Tag: Inspiration
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You Can’t Help Yourself
I grew up with a single mother who was friends with other single mothers. Several of them had their own businesses. I often heard them bashing men and saying things like, “I don’t need a man to be happy.” While ontologically true, many of them attempted to enter into relationships with men or other women…
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The Time to Shine is Always Now
The time to shine is always now. If people are surprised to see me rapping now, there’s more to the backstory you don’t know. A lot of people don’t know this. But my mom was basically a part of early hip hop. She used to be called JoSi, The Queen of Rhymes and she had…
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Disconnected: Lessons Learned From Social Media Silence
At 8AM on October 12th, I started–what was meant to be–a 24 hour social media fast. But, if you follow me online at all, you know it was for much longer. I was initially calling it an “intermittent fast”. But once I crossed the three week mark, I think intermittent was out the window. And…
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Giving Up a Dream to Receive a Vision
Dreams are overrated and not for everyone. In fact, after living a life where I have worked in almost every type of organization with almost every type of person, in numerous different cultures and backgrounds, I can affirm that for most of us, a dream for our lives is a distraction to living the reality…
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If We Can Laugh Together, Maybe We Can Last Together
I need a reasonably decent sense of humor to do the work I do, bringing people together across differences and helping people discover their capacities to affect positive transformation in their communities. I have to see the comedy in everything even if not all of it can be turned into a joke. That is because,…
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Fear of an Equitable Workplace (FEW) and the Quiet Quitting Deception
By now, you’ve probably come across a plethora of articles aiming to explain this seeming phenomena being touted as “quiet quitting” or “quitting in place”. As I see it, this label attributed to folks who–for the most part–have failed at QUIT QUITTING, is a way of adding fuel to the fire known as THE GREAT…
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I Work For Your Organization. And You Can’t Stop Me.
In Mandarin there is a phrase that goes, 水涨船高 (shuǐzhǎngchuángāo)–literally water rise boat high–which basically comes down to the often expressed wisdom that we hear in American economics, “a rising tide lifts all boats”. A lot of people attribute the saying to John F. Kennedy. But it turns out he got it from his speechwriter,…
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Despite Reverence for Variety and Diversity…
In reflection, I wonder if what makes so many “well meaning” folks show up so hypocritically (myself included) is the unexamined discriminatory brain function that tells me, “Weeds are magnificent models of creation and I don’t want them in my yard.”
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Tools for Creating Greater Belonging
Belonging is an essential need for every person. And, creating greater belonging is the main ingredient for community thriving and healthy democracy. But what do we do when our ability to foster belonging reaches its limits? Or when we are frustrated with being excluded from the communities that profess to be welcoming?
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Is This the Face of Fear?
Someone responded to a poem I wrote by saying I was an ignorant religious person, divisive, and a bad writer. I’m not fishing for compliments. So, don’t worry about filling my bucket. Rather, I’m just wanting to look at this philosophically. What I’m thinking about is the question of how or if one should try…
