confidence

December 10, 2014 by David Leave a Comment

Experiencing Resilience…I hope

Don’t fall out of your chair – Yes, this is a blog entry from David E White – and I confess that it has been far too long, with some difficulty in between.

“An easy life is rarely meaningful and a meaningful life rarely easy.”
― Oliver North, Counterfeit Lies

What do you do when you feel that you are losing your bearings? I am not referring to ball-bearings, which would amount to mental marbles in this case (which, in hind-sight, may actually work) – but rather the coordinates for your life journey.

Let me cut to the chase – this past year has been a difficult one for me. For a variety of reasons, I found myself in unfamiliar territory. I have been depressed before – but never like I was during several significantly low periods this past year. Ironically, the speaker, writer, facilitator and consultant (aka: expert) on the topic of resilience, was starting to look like he wouldn’t be so resilient himself. Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: character, confidence, courage, fulfillment, hope, peace, Purpose, resilience

May 20, 2014 by David Leave a Comment

Stay in the Game! Resilience through Creativity

Business viability and sustainability depend on innovation and creativity. According to Andrew Winston, bestselling author and globally recognized business strategist, the way companies currently operate will not allow them to keep up with the current and future rate of change. Successful companies will need to be engines of innovation to thrive. Therefore: no creativity, no resilience.

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Similar to business, professional athletes are sometimes forced to get creative in order to stay in the game. As athletes age, they may have to reinvent themselves for a different role, or come up with innovative approaches to their current role. Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: confidence, courage, creativity, innovation, resilience

May 6, 2014 by David 6 Comments

Be Unstoppable: The Brilliance of Singles

I love baseball. I am not the kind of fan that follows all the trades and statistics, engaging in vigorous debate. In truth, I often don’t even know the names on the full roster of my favorite team.

I know where I was when Joe Carter hit his walk off home run to lead the Toronto Blue Jays to a come from behind victory in the over the visiting Philadelphia Phillies in the 1993 world series, and I know that Jackie Robinson was the first colored ball player and wore number 42 (thanks to the movie), but I couldn’t tell you much more for dates and big events. I just love the game. Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture, Team Tagged With: character, confidence, Purpose, resilience, strategy, success, vision

April 29, 2014 by David 2 Comments

3 Ways to Stop Being Lonely at the Top

If you are, or ever have been involved in a leadership capacity, you may relate to feeling lonely. It’s not a simple social-disconnect loneliness, it’s more about carrying a weight of responsibility that you feel the people around you can’t relate to.

Worse than unrelatable, at times it would be impossible – even inappropriate – to share your concerns with the people you lead. These concerns may be about the business at hand and include potentially negative impacts to your employees and/or others that they are connected with, such as the need for corporate downsizing or behavioral correction.

Delivering loneliness in epic proportion, is the fear of vulnerability and weakness – especially Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: character, confidence, courage, grace, Partnership, passion, Posture, resilience

April 22, 2014 by David Leave a Comment

3 Questions to Break Decision-Making Paralysis

Personal and business leadership requires the ability to make decisions. But decisions can be difficult to make. Some of them so much so that they keep us awake at night, limit our ability to concentrate (or even notice) other issues/people around us, and in more severe cases, the whole process can lead to declining health.

Theodore Roosevelt suggested that, “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

Being paralyzed at the crossroads of decision is a difficult place to be – the place of having options, but not being sure how they will work out. Possibly more difficult is the place of misguided thinking – where the options we think we have are not real. What a relief when we come to a place of clarity, even when that clarity is death to a dream. “Yes” and “no” are both clear – it is “maybe” that causes us the most grief.

During one of my posts as a turnaround CEO, I remember being in such a situation. I had worked through Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: alignment, confidence, decisions, peace, resilience, vision

April 7, 2014 by David 4 Comments

A Wholehearted Solution for Exhaustion

How do you respond to the questions, How are you doing? How are you? or How is work going?

There are many perspectives we could choose as a basis for response, but which ones serve us best? We could talk about how energized we feel, how others are responding to us, whether or not our goals are being met, and more. However, given that we know so little about what will come our way in the next minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years, I wonder if the most accurate perspective is one of alignment; whether or not we are in alignment within the present moment.

I’m not trying to play with semantics here – hang in there. Alignment is an issue of posture. It is the stance that enables capacity and capability. Think of what happens when you Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture, Feature Tagged With: alignment, Anxiety, confidence, courage, encouragement, exhaustion, peace, resilience

December 2, 2013 by David Leave a Comment

Courage — to serve?

Ever reach out to connect or collaborate with someone, thinking it was all about a “project” to find yourself trying to comprehend the quality of the person you were reaching out to; how separate from convention, how extra-ordinary they truly were? I did, and I am still processing it.

As many of you will know, I have recently completed the draft writing of a new book: Resilience; How culture enabled the rebirth of Ford Motor Company (iBooks). Writing a book is the easy part, I hear, and promoting it is where the real work begins. So I have committed to engaging the process, so as to be true to the message. I thought it would be helpful to get an endorsement from Ford, and so I set out to see if this was possible. In the end, I did get the endorsement, but the experience of encountering Alan Mulally (President and CEO of Ford Motor Company) in the process of achieving it, was a greater gift; far more moving than Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: character, confidence, courage, culture, engagement, Purpose, resilience, values, vision

April 5, 2013 by David 2,138 Comments

Your truth, My truth; Who’s to say?

I finally got around to watching The Life of Pi last night, and I have to say that I enjoyed the movie. One of the scenes that stood out for me (I’ll try not to ruin the movie for you if you have not seen it) is a conversation at the end, which features the question: “Which version of the story do you like?”

I hear many statements in our culture of late that imply a great loss of the pursuit of the full essence of truth. Justification and rationalization can be heard in expressions such as “your truth” and “my truth” to allow the freedom to believe diametrically opposed perspectives, wherein it is obvious that one or the other (or possibly both) can not be true. This may make it easier to be respectful of others, and tolerant of differing perspectives, but Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: confidence, pi, story, tolerance, trust, truth

October 15, 2012 by David Leave a Comment

Confident Grace

With a mid-morning sunshine caressing my cheek in the cool of an autumn morning, my thoughts turn to all I have experienced over the past few days. I led a workshop for a group of women, who contribute vocationally to the improvement of transportation systems. Following our time together, I received several warm expressions of appreciation for my leadership. Most affirming for me was recognition of “facilitation, grace and confidence”, which I demonstrated in leading such a strong-minded group.

I spent the next two days in leisure; salmon fishing out on the open water of the straight of Georgia, setting crab traps in a cove near an off-grid cabin high up on a rocky outcropping of a small island, and enjoying the company of old and new friends.

I also enjoyed a brief walk through dense forest, where two six hundred year old cedars have stood faithfully waiting for me to arrive. I smile thinking of this, for I know it is not about me, but the experience if no less meaningful in the moment. Each took part in playing their role, and as such facilitated experience. The salmon, the crab, the ocean, the cove, the island, sky, gull, seal and porpoise all played their part with confidence and grace, enriching life for all.
Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Values Tagged With: confidence, fishing, grace, workshop