Pain teaches us the most counterintuitive thing – that we must go down before we even can know what up is. Suffering of some sort seems the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. For if we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. Fr. Richard Rohr ~~ Dear Everyone: Uncertainty always breeds intense discomfort. Unfortunately, in our headlong sprint away from the discomfort of these times, we can all-too-easily position ou

Dear Everyone: We Repeat What We Don’t Repair. The number of times I’ve recited this fundamental truth can’t be quantified. It’s a mantra in my facilitation, my speaking, my teaching, and my coaching. The joy is in knowing that we can repair. We can repair harm. Even deep, intergenerational harm. Even self-inflicted harm. Especially self-inflicted harm. We can repair and restore. And - given time, intention, and effort - our wounds can be transformed to sources of

Dear Everyone: A recent influx of new subscribers and site members served as a reminder that it's past time to reintroduce myself and our work at Lodestar. So, in this week’s edition of Cereal With Hand Poured Milk – your weekly reminder that sometimes you just gotta figure out what can be half-assed without harm – I’ll give the brief rundown of my why. ~~ The short story is that in 2014, a dear friend tricked me into attending a coach training intensive. A year later, coach

Dear Everyone: This week’s edition of Cereal with Hand Poured Milk comes to you from deep in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Never heard of it? Trust me: put it on your bucket list. ~~ Few things reconnect us with us better or more thoroughly than time spent off-grid in wild places. Feet in dirt, face to sun, pack on back... It is powerful, healing, and restorative. For our family, the Boundary Waters has a special pull. It calls us back every year, summer and wint

Dear Everyone: This week’s edition of Cereal with Hand Poured Milk is penned by my dear friend and colleague, Antoinette Ayers. Antoinette is an executive coach with decades of experience across industries, a masterful facilitator and coach trainer, and an exceptional connector-of-people (and what a gift that is!). I like to tease that Antoinette is the "one to blame." It is she who first trained and gave me the language of coaching, turning my eyes towards this next phase of

Dear Everyone: Hitch a ride when you need to. Provide safe passage when you can. ~~ For the record, I am a world-class catastrophizer. I have just enough life lived, just enough education, know just enough history, and contain just the right sprinkling of paranoia-driven conspiracy to make my brain extraordinarily dangerous. Of course, when the worst-case doesn’t play out I never stop and say, “well, whew! I guess I overreacted!” Oh no. I conveniently forget my dark and twist

Dear Everyone: In this week’s edition of Cereal With Hand Poured Milk (aka “figure out what you can half-ass without harm”) we’re going to touch ever so briefly on the danger posed by Those Who Cheer For Us. We all have them, those well-intentioned co-workers, bosses or others who radically cheer on our herculean efforts and outcomes while willfully ignoring the toll it exacts. They see and love all we DO, are in awe of all we ACCOMPLISH, and clap their hands to the beat of

Dear Everyone: Stress isn’t a bad thing. In fact, stress - particularly when appropriate, scaffolded supports are in place - is central to growth and development for both children and adults. The stress that results from adversity builds strength, courage and stamina. This last year, however, has been something else for most of us. A continuum exists from stress --> trauma, and while there are multiple factors that separate healthy stress from harmful trauma, the unrelenting

Dear Everyone: Recently, I've fielded a lot of requests for presentations and tools on resiliency. Specifically in healthcare and education, there is appropriate, growing concern from administrators about the emotional health and well-being of their staff, and a desire for experts to provide them with resiliency tips and tools that may help. All this begs an important question: are we facing an epidemic of resilience-deficiency? Or are we simply asking too much? 2020 has been

Dear Everyone: A couple weeks ago I wrote the first in a three-part series about resilience and then, predictably, got sidetracked. Thanks to those of you who hung in there, and even bigger thanks to those of you who yelled at me, “EAT YOUR FROG!” In part one of our reservoir metaphor, we talked about the Weaponization of Resilience and the critically important work of recognizing when the spillways that dump OUT of our “Resiliency Reservoir” have been open too much and for t

Sculpture by Alexander Milov Dear Everyone: I got a phone call very late last night. Normally, I turn my phone off early - it's part of tending to my personal resilience - but it has been a week, I was still awake, and the phone was still on. Experientially, late night phone calls are rarely a good thing - I’ve lived long enough that even the thought makes my heart sink. So, when I heard the buzz last night and glanced down to see the name of an old friend I’d not spoken wit