• I'm on a mission to change the world from the inside out, helping individuals and organizations make a difference with Aliveness & Impact.

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  • Speaking Topics

  • Below you will find a descriptions of the talks I offer. They are all part of my mission to change the world from the inside out.

    • Life in the Aliveness Zone
    • Mastering the Inner Game of Change
    • The Inner Peace Learning Lab
    • How to Leave a Ripple Legacy

    Life in the Aliveness Zone
    How to stress less, feel more energized, and make a bigger impact

    Imagine a simple approach to life that can help you feel less stressed, more at peace, more resilient, and more able to roll with life’s inevitable bumps and bruises.

    And now imagine that same approach can help you feel happier and more energized, with more potential for your natural gifts and abilities to shine. Imagine it can even increase your willingness to step outside your comfort zone, expanding your sphere of what’s possible.

    Sound like it might be worth your time?

    If it does, this talk is for you. In it, I offer a nuts-and-bolts, research-based approach to stepping into what I call the Aliveness Zone.

    No matter what your current situation – whether you’re consistently in the groove and looking for ways to turn up the volume on your potential, or you’re feeling ground down and just want to turn down the volume on your stress and anxiety – the ideas in this talk can change your experience of life for the better.

    You should come to this talk if you want to:

    • Feel less stressed and depleted
    • Feel more energized and alive.
    • Open the door to a fuller expression of what’s possible for you.
    • Learn to navigate life’s ups and downs more gracefully.
    • Understand how to more fluidly navigate big change in your life.
    • Make more of a difference with your life.

    You will come away with:

    • A powerful framework to simplify your efforts to feel less stressed and more alive.
    • Specific research-based tips for:
      • Navigating stress when your day goes sideways.
      • Feeling more energized.
      • Building a foundation for greater equanimity and inner peace.
      • Experiencing more of what’s good in your life
    • An understanding of how the inner game affects your ability to make an impact.

    The talk draws from The Aliveness CODE ™, a framework I developed based on my work helping stressed out career change clients explore how to make their here-and-now better while they worked toward change.

    Mastering the Inner Game of Change

    How to navigate big hairy change with less stress and more flow

    If there is one thing you can rely on – in your career and in your life – it’s that you’re going to have to deal with change. Sometimes small. Sometimes big and hairy. And you’ll have to deal with it over and over (and over) again.

    Unfortunately, our brains HATE change. From the brain’s perspective, change equals the unknown, and the unknown equals danger. And our brains are wired to try to keep us safe.

    So we end up caught in this stressful loop of resistance to the inevitable. Not only is that no fun, it also blocks us from bringing our best to what we do.

    Much has been written about the external logistics of successfully implementing change, whether in organizations or in our individual lives. In this talk, I want to shift the focus inward.

    If you’re faced with a change, there are two ways you can go through it. The first – and unfortunately, the most common – is to be pulled through it kicking and screaming (or at least reluctantly dragging your heels).

    The second is to recognize that change is an inevitable part of life and decide to get more adept at surfing whatever comes up. That’s where the Inner Game of Change comes into play.

    In this talk, you will learn:

    • Why resisting change is natural (but not inevitable).
    • The two ways we tend to cope with change, and how they limit us.
    • How the Inner Game can help you navigate change more fluidly.
    • How to manage the stress of change.
    • How to build greater resilience.
    • How creating an external support system impacts the Inner Game.

    You will come away with:

    • A simple framework for navigating change.
    • Specific stress management techniques and practices you can apply.
    • Specific techniques and practices to help build resilience.
    • Tips for cultivating a more positive mindset.
    • Questions to help you recognize how you might be blocking your ability to surf that change.

    Our ability to cope and even thrive in the face of change has an enormous impact, both on our happiness and our achievement and performance.

    The tips, tools, and techniques in this talk will empower you to more fluidly find your way through the natural challenges that come up with change so you can stay focused and in your groove.

    The Inner Peace Learning Lab
    How to use life’s irritations and aggravations to feel happier and less stressed

    Have you ever noticed how much effort we put into trying to get the world to cooperate so we can be happy? We try to arrange everything just so, resting our happiness on a finely balanced house of cards.

    And have you ever noticed how often life decides not to cooperate?

    Like it or not, irritations and aggravations, bumps and bruises are an inevitable part of life. And making our happiness dependent on external events and circumstances is a recipe for a stress-fueled rollercoaster ride that won’t let us off.

    Those irritations and aggravations disturb the peace, so of course it’s natural to want to wish them all away. But what if the very things we wish would disappear could actually be a path to greater inner peace?

    In this talk, we’ll take a look at how to use life’s everyday frictions as a learning laboratory for cultivating a deeper, more sustainable inner sense of peace.

    Attendees will learn:

    • How to recognize inner peace learning lab opportunities.
    • Real life examples.
    • Specific ideas for using common aggravations to train their inner peace.
    • Practices to apply.
    • Questions to ask.
    • Tips on making a positive shift in how they relate to challenging events and circumstances.

    Every time we get pulled into the friction of resisting and reacting, it pulls us out of happiness and limits our potential. None of us is at our best when we’re in that constricted state. So cultivating an inner sense of peace isn’t just about feeling better. It also opens us up to shine.

    In this talk, you’ll learn how to take back control from the whiplash ride of conditional happiness and build a more solid inner foundation to stand on.

    By using problems as the path to peace, you can spend more of your time in a contented, happy state of mind, and less of your time in stressed reactivity.

    How to Leave a Ripple Legacy
    Changing the world one ordinary, energized, impactful day at a time

    If today were your very last day on earth, how would you feel about the legacy you’re leaving?

    For many people, the answer to that question would be, “Meh. Not great.” We all want to make a difference, but in the face of life – its commitments, deadlines, and ever-expanding to-do lists – we too often put off those efforts until “later, when I have more time.”

    But what if there were another way of looking at making a difference, one that expands the picture beyond the standard view of volunteering and charitable giving to encompass your entire life? Not the life where you chuck it all and join the Peace Corps, mind you, but the one you’re living right here, right now.

    And what if that weren’t a life of self-sacrificing altruism, but one that uplifts and inspires you, day in and day out.

    This talk explores:

    • How you’re already leaving a legacy, whether you mean to or not.
    • How you create your “Ripple Legacy” with every choice you make and every action you take.
    • How you can be a mobile point of positive impact in your life.
    • Why making a difference makes you feel more energized and alive.
    • The power of the inner game to energize and amplify your impact.

    Attendees will come away with:

    • A new way of thinking about how we leave our legacies.
    • Actionable everyday ideas for making an impact.
    • Inner game exercises they can do to increase their potential for making a difference.
    • A greater feeling of empowerment to make an impact.

    Perhaps like never before, the world needs people committed to living a life of impact. This talk offers an easy and effective way to do just that, all while tapping into power of making a difference to energize and enliven our lives.