Resilient Wednesday Weekly Memo

When my friend Jack posted on Facebook that his wife Kate was going out for her run when the wind chill was -4 degrees, he asked his followers “foolish or impressive?” Responses were mixed but mine was clear. “She is building hardiness…Go Kate.” I suspect that Kate had to get herself up for her run […]

I’ll be taking some time this week between visits with family, doing some cooking and playing around to reflect on 2017 and to consider what I hope to achieve in 2018. I don’t think of this activity as work as much as mindful reflection. I’ll wind up writing my ideas down as I’ll look to

The sun will reach its nadir tomorrow at 11:28 AM EDT and for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it will begin its 6-month march back to its zenith at the next moment. It’s no wonder that we are built for resilience as nature showers her experiences of recovering from the depths of winter’s

I’m starting to see the flood of articles showing up in my Google alerts about the “Seven Ways to Survive Holiday Stress,” or “Six Ways to Make This the Best Christmas Ever…Without Getting Stressed Out.” We were out shopping over the weekend and as we approached the overcrowded parking lot, I first thought, “oh boy,

One of my clients told me that she had 6 meetings several days this past week which meant that she was only able to get her work done after hours. Additionally, she commented that most of the meetings were longer than they needed to be, were reporting in nature, and had several people checking their

I ran into a couple of business colleagues a few weeks ago and while we were catching up we had a discussion of how excellence is related to resilience. They told me that they enjoy video games and jokingly tell each other that they can either be great at doing their job or that they

A couple of weeks ago, my wife Sheila Collins did a remarkable presentation on The Art of Grieving. Her work has led her to become a thought leader in how we approach this universal experience and how we can deal with it more effectively. Sheila believes that art is a deliberate process of arranging elements

Everyone feels overwhelmed and when I meet with teams and leaders I have to admit to them that their perception is correct. They are overwhelmed and if something is not done about it, the next step is burnout or worse. While much of the blame has to do with the volume of work that we

I did a workshop a few weeks ago on resilience and we discussed the 4 key ways that resilience can improve your workplace: Improving personal resilience and how you address stress. How the team manages workplace overload? How the organization addresses change in the workplace? How successes and failures are addressed? This team wanted to

Later today, I’ll have the honor of introducing Bruce Kraus, the City of Pittsburgh Council President as the recipient of the 2017 STANDING FIRM Champion award. It was just a year ago that I received that honor for my work on behalf of STANDING FIRM, a non-profit organization that works with busineses to addresses the