If you are running around the clock, it is time to look at your calendar. It doesn’t matter if you are a CEO or a student. If you are feeling flung through the day, you are not setting yourself up for success. It is no longer a badge of honour for leaders to talk about how busy they are. Busyness doesn’t equate to strong leadership. If you have got so many things to squeeze into your day and you are not sure how to do it, here are some tips for you!

am noticing a trend in the Executive Coaching work I do where leaders who are normally intensely focused on the next thing and always striving for more, have hit a lull.

There is nothing wrong with them. Their performance isn’t suffering, yet they aren’t feeling particularly inspired to go guns ablazing onto the next project or career move. And, this lack of goal-setting and intense desire to strive is feeling very weird for them. It is hard to put a finger on what’s ‘wrong,’ except they report just feeling “okay.” What has caused this feeling amongst many leaders?

This week, I gave a keynote speech for a corporation. I had a busy morning juggling a few things so got to the point where I realized I didn't have time to BOTH review my notes for this speech AND take a few minutes for me to ground myself, close my eyes and breathe deeply and visualize my connection with the audience. I had to choose one area to put my focus on for my prep for this speech.

I have learned some great lessons throughout my career about presentations. I was the former speechwriter for the CEO of General Motors, then became a VP of Communications and Business Development responsible for making regular presentations to clients and Boards. I have been a spokesperson for a variety of global and national brands. And, I have been interviewed for more than 5000 media interviews since the time I was 23 years old. Now I am a keynote speaker.

What Tips Can I Share With You to Make Your Talks More Impactful?

As an Executive Coach for almost 15 years now, I have seen a lot of trends in people development. But, I’ve never seen anything quite like the impact that already busy professionals have faced when they entered into a global pandemic. Leaders needed to push into a new layer of resilience around working at a high level from home while having other responsibilities laid upon them like homeschooling their children. It really has been a unique time.

So, how do you start to feel more like yourself again?

I was recently connecting with a dear friend of mine who has been through a lot in her life. She had a dream of what her life would look like and in some ways, it just hasn’t turned out that way. As I listened to her, I felt a part of me think I am feeling the same way! Yes, our stories are different but we both had this path in life that we thought we were on and then it seems we veered off of it somehow.

After our conversation, I kept thinking about this idea of the path I wanted to take so badly and how it seems that the more I try to get back on it, the more I get pushed off into the ditch. Then an epiphany hit me.

This is the conundrum faced by many a Type A workaholic perfectionist who works so hard and likely drives a hardworking, successful team. How do I really make space to celebrate? I mean really celebrate your successes, not just the token holiday party or dinner out for the team to mark the completion of a big projection while you are consumed already by the next thing. This celebration shift is just as much about a state of mind as it is about what you actually do for yourself and/or your team to celebrate.

I have always been a believer that we can have it all in our lives. And for a while, it may seem that I did. A great husband, beautiful and healthy children, a fabulous job and I was feeling healthy and vibrant myself. Although ironically if you would have gone back in time and asked me if felt 100 percent fulfilled, I would have likely said no. I was continually striving for more, feeling anxiety inside as well as suffering from insomnia. I was driving myself way too hard and nothing was really ever good enough.

Then I learned life has a way of rearranging our best-laid plans. After I suffered a brain injury and then lost my husband to esophageal cancer, I really began to question what was possible after all. Can we really have it all?

When the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne came out in 2006, people around the world were excited by this theory. According to Byrne, The Law of Attraction states that when we want something, we need to send our desire for it out into the universe and stay very positive (which will increase our energy frequency) to draw our desired outcome to us. And presto, it is ours! For years, I have subscribed to this way of thinking or to use self-help terms, I will say ‘manifesting.’

And then one day recently, I changed my mind.

This summer I experienced an interaction with an indecisive woman at a nail salon. This situation left me feeling bothered inside. Read more about my interaction and learn how my story applies to your workplace and my lessons learned for Type A Drivers like me.

At the end of July, COVID-19 finally caught up with my household. I felt like we had been playing Dodgeball with it for over two years and it got my daughters and me at the same time. It ended up hitting me hard.

As I lay in bed with a brutal headache, I thought about the journey I had been on over the past 10 years since my brain injury. It has been a wild ride. And, I have remained resilient throughout it all. But, I was tired of being resilient. I was feeling Resilience Fatigue.

I have never heard of the term Resilience Fatigue before. It is something I just coined in a moment of pain lying in bed. But, I think it is a very real thing and it is something I believe many of us are feeling right now.

If you are feeling Resilience Fatigue and it is impacting your life and work, what do you do about it?

Recently, a former Executive Coaching client of mine reached out to me to share a poem her Dad wrote in 2011 when he learned his cancer was terminal. His words resonated very deeply with me. I know a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed, lost and perhaps, even facing their own grief journey right now. My client has graciously agreed to share her Father’s words with you.

Is there something you really want in your life or career right now? You feel in your gut that it is going to come to fruition although you have no idea how. And, it might feel like it could be way out of your league? I learned from my Dad on a cool autumn Thanksgiving evening that this is when we need to tap into our inner knowing and trust. To hold onto hope and belief even in the darkness.

Last week, I attended my first silent retreat at Loretto Maryholme along the beautiful shores of Lake Simcoe, Ontario. I am a big fan of meditation and building periods of silence and stillness into my life. I think we are faced with so many demands each day that sometimes we need to just say stop and get off the hamster wheel for a while to re-connect/or connect with ourselves at a deeper level.

What is important about connecting to yourself at a deeper level?

This picture was taken for my MBA graduation. I had been working for a few years after my university undergrad and then college education when I decided to go back to school on weekends to pursue an MBA. When I graduated from this program, I was 27 years old. I had just signed on for a new job with General Motors and got my first signing bonus. In many ways, I was flying high on life and felt anything was possible. I was smart, super ambitious, and ready for anything that came my way…or so I thought.

After experiencing a brain injury 10 years ago, the death of my Dad and husband, Jeff, to cancer within a few years of each other, and then came the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had to reach down deeper within myself than I knew even existed. What have I learned about life and my career along the way? And, what do I wish I could have told my younger self?

I recently spoke at a virtual event about the importance of having coaching-style conversations within the workplace. Before we dive into how you can have coaching conversations to inspire others around you, let’s define what coaching actually is.

What is Coaching? Coaching is the process of helping another individual or group of individuals reflect, learn and create a plan of action to help them perform to the best of their ability in his/her/their life or job.

Recently an article was shared with me entitled, “Welcome to Holland!” This piece was written by Emily Perl Kingsley from her perspective as a mother of a disabled child. But, the person who passed it my way felt it would resonate with me (and it did) and perhaps it will resonate with you, too.

Welcome to Holland!

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland." "Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy." But there's been a change in the flight plan.

In the earlier article ‘Welcome to Holland,’ Emily Perl Kingsley writes about when life doesn’t turn out like you expected it would. Does that concept resonate with you? I think many of us had ideals or hopes in our minds about how our lives/careers/relationships would be in the future, then life intervened and took us down another path.

Perl-Kingsley compares Italy to where we thought we were going in life, but instead, we ended up in Holland. For me, I was in Italy (as shown above in the Isle of Capri, Italy) with my late husband and our firstborn daughter, but also in terms of my life in many senses. I had an amazing husband, a great job, two beautiful healthy daughters, and lived in a nice community. What else could a person ask for? But life intervened…

I recently led a learning session for a company’s internal coaches on resilience. The topic of vulnerability came up. It is interesting how 15 years ago, vulnerability would have been seen as a weakness for a leader to show. Nowadays, particularly since the COVID pandemic, vulnerability is a highly desirable leadership characteristic.

But, as one of the participants in this training program asked me, “How do you become a more vulnerable leader?”

In honour of International Women’s Day on March 8, I would like to share a story about some of the women who helped make me.

The women featured in this blog photo are my Grandma, Great Grandmother, Great Great Grandmother, and Great Great Great Grandmother - all on my Mother’s side.

I loved my Grandma very dearly, just as I did my Grandma on my Dad’s side. Both of these women inspired me to be strong, to reach down deep within myself when things get tough, and to carry on.

In many ways, the women in this photo had hard lives. Their workdays on the farm were long and tiring. There was little time for play and money did not come easy.