5 Key Skills for 2013

As a Certified Empowerment Coach, I am a big supporter of setting goals.  So as we enter 2013, I encourage you to decide what you want to see changed in your life in the New Year.   I also want to encourage you to become sharp in the application of five key skills over the next twelve months:

In fact, I invite you to work with me as I seek to improve them in my own life.

1. Fix Your Focus: Pick four key goals that you want to achieve in 2013.  Your list may be longer and you may feel tempted to add more.  However, I encourage you to limit it to four things  that must change in your life over the next twelve months.  Then, order them in terms of what should naturally come “next” in your life based on what is easiest to achieve with your current resources.  So, if your list were to include finding a new job, losing weight, dating and taking a trip.  Which one could you impact immediately?  Losing weight or taking the trip may be the goals you can take on right away.  Once you determine the goal you wish to pursue, your time management and decision making should be in service to achieving that goal.  Total alignment in thought, word and deed is the result of true focus.

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Is Nothing Sacred? What the Victims of Newtown Teach Us

I am shocked and deeply saddened by the tragic shootings in Newtown, CT.  Each unfolding story and every media sound byte brings me to tears.  Because no matter how much I try to understand—I can’t.  All I can seem to do is weep and pray.  This morning when I woke up, I reached for my phone and every new headline was about the massacre.  New day, new tears and a sadness that makes me feel as if I have lost someone close to me.

I grow even sadder thinking of parents who sent their children to school and must now endure the worst loss possible to mankind—losing a child.  As a writer, I want to say something prolific.  As a speaker, I am trying to find words that will soothe.  As a believer, I am trying to find my Father’s hand in this senseless brutality.  And as a human being, I want to know—why?

It comes to me that I feel as if I lost my own because in some sense I have.  I may have never met Adam Lanza’s victims—those who died and those who must live with his heinous actions.  But I am an aunt, a sister…a friend.  Last night, a reporter stopped someone from Newtown and asked him how he felt.  He responded, “This happened in a school, is nothing sacred?”

The reality is that schools are not sacred.  We think they are because many of us hold the protection and education of children as sacred.  We hurt for the adults who lost their lives…but it is the children that our hearts are bleeding for…they didn’t even get a chance to live!

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Success: Was the Best One the Last One?

I’ve kept quiet on the subject, but as a former teenager of the 80’s… I can’t believe that I live in a Whitney Houston-less world!  I will never forget the first time I saw Whitney.  I was 13 and my monthly subscription to a teen magazine had just arrived.  Every single month I waited for it.  I would spend the next hour or two sitting on the porch peeling through a magazine filled with teenage girls…who looked nothing like me!

There were occasionally girls of color, but they were always lighter than me with straighter hair or lighter eyes.  I was happy to see them, but I couldn’t necessarily relate.  But one day as I flipped through the issue—there was Whitney.  Her signature smile, her radiant cocoa skin and curly tight afro.  There was no question…she was me!  I read and re-read the tiny section covering her upcoming debut album about twenty times.  I had finally found my face in America.  That picture, that young girl full of promise, is who Whitney will always be to me. 

But for the past three nights when I retreat to my hotel room and turn on the TV, I see a different Whitney.  The cable station is promoting her last film, Sparkle.  But rather than focusing on the movie, they have chosen to delve into the darkness that eventually consumed her.  I am disturbed by the newspaper headlines and images that flash across the screen.  My Whitney is somewhere underneath the influences of addiction.  I want to scream, “Let it go, she’s gone,” but her legacy can no more escape her faults and failures, than we can ours.

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