We've all heard it before. "I was blindsided..."  The source of this can be different for all of us. A relationship crashed. There was an accident. Something unexpected happened financially. You lost a job. An employee quit. You get hit with a rude comment. Your car breaks down. Someone backstabs you. Worse, someone dies. It [...]

When you take a rubber band and stretch it too far, it snaps. Blow up a balloon too much, and it pops. At some point, there’s just so much they can take.  You and I are a lot like those rubber bands and balloons.  At work and home, we’re stretched. As spouses and partners and [...]

Regardless what you think about him, Kobe Bryant was a kid with a dream who made his dream a reality. There's a compelling story to be told about mindset and dreaming based on an interview Kobe shared with Dave Belasco and his students at the USC Performance Science Institute...  At the beginning of their chat [...]

Remember this question? "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"  Let’s change it up... “If someone shares something important, but we’re not actively listening, did they really say anything?” My wife was sharing something with me the other day, and although I was [...]

"I had to figure out what was enough." I was sitting across from a friend. It had been eight years since we last connected. Past conversations had focused on growing our businesses, our relationships with our wives, and raising our new families. Back then, we were young entrepreneurs with an eye toward the future and [...]

There’s a photo in my office of my grandfather. It’s a copy of a picture that used to hang in my grandmother’s apartment when we were kids. A Greek immigrant to the United States, my grandfather is pictured standing proudly in the diner he owned. There’s a customer at the counter enjoying his coffee, and [...]

Just before the police walked through the door, he told me, “Act like you belong here.”  Those words of wisdom were given to a 19-year-old version of myself by my friend Daryl. The house party we were at had gotten out of hand, and the police would be walking through the door any second. People [...]

I was sitting in a simulcast of a John Maxwell event a few weeks ago, and John was sharing a conversation with Angela Ahrendts, former vice president of retail at Apple as well as CEO of Burberry. Toward the end of their chat, she brought up the best advice her father had ever given her, [...]

"You don’t have because you don’t ask."  Hearing those words was a gut-check for me. In looking ahead toward the things I’m working toward in the next months and years, there’s nothing on my list that I can do alone. That flies in the face of my natural tendency to try and do everything on [...]

I was with a client’s team this week, and part of our conversation focused on mindset. As Henry Ford put it, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t -- you’re right.” Our minds hold a massive amount of power, and our mindset dictates many of our successes, failures, and experiences in life. [...]