"Sometimes an insight is worth a life’s experience." —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. One of the ways we can change our behavior is to have an insight and then work with that insight until it becomes a habit. Research about the brain has informed my thinking about this: We...

Have you noticed how young kids are into sunglasses? It’s no longer just a thing for adults or even teens. Two-year-olds and three-year-olds love sunglasses. It doesn’t matter that they can hardly keep them on their faces or that they are indoors. It’s not about the...

Recently, I was walking out to my car to retrieve my instructor notes for a class. As I walked to the parking lot, I was thinking about how to introduce Cindy to the participants in the class. It’s always an honor to have Cindy attend, and I like to acknowledge who...

Yesterday in a meeting, one of the participants was a young woman who said she had been in one of my training programs 15 years ago, and she had repeated one of the stories to her children many times—so much so that her teenage daughter recently told her, “Mom, I get...

I recently had a strong reminder about how important conversation is in each of our relationships—how essential it is to find a way to engage in quality conversations—the kind that often get pushed to the sideline by all the distractions of doing life. Cindy and I...

In my last post, I reflected on the notion of life questions as a way to engage your children in different and perhaps more interesting conversations. I appreciate those of you who thought about this and responded. The questions certainly need to fit your child’s age,...

There are a number of ideas that weave and work together in life. • Our sense of connection in a relationship is determined by the kinds of conversations that we have together. • Asking different questions will produce different conversations. • Listening and...

One morning while making coffee I noticed a photograph we have of granddaughter Zoe sitting on the table while we unloaded groceries. This is when she learned the word for cold by touching the ice cream. For a while we played the game of cold and not cold. You’ve...

Ever get caught off guard by something your child says or does and then realize they learned it from you? Our kids and grandkids are watching us all the time. They are learning from us how to be in relationships, and they are learning about how to act out in the...