“Your face is my map to your life.” ~ Harry Houdini, magician
We are all literally and unwittingly two-faced. To learn more about how you present yourself to the world and about your underlying, more “private” feelings, you just have to look yourself in the face.
Want to get out a mirror now, before you read further?
You [...]

”I had a doorbell moment this week,” Patricia told Tracy.
Both have sons serving in the same Marine unit in Iraq. Patricia is describing the fear that grabs her the moment her doorbell rings unexpectedly, thinking that the officer on the other side has come to tell her that her son is dead.
Tracy understands.

Hint One: [...]

I am gratified by the 249 comments to this post I wrote for Harvard Business Review and seek your specific tips on quotability, the first step to connecting in this increasingly complex, information-flooded, and connected world:
You can feel the tension in the compressed smiles, quick nods and pointed questions at the annual Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare [...]

Holidays are times of great loving and loneliness and we often don’t know who is experiencing which. For many it is a bit of both.
For us all this can be a prime time for kindness, sometimes by sharing what we have.
And kindness is often unspoken. “An eye can threaten like a loaded and leveled [...]

Simplify.
It’s clarifying.
Only then can one can focus. Focus on what is really going on. From the inside out
What do you feel right now?  What most matters to you?
What is happening, truly happening with those in the scene you are playing out right now?
What best serves the situation?  My friend Nate says, “What would love do now?”
Gratefulness. [...]

Wincing I glanced down. It hadn’t taken much to make that small blister appear in the hollow of my palm, that most tender of places on one’s hand. It’s my writing hand where a thin flap of skin now folded back.
I’d just planted 30 daffodil bulbs in my garden but had neglected to wear gloves.
Suddenly [...]

Odd things can happen when hanging out with those who don’t act right, like you. I got unexpected insights when, with two friends, I walked through the Steins Collection of paintings by Matissse, Picasso and other avant-garde painters in bohemian Paris.
In most every gallery room one friend would sit on the bench in the middle [...]

Want to to kick off your new year in a way that will spur growth, enable you to  savor time with others and create fresh meaning in your life? Try this ….
Create a Mutually-Reinforcing Group Ritual
For over a decade in Lake Oswego, Oregon, eight women, including my college friend Jane, get of bed to meet [...]

There’s a Relationship Revolution bubbling up and you’ve probably seen signs of it.
Rain or shine, for over a decade, my college friend Jane Burns has been walking the same route in Lake Oswego every morning at 7:00 am with the same hardy group of women. Neighbors yet strangers at first, the habit has bound them [...]

For many years my parents took what some Brits call an evening “constitutional.”  They walked, hand in hand, around the neighborhood – just the two of them. Sometimes, they talked. Other evenings they said little, so I am told. Yet they always came home smiling.
Since then I’ve discovered that motion evokes emotion, for good and [...]