Work as a Calling (Part 2)

Last week I wrote about three different approaches to work: Work as a job, a career, or a calling.  The benefits of seeing work as a calling, to the individual and the organization, can be profound. In that article I pointed out that one way to shift to work to…

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Work as a Calling (Part 1)

How do you describe your work? Is it just a means to pay the bills?  Something that fills the day that you can’t wait to end?   Or is it something you basically enjoy, but don’t expect to be doing in five years? You have bigger plans and other goals.    Or do you consider your work…

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Holiday Presence

It is the holiday season.  A time for celebration and old friends, mistletoe and the oh, so patient stockings. Gather all your hopes and expectations and sit beside the fire.  Hang your glittering memories like tinsel from the tree.  Tis the season of anticipation, excitement and joy. But often, there…

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Keys to Engagement at Work

In its studies with over 30 million employees, in big and small organizations across industries, Gallup identified four things that contribute to whether employees are engaged: Basic Tools. Do I know what is expected of me? Do I have what I need to do my job? Feeling that they are…

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Fingertips

“Each one of us has at our fingertips, access to so much meaning and hope, goodness and beauty, in every moment, if we would only let ourselves see.” From Being Human by John Sean Doyle

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Hugging the Horse’s Head

In January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche went insane. Armed with metaphor, irony and aphorism, the German philosopher carved his influence deep into 20th century culture, criticism, literature and psychology.  Freud, Mann, Yeats, Richard Strauss and countless other artists and thinkers were shaped by the “first Immoralist”.  In popular culture, Nietzsche was…

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Resilience, Growth & Kintsukuroi

Resilience. Grit. Sisu. Post traumatic growth.  Different researchers emphasize the subtle distinctions within the larger truth that more often than not, we are better than we think we are. We are stronger, more adaptive. When things go wrong, most people, most of the time, do not dry up, crumble and…

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Discover Each Other Again

“Go with your friends and loved ones to a park or a coffee shop or some other quiet spot and look them in the eyes. Discover once again their hopes, their wishes for the future and their fears.  It is our dreams that make us different than the mud beneath…

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Throwing Bullets on the Fire

When we first moved to the place I would come to call home, a boy, five years my senior, knocked on the door to meet his new playmate.  He introduced himself, spelled his last name, and every weekend and summer we played: Sometimes in the woods pretending we were soldiers…

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