inspiration | Suzi Pomerantz

New self-study course helps you SOAR!

Suzi Pomerantz — Thu, 21 May 2015 22:33:42 +0000

Need to put a little extra inspiration and motivation back into your life?
My friend Mali Phonpadith has created an outstanding online self-study course called SOAR.
S.O.A.R. Self‐Study course will help map out gifts, talents and passions to uncover your vision & mission for life.
Course Goals & Outcomes:
1) Uncover your gifts, talents, hobbies and interests
2) Craft affirmation statements
3) Identify your existing beliefs to help shift your perspectives
4) Clarify your vision and mission
5) Rediscover your significance
6) Awaken to your relationships with self and others; highlight the roles you get to play in life
7) Craft your desired purpose and legacy
8) Make commitments and create actions steps to help manifest your vision into reality
https://www.kajabinext.com/a/kHLDfYUS

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When suicide is not the end, but a new beginning

Suzi Pomerantz — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:31:25 +0000

Until I saw this powerful TED talk from JD Schramm, I had no idea that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide do not actually succeed in ending their lives. It raises the question about how do we, as coaches and leaders, help those who have lived in spite of their choice not to, actually choose life again? Especially if we are not aware that they made such an attempt previously? The societal taboos about discussing the topic of suicide could mean that the leaders we coach and the people they lead may have had suicidal thoughts or attempts in their history. This four-minute video encourages all of us to eliminate the fears and taboos about talking about suicide so that we can support and help those who, like John, have much value to contribute to our world.

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Free story inspires in an otherwise cynical world

Suzi Pomerantz — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:55:31 +0000

My colleague Lable Braun wrote a beautiful story of kindness, compassion, and faith as part of his series the Legends of the Lamed Vav, which is part of a larger Lamed Vav project he’s spearheading. It also happens to be a great parable for leadership, in my humble opinion.
Lable is giving the story away as a gift and asking people to sign up at his site to get a copy of the Simple Chaim story and keep in touch regarding the other stories and future developments. The form is at the bottom of the page here: http://www.thelamedvavproject.org/ . It’s available on Kindle and Nook as well. If you are moved to do so, please share the story by sending folks to the web page to sign up for their gift copy.
Here’s a synopsis from the Amazon description:
A young girl’s world is falling apart. Only her frail mother’s faith in an ancient legend, the Lamed-Vav, stands between Raizel and the total loss of all she loves.
In the end, Raizel will discover that nothing is ever quite what one expects, and the most miraculous results can come from unexpected sources.
In this first in a series of stories, an old legend is introduced to help us face the challenges of our times. Our modern myth that people are only out for their own narrow interests, and that only strength and wealth prevails, is put to the test by an ancient myth of love and compassion being the true foundations of the world.

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Life Legos: The interconnecting building blocks for growing up and leading in swiftly shifting times

Suzi Pomerantz — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:16:33 +0000

Children play with Legos and create worlds with an enormous variety of interconnecting, colorful pieces, not unlike the way business leaders and executives piece together business models, talent, vision and strategy to create cultures, worlds, and an intended future of possible results. As both a mom and an executive coach, there are a few Life Legos needed in conversations with the future; with the young people of today who must lead in the creation of that future.
We are growing up into a future that changes every time we look at it, precisely because we looked at it. The rate of connectivity and change is exponentially expanding on a global, unprecedented scale.
In working with thousands of leaders over the last 20 years, I’ve discovered some core Lego pieces I want to give my 9 year old son and 11 year old daughter, so that they will have a starter set of 30 Life Lego pieces from which they can build and create the future they will lead:
1. You are a leader. Really.
2. You have the power to choose, which is also a right, privilege, obligation, and opportunity
3. Freedom comes from within
4. Flow and flex
5. Find and own your voice
6. Listen and observe
7. Know yourself, trust yourself
8. It’s okay to ask for what you want
9. It’s okay not to get it
10. Be accepting and inclusive – and ask questions
11. Adapt and pivot
12. Find, trust, and own your strengths and gifts
13. Values matter, so do manners
14. Lead from passion and meaning; know what matters
15. Make a difference. What is the best use of you? Where can you serve best? What is your deepest contribution?
16. You are already good enough and imperfectly perfect exactly the way you are.
17. It’s okay not to know
18. Love, take care of, and be good to yourself
19. Love, take care of, and be good to others
20. Include play, chocolate and dance
21. Everything will work out for the best
22. Respect and kindness matter more than fairness
23. Become comfortable with uncertainty
24. Collaborate openly and make connections
25. You don’t have to do it alone, you’re not the only one
26. Change is good; embrace it
27. Technology will always accelerate, but you can slow down when you need to
28. Breathe… and know that you are loved
29. Make deep and lasting relationships; It’s more fun with friends
30. Always remember your Mama loves you forever.
This is just a starter set, now you can unleash your creativity and make new connections, create new pieces from your own experiences, learn from and teach others as you build expanded universes. You need not be limited by the instruction manuals and rule books – they offer suggested starting points to stimulate your thinking. Be your own inventor. Imagine, connect, go!

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Dr. Brene Brown’s TED Talk on the importance of listening to shame

Suzi Pomerantz — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:46:47 +0000

As a follow up to her 2010 TEDxHouston talk on vulnerability, Brene Brown returns to the TED stage with a very moving and insightful talk about shame, and the epidemic of shame in our country.
Here are a few of my favorite soundbites from her transcript and you can access the video below:

I’m going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk. I woke up the morning after I gave that Talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life. And I actually didn’t leave my house for about three days.
Vulnerability is not weakness. I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives. And I’ve come to the belief — this is my 12th year doing this research — that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage — to be vulnerable, to let ourselves be seen, to be honest.
One of the weird things that’s happened is, after the TED explosion, I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country — everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, “Hey, Dr. Brown. We loved your TEDTalk. We’d like you to come in and speak. We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention vulnerability or shame.” (Laughter) What would you like for me to talk about? There’s three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change. So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. (Applause) To create is to make something that has never existed before. There’s nothing more vulnerable than that. Adaptability to change is all about vulnerability.
And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability. I learned about these things from studying shame. There’s a great quote that saved me this past year by Theodore Roosevelt. A lot of people refer to it as the “Man in the Arena” quote. And it goes like this: “It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he’s in the arena, at best he wins, and at worst he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly.”And that’s what this conference, to me, is about. That’s what life is about, about daring greatly, about being in the arena. When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door, and you think, “I’m going in and I’m going to try this,” shame is the gremlin who says, “Uh, uh. You’re not good enough. You never finished that MBA. Your wife left you. I know your dad really wasn’t in Luxembourg, he was in Sing Sing. I know those things that happened to you growing up. I know you don’t think that you’re pretty enough or smart enough or talented enough or powerful enough. I know your dad never paid attention, even when you made CFO.” Shame is that thing.
And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say, “I’m going to do this,” we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing, 99 percent of the time is who? Us. Shame drives two big tapes — “never good enough” and, if you can talk it out of that one, “who do you think you are?” The thing to understand about shame is it’s not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.” How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake?” How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I’m sorry. I am a mistake.
There’s a huge difference between shame and guilt. And here’s what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. And here’s what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we’ve done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s adaptive.
The other thing you need to know about shame is it’s absolutely organized by gender. Shame feels the same for men and women, but it’s organized by gender.
Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we’re supposed to be. And it’s a straight-jacket.
For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is one, do not be perceived as what? Weak.
So I started interviewing men and asking questions. And what I learned is this: You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear, I’ll show you a woman who’s done incredible work. You show me a man who can sit with a woman who’s just had it, she can’t do it all anymore, and his first response is not, “I unloaded the dishwasher,” but he really listens — because that’s all we need — I’ll show you a guy who’s done a lot of work.
Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it, to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we’re parenting, the way we’re working, the way we’re looking at each other.
If we’re going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy’s the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive. The two most powerful words when we’re in struggle: “me too.”

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More Notes from A Day with Werner Erhard at CAM 2012

Suzi Pomerantz — Mon, 28 May 2012 20:48:02 +0000

Just to continue my notes from CAM from the previous blog post, words of wisdom from the rest of the Day with Werner:
The winners aren’t doing what you’re doing better than you, they’re doing something completely different.
Masters dance with whatever it is they’re masters of.
Master’s don’t figure things out, they just dance. What’s more fun than discovering?
What’s the role of intuition? There isn’t any such thing…it’s an explanation. Start to suspect the way things are explained; don’t live in a world of explanation.
Master the conversational domain of whatever it is you want to be a master of.
In the stands: Observe behavior, describe behavior, interpret behavior, explain behavior…conceptual knowledge.
On the court: As it is lived
Dancing rather than figuring it out.
Human beings are objects. You are an object with properties (traits and states).
Consciousness some people reify as a thing called “mind”.
Illusion that deciding to act causes one to act.
Every time you remember it, your memory of it changes.
It seems to us that we decide to act, then we act…that’s how it appears. In reality, all conscious decisions to act are predicted in neuronal action patterns. This has been proven by neuroscience.
The brain generates a reality and functions in it. Largely for the purpose of surviving.
Constituted as networks of patterns of neurons. Opportunity: it’s not really scarce. It’s everywhere. If you really were any good, you’d be overwhelmed by it.
Everything we do/ are is generated prior to consciousness.
The ‘readiness potential’ encodes how you’ll decide. It’s not an unspecific preparation of a response.
“What you are dealing with” includes:
1. The circumstances ON which you are acting (your listening, your looking)
2. The circumstances IN which you’re acting (environment)
3. The way in which YOU occur for yourself in acting on whatever you are acting on in the circumstances in which you are acting.
Discovery does not happen by thinking. It happens by looking.
What you’ll get by thinking about it is what you already know.
“occur” – the way in which “the circumstances you are dealing with” register (exist) in some way for you — whether you taken note of it (are conscious of it) or not.
What occurs for you = 1) object & situations out in the world
2) other people and yourself out in the world
All these occurring as a whole (a holistic unity)
Note that when you are engaged with life, you occur as an interactive part of the whole, not something separated from or distinct from the whole.

More notes from the Day with Werner in the next post…

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Notes from CAM: Werner Erhard Spoke at Conversation Among Masters Last Week

Suzi Pomerantz — Fri, 25 May 2012 12:56:55 +0000

The folks at CAM sure know how to create a memorable, meaningful, transformational experience. I’ve been attending CAM for four years now — my annual retreat where I get to learn from and share best practices with 200 master coaches from around the world for a few days.
This year, I was looking forward to our first “conversation starter”, Werner Erhard, who is kind of the mac-daddy genius behind much of the foundational coaching methodologies that we master coaches employ in our businesses. Best known for creating the est programs in the 1970’s that then became Landmark Education’s Curriculum for Living, Werner had a great deal of negative press and has largely been out of the country for the last 20 years. Since I’ve had my coaching business for nearly 20 years, I was excited to be in the presence of the legend himself. Some call him the father of transformation. Anyway, here are a few of my notes from the day we had with Werner…I started trying to tweet them, but gave up because I can write faster than I can type with thumbs only:

A Day with Werner

Without integrity, nothing works. Integrity, morality, ethics, legality. You can count on me to be always committed to that. I don’t always make it, but I will be committed to it.
Discovery – insights don’t create behavioral change
Committed that whatever is of value you have to discover for yourself in order for it to make any difference in your effectiveness.
“What I can’t create I don’t understand” – Dick Feynman
Discovering rather than learning or having an insight into
Knowing that you’re breathing is a different state than discovering that you’re breathing. Contrast what you learn and understand with what you discover for yourself. If it doesn’t move or shock you, you haven’t discovered it (as opposed to learned it, understood it, had insight).
Profound difference if you discover it yourself.
“He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality.” ~ Anwar Sadat
People who have mastered life are ordinary people. They see/ perceive life differently than most of us. They interact with life differently. They make sense of it/ interpret life differently than most.
In order to be effective at dealing with life, it’s a product of how you interact with life. How they interact with the world, others & themselves.
What you already know easily gets in the way of changing the fabric of your thought.
Experience life through a unique conversational domain (linguistic domain).
A master experiences life…perceives, comprehends, and interacts with life.
Explain it versus access it.
CONVERSATIONAL DOMAIN: Specialized terms networked together in a specific way forms the specialized linguistic domain through which a master perceives, comprehends, and interacts with the thing in which they have mastery (i.e., physician and human body)
What it explains versus what creates access so that they open up a world for you so you can dance with what shows up in that world. A pottery master dances with the clay within specialized terms networked together.
See if your mastery of whatever, is a product of/ given to you by a conversational domain: a set of specialized terms networked together that allow you to perceive and make sense of and interact with it effectively with a high quality of life.
Perceives includes all senses.
Comprehends – makes intelligible, makes sense of, the meaningfulness.
All objects include the space around it. Order rarely produces a sense of order.
Mastery is a product of mastering a conversational domain, a lens through which it is viewed (“although that’s an explanation and I don’t like explanations”). Helps us understand it but it doesn’t give us any access to it.
Understanding of: knowledge of does not equal mastery unless you’ve mastered those terms and the special way they’re networked together, you won’t get that world to open up. It’s not just knowing what I don’t know, the master sees/perceives differently.
More notes from a day with Werner to come in a future post…
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Scarcity is Contextual: Peter Diamandis TED Talk on creating Abundance and why our future is optimistic

Suzi Pomerantz — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:10:58 +0000

Diamandis paints the picture that life on our planet today is not nearly as doom and gloom as the media would have us believe. Amen!
Technology coming online right now offers hope. “Technology is a resource-liberating force.”

So let’s look at what this last century has been to see where we’re going. Over the last hundred years, the average human lifespan has more than doubled, average per capita income adjusted for inflation around the world has tripled. Childhood mortality has come down a factor of 10. Add to that the cost of food, electricity, transportation, communication have dropped 10 to 1,000-fold. Steve Pinker has showed us that, in fact, we’re living during the most peaceful time ever in human history. And Charles Kenny that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent in the last 130 years. We truly are living in an extraordinary time. And many people forget this.
And we keep setting our expectations higher and higher. In fact, we redefine what poverty means. Think of this, in America today, the majority of people under the poverty line still have electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators, television, mobile phones, air conditioning and cars. The wealthiest robber barons of the last century, the emperors on this planet, could have never dreamed of such luxuries.

Thanks to Steve Dorfman (@driventoexcel) for sharing this with me. If you like Peter’s TED talk above and want more, tap into his much longer, full presentation HERE!

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Connecting Science, Art, Technology, and Creativity with TED Fellow Kate Nichols

Suzi Pomerantz — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:39:28 +0000

The Leonardo is a first-of-a-kind museum where you can explore the unexpected places and ways that science, technology, art, and creativity connect.
Kate Nichols is a one-of-a-kind artist who uses nanoparticles to create unexpected art. She is also a TED Fellow.
Kate and The Leonardo created this fabulous video that connects some unexpected dots! Enjoy…
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Coaching as Romantic Adventure

Suzi Pomerantz — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:04:38 +0000

Charlie Smith, inspired by Don Juan DeMarco in the Marlon Brando movie, has created 6 Rules for having life and work be either a romantic adventure or nothing at all. The full article is HERE, but the basic rules, which I think are pretty dynamite advice on their own, are listed below:

Rule Number One: Stop needing anybody’s agreement ever for who you are and how you are being.
Rule Number Two: Pay attention to what you love and to what truly attracts you.
Rule Number Three: Know in your blood that your power and impact is coming from the way people contrast your way of being, moment by moment, with their own attitude and experience.
Rule Number Four: Fully accept people and situations exactly the way they are.
Rule Number Five: Be content being stuck where you are.
Rule Number Six: You do not have to seek breakthroughs and extraordinary results in intentional and forceful ways.

Read the full article, including the poem by T.S. Eliot over at the Library of Professional Coaching.

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