The Power of a Weekly Sabbatical
One of my business mentors is Alan Weiss (aka “The Million Dollar Consultant”); he’s the global authority on educating and coaching consultants, and I’ve been working with him for well over a decade at this point. Alan shares best practices from his own experience and teaches us how to grow and expand our businesses, how to be leaders in our respective fields, and essentially how to thrive under all circumstances. Alan is constantly re-inventing himself and coming up with compelling new programs and services for his audience.
One of my favorite programs he crafted was a weekly video series entitled “The Weekly Sabbatical” where he’d share five-minute insights on the fine art of taking time for ourselves every week. There were two aspects of this series; one was that we could (and should!) give ourselves permission to work less and enjoy our lives more, and the other was that Alan would share a specific idea for us to consider and try on for size in just five minutes a week. …
At this time of the year, people often come up with a list of ‘resolutions’ most of which don’t live past the first month (or even the first week!) of January. They often don’t work out because of one or a combination of several factors. Firstly, they’re often vague goals without specific actions or metrics of success fleshed out to achieve those goals. Further, they’re often about what you think you should do to appease others or be more socially acceptable vs want really matters to you at a deep level intrinsically. And finally, there’s often no commitment and no accountability — so inevitably they fizzle out pretty quickly. So what does work? …
What do major athletes, tech innovators, actors, rock stars, and successful CEOs all have in common? Many if not most of them have a coach, mentor or trusted advisor in some form or fashion. I only recently learned that Bill Gates did a TED talk awhile back entitled “Everyone Needs a Coach” where he stressed that no matter who we are we can all benefit from having people around us to give us feedback, provide perspective, and help us reach our goals. There are many examples of corporate CEOs and other highly successful and influential people using coaches — like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, who shared Bill Campbell a coach, Alan Mulally (Ford CEO) & Frances Hesselbein (Girl Scouts CEO), who shared Marshall Goldsmith as their coach, and Oprah — whose coach was Maya Angelou; and on it goes. …
I attended a wonderful event earlier this month on November 10th, in Sonoma County — called 
November 27, 2017,
In the past six weeks, we’ve experienced unprecedented disasters of scale — some delivered by nature in the form of the big hurricanes affecting Texas and Florida, and the major fires in Napa and Sonoma counties; and some by man as was the case with the music festival massacre in Las Vegas. While these disasters wreak havoc and change lives in untold ways, how we react to them when they’re going on makes a huge difference in how we (literally) weather the storm, and in the recovery once we’re on the other side. It makes good sense to reflect on lessons learned before, during and after these disasters. Here are a few ideas to share: …