ConnextionPoint

04/25/2025

So honored to have this conversation with Natalie Born on Thrive Today Podcast 🩷

12/02/2024

You need that positive sense of forward momentum in your life …

Find the path or make one ❤️❤️

08/19/2024

Powerful words in this quote: "The true and durable path into and through experience involves being true...to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. - Seamus Heaney

How do you maintain your identity and nurture your agency when faced with overwhelming demands? It's common to feel the pressure to constantly be there for everyone, yet in doing so, we risk being absent for ourselves. Intentions clash as you navigate between shouldering the burden alone to spare others and striving to bring your best self forward while seeking mutual success. Embrace your authenticity and find the balance between giving and self-care.

Allow your Performance Self - always determined, achieving, and responsible to be led by your Peace Self - always loved, learning and worthy. Your Peace Self allows you to be truly honest with yourself and in part then - be honest with others. Somewhere between giving all of yourself away and walking away - is a position to negotiate. You alone are the one best positioned to teach those around you how you can most powerfully can contribute.

04/21/2024

Do something really beautiful for yourself this week.

Play up the power of your journey over “the effort” to reach your outcome.

Maybe you have some pressure to close a deal
Maybe you have to get that project milestone completed
Maybe you have a readout presentation that has to hit the mark with your executive team
Maybe your starting a job search

The relationship you have with any outcome depends on relationship you have with the journey.

If you don’t acknowledge the journey, only “effort or the work tasks” to get to an outcome, the risk is the outcome rules you entirely and not in a good way. The thinking is, heads down ~ grind through it and get “IT” done. There is no journey to appreciate and you can’t let yourself have any peace until the outcome is achieved. Any challenge in the way to the outcome is an annoyance. In fact, without embracing the existence of a journey we can start to resent the outcome we want and need.

If you see the outcome as well as seeing the effort as a journey and -even more- the journey is as equally valuable, a shift happens. The journey becomes part of the value of the entire experience. Thinking this way, you may consider different approaches. You may allow more curiosity and experimentation. Setbacks become points of interest with less frustration. The pressure of the outcome, in this case, lacks the power to toy with your psyche.

And what if …the journey was MORE important that the outcome. This doesn’t mean you could care less about the outcome. It means the quality of the journey is going to DRIVE the outcome. For example, if my outcome is to get in better shape ( which is true for me now) then every detail of the journey is meaningful ….the quality of the gym, the things I think about, my workout gear, my routines, my food….the people ….it all matters.

I talk about peace over performance. This is part of it. You have a Peace Self, always loved, learning and worthy ….and you have a Performance Self …that is determined, achieving and responsible ( with a capital R).

Your Performance Self laser focused on an outcome might have worked for you in the past. Maybe your tired now. Maybe you can’t find motivation pursing this outcome. Before you give up ….let your Peace Self show you the journey.

Something beautiful could open up that changes how you see and experience everything.

01/25/2024

Welcome to 2024! I love pictures of paths, bridges, and roads. I couldn't resist snapping this one while coming back from a short trip this weekend. This photo inspired an opening 2024 message. ❤️

No matter what is happening in your life there is a special road that is always open to you; the name of this road is - Best Choice Right Now Road.

Moment by moment and day by day, we are confronted with countless choices. Do I say the best thing or the first thing that pops in my head? Do I react here or step back and think about it first? Do I eat that or do I make another food choice? Do I work-out or skip the gym? Do I smile or just ignore this person? Do I help or become irritated? How well do I stay on Best Choice Right Now Road?

Our choice in the moment is much like pushing a domino. So much of the rest of our life falls down by the momentum of one choice in one moment.

Traveling down Best Choice Right Now Road you learn to lead yourself intentionally.
Traveling down Best Choice Right Now Road you learn to put yourself in other people's shoes before you speak.

Traveling down Best Choice Right Now Road you learn to allow your Peace Self (always worthy, loved and learning) to guide your Performance Self (so responsible, determined and achieving) ...

Our alertness to our real choices determines whether we keep our bearings on the Best Choice Right Now Road. The better our choices the better the ride - the better the destination. Even after a slate of terrible choices where we may find ourselves wheels up in a steep ditch - the next choice is the beginning of finding your way back - then the next choice after that - then the next after that - soon you will be back rolling down the road and heading to bright and stronger days. I wish you full wakefulness to all your choices this year on your amazing Best Choice Right Now Road.

11/23/2023

Thankful for all my friends and family and faith

Thankful for friends that became my family
Thankful for family that have become friends

Thankful for the people that woke me up
Thankful for the people that have helped me sleep

Thankful for hard days that helped me bring good people close
Thankful for my best days where I could help good people in hard places

Thankful for steadfast & forgiving hearts that allowed my misses to sit in the past
Thankful for my own compassionate self forgiveness that allowed me to move to my future

Thankful for embracing a truth - Life is bigger than me
Thankful for being embraced By this Big Forever Life ( ✝️🙏)

I am thankful for Peace that reigns over Perfomance

And the Performance fueled by Peace

that allows us to do right by this most gracious and beautiful thing - the gift of life ❤️

11/19/2023

Be mindful what you fill your mind with.

“Study after study shows that many of those who consume media about traumatic events will develop symptoms similiar to PTSD. Being glued to a screen can even be worse than actually being there; one study found that individuals who took in a more than six hours of coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing in a day showed more signs of acute stress than those standing at the finish line.” - America the Traumatized, by Ana Marie Cox

11/17/2023

Keep this note to self: Just take it one day at a time. Enjoy this life and break out of the endless day mode.

Earlier this week I watched the Lady Bird Diaries and my favorite quote from the documentary was

“Sometimes I think the greatest courage in the world is to get up in the morning & go about the days work “ - Lady Bird

Our mind can be so taken over by the weight of responsibility…. Keeping it together that we stare at a looming wall closing in - that we fear we will surely hit - physically, mentally.

It’s ok to pace and hold life loosely enough to

- just meet the day.
- to pace yourself and take breaks to enjoy the day
- and release the day

We don’t have to carry the payload of years of work pushed into a blind and tiring grind

We don’t have to work like we are living in a 24/7 endless day.

Don’t just pack in the world at full tilt - plan your days so you can also enjoy your life.

Make small daily space for a little peace for your Peace Self

There is no rush to a finish because it always moves. Just enjoy your forward motion.


❤️

11/03/2023

It's taken me awhile to process, pray, and provision within myself the strife and pain this world is enduring and relate it to peace over performance as we meet such daggered edged divide and suffering - humans hurting humans.

Social media and so many other performance-based forces in our life can pull as very far away from ourselves. Peace-based forces, pull you not only back into your true core, but back into your home base of the goodness that is alive and vibrant in you. Sometimes we have to see past and ignore the anger and discord around us (not to dishonor what others are experiencing) but to know from where in ourselves we are giving back to a hurting world.

To lead with your always worthy, always loved, always learning Peace Self you cannot lose your very own touchstone of you. And - that being the "you" who is actually not bound to others validation- but more powerfully, the "you" - bound to an untouchable love. And specifically, the love that drives everything else that you do in your life for yourself and others.

Love rises to create abundant light - hatred drowns to a lonely darkness...

To rise above things - we ourselves have to know where we are above these things and past them. In love. And then we are equipped to lead.

Leaders - take people to places that maybe they haven't imagined yet.

Leaders are re- framers of the forward over the past.
Leaders are re-framers of how we can see each other over how we judge each other.
Leaders are re-framers of what commonly matters over damaging divides. Leaders are re-framers of possibility over problems.
Leaders are re-framers of compassion over control.

Ultimately leaders understand that the only fuel to life giving performance is the peace of always worthy, loved and learning -- unbounded in a hurting and harming world.

10/03/2023

The job can’t take all of you all the time ….

Just like we may falsely allow performance to create our peace - instead of allowing peace to create our performance …

We may also allow intense demands of a job define our absenteeism to managing our health - instead of allowing the attendance to our health management define the job we have

Moreover…. 🙂….

Work routines that prohibit you from exploring your performance in different ways BEYOND the job is not sustainable -

Life routines that protect you from attaching your whole identity to your job performance is sustainable ….

See the research to bring this home here
❤️👇

Although the benefits of physical activity on general well-being are widely acknowledged, there has been a lack of research on how it impacts outcomes at work, including job performance and health. Approximately 200 employees from the UK and China participated in a 10-day study in which the authors....

10/01/2023

Sunsets are wonderfully symbolic of letting go

Sometimes we can’t have any access to our always loved, learning and worthy - Peace Self because our our determined, achieving and responsible- Perfomance Self is holding on to way too many things or involvements in life…. Trying to keep up. What we are holding on to is keeping us from what we are able to grow into ….

There are words in Proverbs that speak to treasures tied to trouble. There is a time to uproot ourselves from these troubled treasures.

You and I have things / maybe even relationships we USED to treasure but now - they have lost true meaningful connection - other than - it’s something or someone we need to keep up with. The shine is gone.

So what needs to be sunsetted?

Three questions so ask -

What would give me peace if it wasn’t in my life ?

What is in my life but drains me entirely?

What part of my past doesn’t belong in my today ?

08/06/2023

Today this summer Sunday - Wishing everyone the peace that you get only when you take a break - - slow down — get alone — and connect with a quiet place in nature unaffiliated with performance or time.

We all can normalize a clock speed of life that is packed in with constant interactions and activity… people around us all the time, things on the to do list, busy work schedules ….busy weekend schedules - the there is an undercurrent need beneath this: you need your quiet time ❤️…

You need your place where peace is offered to you by the nature of the place itself. There you can set down all the things you carry to “be on” in your most geared up Performamce Self - the Peace Self needs to touch down in its very own home base …

For rest in the body
For the resetting of busy thoughts
For the reclaiming of truest self

Here you take a full breath, outside the push of the world where you can be freely unassociated with anything promoted - your brand, your book, your message, your company or work. Just you is ok - and there you accept yourself quietly and graciously.

I wish you time in this place today