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Thursday, February 18, 2016


In all the reading I've done, I've never found a description of the notion of your personal vibration that resonated with me. I just stumbled across these words in a chat that, for the first time, made sense to me. I feel like it's basically saying, "Change your thinking. Change your reality." At the same time, it's saying that we're all connected at a basic energy level; something I believe.

"Every object has its own electromagnetostatic field of conciousness. Attracting atoms of the same vibration and repelling atoms of different vibration.

So if you change your own vibration significantly enough you will see movement and replacement with different vibration. Likes attract likes.

The electromagnetospherical balance is the foundation of the universe. Change your vibration and everything has to change too!" ~The Unified Mind

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

I'm starting a Crush of the Week ‪#‎COTW‬ practice where I pick a new thought leader every week and study their philosophies during the week. I'll share bits and pieces of what I learn. I'm sure my list will change over time....I'll update it as I go. Here's my initial
list:



  1. Howard Zinn
  2. David Suzuki
  3. Eckhart Tolle
  4. Dalai Llama
  5. Thomas Friedman
  6. Stephen Greenblatt
  7. John Gottman
  8. Deepak Chopra
  9. Marcus Buckingham
  10. Gabby Bernstein
  11. Gretchen Rubin
  12. Ray Kurzweil
  13. Michio Kaku
  14. Stephen Covey
  15. Stephen Hawking
  16. Malcom Gladwell
  17. Daniel Quinn
  18. Desmond Tutu
  19. Nelson Mandela
  20. Pema Chodron
  21. Helen Hayes
  22. Neil Donald Walsche
  23. Neil Degrasse Tyson
  24. Carl Sagan
  25. Hans Rosling
  26. Plato
  27. Steve Jobs
  28. Brene Brown
  29. Simon Sinek
  30. Jane McGonigal
  31. Elizabeth Gilbert
  32. Dan Gilbert
  33. Lao Tzu
  34. Wayne Dyer
  35. Ralp Waldo Emerson
  36. Ghandi
  37. Mother Teresa
  38. Martin Luther King
  39. Hilary Putnam
  40. Derek Parfit
  41. Thomas Nagel
  42. John McDowell
  43. David Chalmers
  44. Marth Nussbaum
  45. John Searle
  46. Saul Kripke
  47. Daniel Dennett
  48. Jurgen Habermas
  49. Maya Angelou
  50. Mastin Kipp
  51. Dacher Keltner
  52. Noam Chosky
  53. Lynne McTaggart

Thursday, February 4, 2016

My Change Formula

It doesn't matter what I'm working on, I see the process for creating change to be the same. It's what I call my formula for BLOOMING:


knowingness  + ritual  +  action

Knowingness. The key to any successful change is to start with data about where you are and what you want. I call this knowingness.

When I coach people, I take them through a process of defining their personal wants: who & how they want to be, what they want to do, what they want to have, and what they want to feel. Once they have this #knowingness, they have a place to start.

When I coach teams, I take them through a process of discovering their individual strengths and how their individual strengths help or hinder the team so that they can create better interactions.

When I work on programs as a Change Leader, my mission is to get everyone to become a fanatic about the To Be state they are trying to achieve. This knowingness of where they are trying to go helps them understand all the things that have to change to get there.

Ritual. Once you have #knowingness, you can start to identify the rituals, practices and processes you need to put into place to get what you want.

With people, I explore daily practices, habits of thinking, interactions with others, and rhythms. We also delve into their belief system so that any new rituals align and are supported by what they believe.

With teams, we examine current interactions (what works and what doesn't), how team composition affects those interactions, and implement proven process steps to improve the results of the teams' interactions, with special focus on the specific strengths and weaknesses of that team.

With programs, there are two filters I apply to any Change undertaking.
  1. How do I equip a project team understand and own their role in identifying and facilitating change? In any sizable project, it's virtually impossible for a single Change Lead to successfully identify all of the project's impacts. Projects are successful when it's project members understand that each of them should be always wearing a "Change Lead Hat" and contributing to the overall project change plan.
  2. What levers of change need to be employed to ensure that stakeholders progress through the change curve at the appropriate pace from project inception to implementation to adoption & sustain? The goal is to create a Change Plan that accounts for the end-to-end process and succeeds at getting impacted stakeholders heads, hearts and hands around why they should make a change.
Action. This is the fun part. It's putting all the work into play. Trying it out. Seeing if it works. Making it work. Iterating. Getting results.

And then moving onto the next change.....   :-)
~M

Monday, February 1, 2016

Don't Let Sunk Costs Undermine Your Future

I woke up this morning thinking about sunk costs or rather how sunk costs can get in the way of progress. Have you ever taken that first step in a effort to change only to have your head fill up with all the reasons it's not going to work? Among those reasons is the fact that you've done it that other way for so long and you made quite an investment (money, time, energy) in doing it that other way that there can't be any chance that this new way will work, so you should just quit now. In accounting, we called all of those investments made in the past sunk costs. I see past habits as part of those sunk costs.
If you have set your sights on a new destination, you can't let sunk cost play a role in figuring out how to get there. You have to throw out all of those habits and attachments to your past investments. They're irrelevant to your new path regardless of how important they were in your old. They'll only slow you down and may even stop you from getting to that new place.
So, the minute you find your thoughts wandering in the Land of the Past, stop it. Just focus on mapping your future.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

How My Cat is a Reminder Of How I Want to Show Up

Sometimes, when I'm working hard, on my laptop, 10 tabs open, focused on a goal, I'll find myself irritated that my cat is walking on my keyboard, sitting on my notebook, or entwining herself among my legs. My first instinct is to push her away so I can just get DONE with the stuff on my list.
Then I realize, I love that she comes to me for attention. I want her to keep doing it and if I push her away when she asks for attention, she's not going to come to me anymore. I will become the person that pushes her away; not the one that gives her love.
Psychologist, John Gottman, calls these interactions bids for emotional connection. Each bid can be reacted to in a variety of ways but they boil down to 3 simple categories:
  1. turning towards - receptive & reactive
  2. turning away - ignore
  3. turning against - aggressive
Each of our relationships are like this. In every interaction, we are defining who we are to the world and so, what anyone can expect of us.....and it's so important when we do this "contracting", we know what we want because we might just end up pushing the cat away when it was the laptop that should have been closed.

For more information of Gottman's findings, check out this article.

Friday, January 29, 2016

Structure is Important in Times of Change

An acquaintance of mine tells a story about how she was on the verge of leaving her corporate job and explore a new life when her barista gave her more than a cup of coffee. He offered these words of wisdom, "Structure is important in times of change." Those words have remained with me and continue to prove helpful.

When big changes happen in your life, they disrupt the habit of life. Sometimes, without that old list of things to do dictating your days, it's difficult to figure out the right new list of things to do. That's not to say that you won't find a way to be busy. It's just figuring out the right busy. So where do you start? I have long preached that you should start with your wants. Who and how do you want to BE? What do you want to DO? What do you want to have? Thanks to Danielle Laporte's The Desire Map, I'd add asking yourself what you want to feel.

Start with these simple lists and you'll find some goals. Once you have these goals, you can start figuring out what needs to be done to achieve them. Then, you can start chunking up your days accordingly so that your days don't become a slide into non-purposeful doing. Even unstructured doing should take place within a structure.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Beautiful Bravery is all around you.


How different would your work environment be if you paused for a moment and tried to see each of your co-workers as brave warrior of life? Beyond all of the office politics, who are they, really? I bet if you saw just a kernel of the REAL person, your interaction would change. Bravery comes in many forms and when I look around and try to find it, I'm amazed at how much of it there is. You don't EVEN need a viral video to see it (LOL). Beautiful bravery. Look for it.

You are not here merely to make a living.

"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand." ~Woodrow Wilson

I find this sentiment to be quite lovely and one that resonates deeply with me. Each of us play our part in this world. It's your job to contribute the beauty of your uniqueness. beYOU! ‪

~Michele
#‎beblooming‬

Sunlight or clouds. You choose.


I had a realization one day on a plane as we were preparing to land. We were moving from the spot above the clouds where the sun was shining brightly into the cloud layer. It came to me in an instant. Your whole view of the world could change in just in a few feet. You could believe the world was sunny and be right. AND you could believe the world was grey and cloudy and be right. So, if those truths exist simultaneously, I can choose which one I want to live with. I imagined myself suspended in the clouds, peeking my head above the clouds to find sunlight and then leaning down into the clouds. Sunlight. Clouds. Sunlight. Clouds. The same was true when I looked at the ground. Some places were sunny and others were dark. I could choose to go to sunny places. So, where will you choose to be today? Sunlight or clouds?
~Michele
#‎choosetobloom‬  www.bloominginexistence.com

Insatiably Curious & Rarely Bored

I keep waiting for LinkedIn to list curiosity in their skillset listing. I know it's something I value in employees. And it's not because I think those employees are more likely to come up with creative solutions. I find that people full of exuberant, insatiable curiosity not just at work, but in life, just feel more fun to be around. Maybe it's because I believe curiosity their curiosity is a basic indicator that they care. If you stop to ask a question, to wonder why, dive deeper, be driven to understand, it feels like you're honoring someone with your time, energy and mental bandwidth. I also think that curious people are a lot more likely to be engaged more, interested, and seeking & finding connections.

Maybe I'm not objective on the topic because I consider myself insatiably curious. I'm not saying it doesn't come with its drawbacks. (Here's where I say sorry to all of those close to me for the unending questions!) I've wished more than once that I could wonder less but I'm thankful that my curious brain is rarely bored. ~Michele

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Applying the Concept of Relevance to Achieving Life Success

I remember in the early days of the internet when the concept of relevance was preached as a key contributing factor to becoming successful in the medium. I think it's also an important factor in being successful at life. I'm not saying, by any means, that you should define yourself by whether others find you relevant; rather you should define who you want to be relevant to and purposefully devote energy to creating that relevance. Assuming that you've already got a grip on identifying key people in your life, as a change manager, the first step I would take in becoming relevant to someone else is to determine what motivates them and how they "hear" those motivations. I'm reminded of Gary Chapman's The 5 Love Languages. Once I understand how they hear, I can frame up the topics that are important to me to share in a language they understand and hear. Sounds like work, right? It is. Just the same way it's work for all of those websites trying to figure out how to appeal to their target customers. ~M

Monday, January 4, 2016

Back To Who I Am

Somewhere along the way, I lost the essence of me. I miss me. I know what it's like to bloom in my existence and I'm determined to find my way back to who I am. I'm starting now. I'm starting with a place that I know is a very real place for me. It's the place where I start eliminating the shoulds that have sneaked into my life making my life a list of things I should do, not a list of things I want to do. The end result is that the state of my life has become something I don't truly own deep, down inside because it doesn't feel like me. I don't connect with it. It's become something I manage but not something I'm immersed in. I can think of a lot of reasons for it but they don't matter. What matters is what's next.

The first thing I'm going to do is give myself permission to spending some time on regrouping....figuring it out, asking myself some questions and giving myself some answers. Ground rules: Trust my gut. Honor my wants. Remember it's okay.