Insights

Binary thinking traps us into opposites. Dualistic thinking opens us up to new possibilities.

Three pillars of Strategic Leadership: Self-Awareness and Personal Mastery, Development and Empowerment, and Leading Transformative Change.

Think of a major change you made at some point in your life: what precipitated that change? It could have been an accumulation of events...

There’s a gap between where you are and where you want to be. What's in the way? How do you perceive at that gap? Do you think of it as...

We tend to label people or things and assign them into “boxes” – by gender, race, political persuasion, nationality, you name it. And,...

You stir a little sugar into a cup of hot tea. Notice the crystals dissolve and “disappear.” As the tea cools, you notice a little sugar...

I find the phenomenon of “emergence” one of the most fascinating marvels of nature. Understanding and appreciating it can change your perspective on a LOT of things. To be clear, I’m not talking about the "emergence" of a butterfly from chrysalis or the "emergence" of the sun after a long rain. This is about the kind of emergence you have witnessed in the flocking of birds, the shoaling of fish, the herding of animals, and in the colonies of ants. Emergent behavior - or an em

December 21 marks the first day of winter. For many, it can feel like a time of cold, dark, and bleak nothingness. Let’s just say, it can feel depressing. Here’s a different way of looking at it that I hope will inspire you! Think of the seasons like the cycle of the butterfly. Note: don’t take this literally: butterfly reproduction cycles don't follow the seasons. It's just a metaphor. Spring  Spring represents the emergence of the beautiful butterfly from chrysalis. The but

Remember playing with a magnifying glass as a kid, using the light of the Sun to burn holes in leaves? Well, that’s a convergent lens: it takes parallel light rays and focuses them on a point. The lenses in our eyes do the same thing: focusing what are called “real images” onto the retina. In a way, our mind acts like a convergent lens: we focus on the task before us to accomplish an outcome. Call it “convergent thinking.” This is our usual mode of thought and works well for

A high school chemistry experiment has been with me the rest of my life:  Fill a glass beaker with ice. Put it on a tripod with a bunsen burner underneath. Stick a thermometer in and measure temperature over time. What would YOU expect to happen?  I'd expect the temperature to rise steadily. But it doesn't! Instead it looks like the graph below: What's going on? The bunsen burner heats the ice until the temperature reaches 0 degrees C. where it stays until the ice fully melts

If you’re like me, you enjoy learning new things. But you also realize that you're not going to be good at those things . . . at least in the beginning.  I took up singing a few years ago on a whim. That was a great idea until I had to perform on stage. Unconscious Incompetence Until then I had been happily basking in the first stage of learning development: unconscious incompetence. I had no idea how bad I was! Conscious Incompetence Standing there on stage with parched lips

We all learned the cycle of metamorphosis in school as kid: The butterfly lays its eggs  on a leaf. In time the larva ( caterpillar ) hatches out and starts eating and growing. It molts several times as it gets bigger until it is fully grown. The caterpillar attaches itself to the stem of a plant, and goes into chrysalis (pupa). After some time, out pops a butterfly . The cycle then repeats. Here’s the question: how does the caterpillar magically turn into a butterfly? How is

Fall is a beautiful time of year. The leaves turn beautiful colors and change is in the air. Why do leaves “turn” colors in the Fall? They don’t! Well, not really. We know that the green color is a result of chlorophyll – a key element of photosynthesis. In Spring and Summer, the chlorophyll is strongly present. But there are other colors within the leaves – they’re just temporarily masked by the chlorophyll. In Fall when the days grow shorter and cooler, the chlorophyll ceas

Every cycle seems to repeat itself but actually moves us forward like a screw through time. It’s an odd phenomenon actually: rotating one direction (on a plane) and having it move forward in a completely other direction (perpendicular to that plane). Life is much the same. Each day can seem like just another day. Each week just another week: one rotation of the screw. But we know that a lot changes in a day, a week, a year. What can seem like Groundhog Day somehow isn’t: duri