Getting Unstuck – Cultivating Curiosity

The Takeaway In this episode, I travel to Berlin, Germany, and the Bebelplatz, a large square in the city's heart. A university borders one side, a church another, and the opera another. Behind me is one of Berlin's main libraries.  Sitting atop one of the buildings is an outdoor bar with large colorful umbrellas to shield the patrons. As calming as the setting is today, it was anything but on the...

Guest Tammy Hader, with a BBA in accounting from Wichita State University, her professional history resides in numbers. In 2018, after a 30-year accounting career, Tammy reinvented herself as a writer. She is an essay writer at Medium, BizCatalyst360, The National Association of Baby Boomer Women, BabyBoomer.org, and WebMD. Tammy is also a contributing author in the Daily Gift Book Series. Walking...

Guest Doug Peacock is a Vietnam veteran, author, filmmaker, and naturalist – and none of those words do him justice. He is a relentless protector of our physical wilderness and its creatures. Here's a link to the full bio of an extraordinary individual. https://dougpeacock.net/biography Summary Doug Peacock's lifelong fight for American wilderness and grizzly bears began after witnessing the devas...

Summary In this episode, I travel to Wannsee, Germany, a suburb of Berlin, where on January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazis gathered in a villa to resolve various aspects of the "final solution of the Jewish problem." I need to stand where terror and genocide were launched on a continental scale.

My co-host in this episode is a fellow podcaster and someone I am proud to call a friend – if only a virtual one at the moment, Steve Miletto, EdD. Steve has been an educator in Georgia(US) for 36 years. He has served public school families as a history teacher, assistant principal, high school principal, and RESA Executive Director in the Heart of Georgia RESA (8 years) and now with North Georgia...

Guest Matthew E. Berger is executive director of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. He oversees the foundation's programs to raise awareness about hatred against Jews and to monitor and analyze antisemitism on social media. As executive director, Berger is leading FCAS' launch of "Stand Up to Jewish Hate," a multi-platform advertising campaign to educate non-Jews about modern antisemitism and...

Guests Kevin and Sue Harter are the proud innkeepers of Rockwell's Retreat, the former residence and studio of Norman Rockwell in Arlington, Vermont. Summary Kevin and Sue began their dream and journey of owning an inn more than 25 years ago. Life intervened, and they got busy raising a family, working, and moving around the country. In the summer of 2019, they made an impulsive visit to the Norma...

The Takeaway In this episode, I trace the mental and physical journey I took recently in the Netherlands to grasp the murder of more than one hundred thousand Dutch Jews during WWII at the hands of the Nazis. I wanted to move beyond the number and get to the human beings. Physically, the journey took me to several Holocaust-related sites in Amsterdam: the old Jewish Quarter, the Anne Frank House (...

Guest Mike Magee is President of Minerva University since April 2022. Prior to joining Minerva, he was the founding CEO of Chiefs for Change, a non-profit organization supporting leaders of many of the nation's largest and most innovative K-12 public education systems. Previously, Magee co-founded and was CEO of Rhode Island Mayoral Academies (RIMA). As CEO of RIMA, he built a statewide network of...

My guest Renée Smith , MSOD (she/her) is the founder and CEO of A Human Workplace, a global movement and consultancy committed to making work more human. She led award-winning culture work as a state executive and served in the Governor's Office as Director of Workplace Transformation for the State of Washington. Smith is a researcher, writer, and speaker who's reached hundreds of audiences worldw...

My guest Renée Smith , MSOD (she/her) is the founder and CEO of A Human Workplace, a global movement and consultancy committed to making work more human. She led award-winning culture work as a state executive and served in the Governor's Office as Director of Workplace Transformation for the State of Washington. Smith is a researcher, writer, and speaker who's reached hundreds of audiences worldw...

The Takeaway In this episode, I share thoughts about a tour I recently took in the Hurtgen Forest World War II battlefield, which sits between Belgium and Germany. The Hurtgen Forest was the site of the longest battle the U.S. Army engaged in during World War II, and it is widely considered an egregious failure of strategy and leadership. I wanted to understand why the battle was fought, what elem...

Guest Kirk Wallace Johnson is the author of The Fishermen and the Dragon: Fear, Greed, and a Fight for Justice on the Gulf Coast, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, and To Be a Friend is Fatal: the Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind, which covers his efforts on behalf of Iraqi refugees as the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi A...

Guest Bernard Beitman, M.D. is the first psychiatrist since Carl Jung to systematize the study of coincidences. A graduate of Yale Medical School, he did his psychiatric residency at Stanford University. The former chair of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia medical school for 17 years, he writes a blog for Psychology Today on coincidence. He is the author of Meaningful Coincidences...

Guest A veteran San Francisco radio broadcaster, Joanne Greene currently hosts two podcasts -  "All the F Words", in which two writer friends nearly 30 years apart explore issues that begin with the letter "F" and "In This Story…." Joanne's 3-minute essays, set to music. In June 2023 she publishes By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go, her inspiring and growth-filled memoir through and emergence fro...

Guest Mark Reid is host of the "Zen Sammich" podcast and a maker of traditional handmade Japanese paper, called washi, where he lives in Yamaguchi, Japan. Before that he was an attorney, beginning his career as an Assistant District Attorney in New York. He's also been a professor of English at three universities in Japan and a graduate teaching assistant at Florida State University in Religious S...

Guest Jennifer Jane Young is an Intuitive Business & Leadership Advisor and Founder of The School of Intuitive Leadership. She helps entrepreneurs and leaders find the path of least resistance, make the biggest impact and create sustainable, aligned success through intuitive leadership. Jennifer is also the author of the forthcoming book, Say Yes to Your Yes – How to trust your gut and take the le...

Dr. Alan Stern is an aerospace executive and planetary scientist with experience on 29 space mission teams, 14 of which he played a principal investigator role. Among those, he is the leader of NASA's New Horizons, the first mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt—making the farthest exploration of worlds in history.  Summary Our conversation explored a number of questions: Why was the explor...

Guest Valerie Gordon is a 10-time Emmy-winning television producer with over 20 years of producing and overseeing award-winning content for HBO, ESPN, CBS, and the Olympic Games. She knows what makes a story meaningful and memorable and the incredible power of stories to engage, educate and entertain. An engaging speaker with innovative programming, Valerie offers audiences and individuals the sto...

Guest Hal Herring is an award-winning journalist and contributing editor at Field and Stream magazine. He is also the host of the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Podcast and Blast. Summary The debate over public and private land and water in the United States has raised concerns over public access to natural resources. While large tracts of land are being bought up in the West, the major consequen...

Guest Jeanine Cowen is an active media composer and educator. She is the chair and professor of practice of the Screen Scoring department at the University of Southern California. Formerly the Vice President for Curriculum and Program Innovation at Berklee, she is an experienced and skilled educator and innovator. She is an active freelance composer, music producer, and sound designer focusing pri...

Guest Rick Locke was born and raised in Erie, PA.  He earned a BS in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA in finance from Rutgers University. Rick's professional career in information technology spanned 39 years.  He completed his career as Chief Information Officer at his last two companies and retired in 2014.Rick became interested in photography around 1980.  He learned the...

Guest April Vokey is a  fly fishing writer, fly-tyer, and speaker . After guiding in British Columbia for ten years, she now splits her year between camp in northern BC and Australia. She is an FFF certified casting instructor, forager, bowhunter, and mother. Summary April Vokey can't help but look at life differently. From a very early age, April loved fishing and hunting. She's decided to shun q...

Summary In this podcast episode, my cohost, Steve Miletto, of the " Teaching, Learning, Leading K12 " podcast, and I talk with Elizabethton, TN High School teachers Daniel Proffitt , Jason Clevinger , and Patrick Roberts . Elizabethton is an XQ Super School with a mission to build a culture for learners to think and act as changemakers. This episode discusses how the school actualizes this mission...

Summary Cindy House is the author of Mother Noise , a memoir in essays, and is a regular opener for author/humorist David Sedaris on his tours across the country. She teaches in the MFA program at Lesley University. In this brief episode, we follow Dr. Christian Busch's 3-part process to showcase a beautiful example of personal serendipity — the act of creating personal smart luck. Social Media >W...