courage

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

June 17, 2014 by David Leave a Comment

For Strength, Character and Resilience, just add Heat!

A leader’s life is filled with a barrage of external challenge of adversity, change and crisis, as well as with personal failures and lapses in judgment or will power. As leaders, we all want to finish well, but at times we may be tempted to quit.

American author and Presidential advisor Napoleon Hill once said, “Character is to man what carbon is to steel.”
Steel is forged in fire. The evidence of resilience in any great leader will be forged in the fires of daily life, and it is the very heat of the challenge that forms the strength of character that makes us resilient. Though carbon is used for steel, it is also used for pencil lead. As such it is soft and smudges easily on paper. This would be our character, and our resilience, without the fire of challenge. Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Courage Tagged With: character, courage, hope, leadership, Perseverance, 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

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 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

January 10, 2014 by David

12 Years a Slave; How slavery brought freedom to Solomon Northrup

Do you remember the day that you filled out your life creation requisition form? You know the one: I requested to be born in Canada, white, male with DNA that would produce a 6’1” stature at 185 pounds (someone screwed that up though – I don’t know where the extra 30 pounds came from!)

Of course, this never happened for me, or for you. I’ve been reminded of the importance of keeping this truth in perspective when confronting the challenge of life and work: We had no control over our life at the beginning. Along with this truth is another: we have no control over our eventual death either. I wonder, given that we have no control over either of these significant circumstances of our life, why Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: choice, courage, resilience, suffering

December 16, 2013 by David 5 Comments

Paradigm challenge: Suffering is good?

Enroute to a deeper exploration of the connection between why we live and what we do, I have a slightly different approach to this week’s blog post!

I have inserted a few Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) quotes below, and I invite your perspective on what they do for you. Leading off, here’s a tough one: Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: choice, courage, Perseverance, resilience, suffering

December 9, 2013 by David 11 Comments

Courage…to be real

I believe that we all struggle with a sense of insecurity. I don’t know if this is the case, but I would be willing to bet that it is true for the vast majority of us at some time or another.

Insecurity is a difficult thing to live with. It challenges us in relationship. It leads us to compromise and to alter our behavior in potentially limiting and even damaging ways. It takes courage to overcome insecurity.

I have defined courage as the ability to act rightly in the face of discouragement. However, I also like Brene Brown’s definition. She defines courage in this way: “To tell the story of who you are with your whole heart”. She explains it this way: Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Fulfillment Tagged With: courage, fulfillment, insecurity, peace, Purpose, 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

November 25, 2013 by David Leave a Comment

Poverty, Prosperity or Peace

I have been engaged in several conversations of late wherein we have discussed the felt impacts of deep challenge. Some were under attack at work, others finding too much month at the end of the money, and still others longing for more meaningful impacts through what they do.

In all of these situations I find myself remembering that there is a blend of BE-ing and DO-ing — unto BECOMING. Who we are and what we do will lead to what we become. Please Continue Reading …

Filed Under: Courage, Leadership Tagged With: challenge, character, courage, peace, resilience