Speaking

Everything I do, from my coaching to my writing to my speaking, is focused around one central question:

How can you step more fully into your potential and make the impact you’re here to make?

Each of the following talks offers a unique angle on that question. My approach is low on motivational fluff and high on specific ideas and practices that attendees can start putting to use immediately.

Life in the Aliveness Zone
How to feel less stressed and more in your groove

First-Aid for a No-Good, Very Bad Day
Research-based hacks to de-stress your day

The Imperfectionist’s Guide to Success
How embracing imperfection can make you happier, healthier, and more successful

The Inner Peace Learning Lab
How life’s irritations and aggravations can make you happier and less stressed

How to be a Ripple Revolutionary
Changing the world one average, energized, ordinary day at a time

Details

Life in the Aliveness Zone
How to feel less stressed and more energized every day

Are you living into your fullest potential? Or do you fall all too often into the stress, challenges, and busyness of life? Does it feel like you have more to give, and more you can achieve? Do you want to open yourself to the flow of what’s possible?

This talk offers nuts-and-bolts, research-based ideas to help you feel both more energized and alive and less stressed and depleted.

When you’re in the Aliveness Zone, you step more fully into your shine and live life as your best self.

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

You should come to this talk if you want to:

• Step more fully into your best self, opening the door to a fuller expression of your potential and possibilities.
• Feel more energized and alive.
• Feel less stressed and depleted
• Learn a way to navigate the inevitable bumps and bruises of life more gracefully.
• Make more of a difference with your life.

You will come away with:

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

The talk draws from The Aliveness CODE ™, the 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.

First-Aid for a No-Good, Very Bad Day
Research-based hacks to de-stress your day

Even the best of careers can have no good, very bad days, packed with stress and things that go splat. (And if you don’t happen to have the best of careers, then you probably have even more of your share of those days.)

This talk looks at several research-based hacks you can apply any time to help you feel more grounded and less stressed and reactive. It combines a focus on foundation-building (so you have a more solid ground to stand on as you face the inevitable stresses of life) and “first-aid”, practices and techniques you can apply to more gracefully navigate the bumps and bruises of those no-good, very bad days.

Attendees will learn:

• Techniques to help them dial down the stress as they experience it.
• Practices to help them build a solid inner foundation so they are less reactive to stressful circumstances.
• The neuroscience and psychology research behind the techniques and practices.

Nobody is immune to the challenges of life. The more adept we get at navigating stress as it comes up, the happier and healthier we can be.

The Imperfectionist’s Guide to Success
How embracing imperfection can make you happier, healthier, and more successful

Is the quest for perfection holding you back? Are you limiting your potential with the desire to look good? Is your fear of flopping keeping you small? Might perfectionism be putting a damper on your happiness? To err, as they say, is human. But for all too many of us, the answer to at least some of these questions is a resounding yes.

In this talk, you will learn the value of “imperfectionism” and how it can help you feel happier, less stressed, and more successful. In this talk, attendees will learn:

• How the desire to look good holds us back (and what to do about it).
• Specific tips to help you embrace the life-enhancing power of imperfection.
• Insights on how authentic imperfection can help us get more out of life.

Being an imperfectionist isn’t just about letting go of perfectionism. It’s about letting go of the absurd notion that we are anything other than human. It’s about embracing the reality that being human is a messy and imperfect affair, and any attempt to deny that will only impose rigid limitations. Being an imperfectionist involves, for example:

• Letting go of a one-shot approach to perfection and replacing it with an evolutionary approach to ever-better.
• Turning mistakes and less-than-perfect performance into opportunities for learning.  Being authentic and real.
• Practicing self-compassion.
• Celebrating the success part of partial success.

Resisting the inherent imperfection of the human experience is a little like resisting the wetness of water. You can rail against it all you want and insist you should stay dry, but if you end up in the water, you’re still going to get wet. Far better to learn to swim and enjoy it.

The Inner Peace Learning Lab
How life’s irritations and aggravations can make you happier and less stressed

Let’s face it. Irritations and aggravations, bumps and bruises are an inevitable part of life. They disturb the peace, and it’s natural to want to wish them all away. But what if the very things we wish would disappear can actually be a path to greater inner peace?

Imagine if that commute you dread could actually help you feel more at peace. What if that annoying co-worker could actually teach you how to feel happier? And wouldn’t it be cool if that interminably slow checkout clerk at the grocery store when you’re in a hurry could actually leave you feeling more peaceful and patient?

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 come away with:

• Insights on how the things we don’t like can be used to improve our lives significantly.
• Specific ideas for using common aggravations to train your inner peace.
• Insights on how to use their commute to feel happier and less stressed.

You will never achieve any lasting sense of peace and well-being if it relies on things being just so in the world around you. Something will always go sideways. By using the problems as the path, you can spend more of your time in a contented, happy state of mind, and less of your time in stressed reactivity.

How to be a Ripple Revolutionary
Changing the world, one average, energized, ordinary 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 less than satisfactory. We all want to make a difference, but life – its commitments, deadlines, and ever-expanding to-do lists – too often put off those efforts until “later, when I have more time.”

In the face of all the problems we see in the world, it can be easy to feel helpless and hopeless about our individual ability to make a difference.

But the truth is, we each have a mind-bogglingly huge potential to make the world a better place, just by the way we live our everyday lives.

Every one of us is already leaving a legacy - more specifically, a "Ripple Legacy," the cumulative impact, both immediate and ongoing, of the choices we make and actions we take every day.

How to be a Ripple Revolutionary looks at a new way of thinking about making a difference, one that taps into the mind-bogglingly huge potential to change the world just by living our everyday lives.

The world is more desperately in need than ever of a movement of people dedicated to making the world a better place. This talk explores:

• How you have the potential to be a mobile point of positive impact in your life.
• Why making a difference makes you feel more energized and alive.
• The power of doing the inner work of your work in the world.
• How you’re already leaving a legacy, whether you mean to or not.
• How we create our “Ripple Legacy” with every choice we make and every action we take as we go through our days.

Attendees will come away with:

• A new way of thinking about how we leave our legacies.
• Specific actionable everyday ideas for making an impact.  Inner work exercises they can do to increase their potential for making a difference.
• A greater feeling of empowerment and seeing their potential impact.

Now more than ever, the world needs people who feel empowered to have an impact. The Ripple Revolution is combines inner work to help people feel more energized and alive with insights on how their lives can – and already do – make a very real difference.