to access your heart and clear wisdom, your judgments of yourself and others disconnect you from those around you.

It is day seven of my silent meditation retreat. I wrote this before I entered the retreat center six days ago.

I am not going to succeed the Dali Llama but also don’t really care about that kind of thing. I am well connected to my true nature and have the gift of awareness, at least for today.

Tomorrow I leave and fear the transition back to the real world. Trusting that with all this cooking in the over something has changed for the long term.

My heart is open, I clearly see the interconnectedness of all beings and the impermanence of everything. I hope I can maintain some of this non-clinging perspective, I am much happier when I see that nothing in the present moment needs to be changed–when I stop fighting reality and loosing every time.

Can’t wait to write about it – yet words do no justice to this kind of experience, after silence, words seem of little value.

It’s day four of my meditation retreat and my Monkey Mind has been tamed. Of course I am not writing this at the retreat (that would kind of defeat the purpose of the retreat now wouldn’t it?). I wrote this before I left and base this on the many such retreats I have attended over the past ten years.

Day four is grounding, very clear, very present and, in spite of no words exchanged, I am very connected to my fellow sitters (actually we walk and meditate a lot too). My back aches have mysteriously vanished as has my resistance to letting go of my thoughts, my judgments and my beliefs.

My Qi Gong practice (like Tai Chi) is heavenly and am close to taking monastic vows and starting my 1,000 days in a monastery. My wife won’t be surprised and I can still make my kids’ college graduations.

Stillness, silence, clarity of mind. Have reached the blissed out stage.

With the help of technology, this is being posted while I am in the middle of a week-long silent meditation retreat. Actually, it’s not the middle, it is day two.

For me, day two is the toughest day. My back is hurting as I sit in one position for eight hours a day. “No moving!!” is the reprimand of the meditation leader if we scratch our nose or reposition our posture.

My mind has moved past the relief of being in a beautiful setting and away from email. It is resisting my attempts to focus on my breathing, to letting go of my random thoughts, judgments of fellow meditators not sitting still and how stupid I am for being here in the first place.

Day two sucks – I’d rather be watching cable.

The excitement about the killing of Osama Bin Laden reminds me of the instinctual energy that loves to kill the “bad” guy. That energy justifies killing. Osama is a bad dude and it makes sense to kill this guy. Like the war against Iraq, Libya and terror – the killing is “just”.

I find this killer in humans fascinating. That we would want to kill another human being. Why would we take pleasure or satisfaction in killing another human being? For revenge? To maintain my lifestyle? To spread an ideology?

We kill to meet a deeper need. Freedom, justice, connection, love, certainty, etc. Osama killed to meet a deeper need. His mission in life was a tragic expression of a deeper need – the same dynamic that fueled Madoff and Hitler.

What we have in common with these “bad guys” is that we are all trying to meet some core, human need. The problem is in what we do to try to meet those needs – this is what causes the blind spots and self-deception. The more judgment, rationalization, and blame, the more self-deception.

Just re-read Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Group, The best book on leadership I have ever read. Required reading for all of my clients.

It teaches leaders that they betray their core values (primarily by seeing people as objects vs. people trying to meet core needs) they no longer see objectively. I call this living inside your bubble (they use a “box” metaphor) that distorts reality. Others look stupid or lazy or some other projection.

The problem for leaders is that everyone knows when the leader is in a box/bubble – they are judging, blaming and complaining, etc. and they get defensive and do all kinds of stupid things. The leader’s belief about his or her team becomes self-fulfilling. After all, if you are the smartest in the room, everyone else has to remain stupid to keep the dynamic alive.

One of the reasons I admire college basketball coach John Wooden is because he proved that if you focus on individuals and core values over “success” and winning, you would be successful. Many of his players did not get what he was doing – they came from high school athletic experiences where they focused on winning, they had become the star and had yet to learn the value of humility.

Many of these players look back on their experience being led by Wooden as transformational. They began to see how his coaching prepared them for life, not for winning basketball games.

I don’t have a lot of juice around going back and running businesses. I had done it to be seen, make money and prove myself (none of which worked by the way). But I love the art of business and I love leadership. What does get me fired up is being in business leadership roles where I can help people grow as individuals. That was the part of running businesses that fed by soul and was fulfilling.

I’m celebrating my 51^st birthday this week. The best thing about turning 51 is that I’m not fifty anymore. Turning fifty and being fifty sucked. For you forty-nine year-olds, you have been warned. For those turning fifty and dreading it or hating it, there’s hope.

Leading up to my turning fifty, I was pretty pumped. Then came my birthday and, for what seemed like the rest of my life, all I could think of was how much time I had left. It was like God set an oven timer and I couldn’t stop looking at it every few minutes to see if it was ready to go off. The glass changed from being half full to half empty. I found myself involuntarily thinking about how much sex, long runs and careers I had left.

On a fall night in 1999 I was sitting at the bar at what was then a Ritz Carlton on Central Park South. It was about 9:00 and I ordered my usual Stoli vodka martini, up, very dry with three olives. The bartender, who had become an iconic fixture in the elegant bar that had windows facing the park, set a beautil martini glass down right in front of me and poured my drink from a metal mixing canister he held about two feet above the glass.

Like Pavlof’s dog I began feeling the effects of the alcolohol before the glass was even half-way filled. Then, for some reason that night rather than any other, I said to myself, “That’s a lot of high-octain booze!” Maybe because it was poured right in front of me but somehow I saw past the fancy bar, the personality of the bartender, the beautiful glass, the $15 price tag, my wearing a $1,500 suit while sitting in one of finest hotels in New York, and all I saw was the chemicals in what I was about to drink.