Disney Leadership Keynote Speaker
Five daily blogs about life's 5 big choices on five interconnected sites.
Retired Disney Institute Keynote Speaker and Prolific Blogger. Five daily, differently-themed personal blogs (about life's 5 big choices) on five interconnected sites.
We may be closing in on our final two choices: celebrate our midlife struggles or quit. The easy answer is obvious. The answer that may break us, begs for our attention.
Quitting is the obvious, easy choice. But celebrate our struggles, our stress, our frustrations from growing older? Seriously? Find beauty in the ashes. Go.
Next Blog
Dear readers, when the voices in your head say, “Look, people don’t care enough to do what you are dreaming. And even if they did care enough, they aren’t willing to do the hard work to change”, the temptation to quit becomes exceedingly appealing.
Right now, it would be sooo much easier to pop a top and enjoy an ice cold beer.
Next Blog
Who am I to think society is even remotely interested in changing, let alone seriously interested? Is it crazy to care about personal responsibility? To believe that if we could teach personal responsibility at a much earlier age and in a more integrated way, teens would move into adulthood much better equipped with the realities of being solely in charge.
Next Blog
Sometimes we must think of ourselves. It’s hard to do when our main concern is to help others. We are taught early on that putting the needs of others before our own needs is virtuous. We learn that “selfish” is a bad thing to be. And yet if we don’t care for ourselves we really can’t take care of anyone else.
Incredibly, in the last few weeks I have been through a hurricane, an earthquake, a flood and a medical emergency. In fact the flood was the same day as the medical emergency. Days were spent cleaning up our flooded basement and then driving to the hospital. Some days I forgot to eat. Last night I noticed that my hands were shaking and I felt lightheaded. I had been going on too little sleep, too much stress and very little food. I also found the order for my yearly mammogram tucked into the rungs of the stair rails. I didn’t schedule it because I didn’t want it to interfere with my father’s outpatient treatments that required me for transportation.
How stupid to allow ourselves to become rundown and tired, the result of trying to put the needs of another before our own. If we really want to care for someone else, we have to care for ourselves. We have to remember to eat even more healthily, try to get extra sleep, and keep up with our own medications and appointments. Even when stress is high and our appetite is low, foods like hard boiled eggs, cereal bars, peanut butter on whole grain bread or small cans of vegetable juice are easy to grab on the way out the door and can be eaten in the car or stashed in a purse or backpack. When sleep is hard to come by, even a 30-minute nap can be a huge help. I type these words while my eyes are heavy, but a nap awaits me. If I get sick, who is going to step in to take over? Not caring for myself would, in fact, be selfish.
Dear Son, use caution when dreaming. There’s a time and a place for dreaming, it would seem. The challenge is discerning this. At 52, maybe I’m dreaming too big. Maybe it’s too much, too late.
Who am I to think it’s possible to change our educational, parenting and personal responsibility paradigms? For today anyway, it’s feeling quite impossible.
Next Blog