My son is going to graduate from college this spring. He goes to a film and media school for college, a decision that stemmed from so many factors: his love of Disney and Pixar from an extremely young age, our …
Tag: Learning
The Whys and Why-Nots of Narrative Change
I went to the Eras concert tour this summer with my daughter. She has been a Taylor Swift fan ever since she was a preteen; in fact, I took her to her FIRST Taylor Swift concert when she was 13, …
The importance of reflective capacity
The other day, I was doing an interview for one of the kabillion case studies I signed up for this year* and the person I was interviewing, who struck me as a lovely, thoughtful person, used a term called “reflective …
Being up in your own head about work
It feels like every week brings another bad workplace story. Last week, Rolling Stone published a piece about Jimmy Fallon creating a toxic workplace environment on his show, Late Night. The piece included numerous reports from former and current employees, …
Being seen and rewarded at work
A dear friend and former colleague of mine emailed me the other day. She recently retired from an organization where I had worked for many years, most of them closely with her, and to this day, she remains one of …
Opinions: Mine, and Everyone Else’s
This post contains my opinions on a few hot topics and I want to start by talking a little bit about opinions in general. (Yes, I know I’m sharing opinions on opinions before I actually share opinions on specific subjects—I …
What it means to be good at communications
I wrote a piece a while back about the joy and the pain of being a communications professional in the social sector, meaning, those of us who communicate for positive social change. This piece is a sibling to that one, …
The conflict between communicating and leading
I have always believed that working in communications involves creative thinking. My day-to-day work involves a great deal of creation—messaging, stories, language that I hope will resonate with target audiences. And this is the part of the work that I …
Communications as understanding
I think one of the most painful things I’ve had to hear for the past several years are people’s stories about how they’ve fought to maintain good relations with their loved ones who have swallowed Fox News storylines hook, line, …
Muscle memory and work
I took several years of piano lessons as a child; my level of skill would kindly be described as “intermediate.” I still play occasionally, though—my parents gifted me the very old Steinway upright that I first took lessons on, which …
