Getting Unstuck – Cultivating Curiosity

Summary Steve Jobs famously said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward." Today's guest would respectfully disagree. As guest Dr. Christian Busch writes, "serendipity is not just about a coincidence that happens to us, but it is actually through the process of spotting and connecting the dots do we start to see bridges where others see gaps." This...

Guest Ted Merwin , Ph. D. is a Senior Writer for the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA). Before coming to JFNA, he worked as AIPAC's Synagogue Initiative Director for the Mid-Atlantic Region. For many years, Ted taught Judaic studies at Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pa), where he was the founding director of the Milton B. Asbell Center for Jewish Life. Summary Look between the slices of rye...

Guest Lee Ellis is a nationally-recognized leadership coach, award-winning author, certified speaking professional* (CSP), a Vietnam Veteran and former POW, and USAF Colonel (Ret) | President, Leading with Honor Summary Some of the most interesting writing on leadership has come from active and former military personnel, but Lee Ellis has the added dimension of learning leadership lessons the hard...

Guest Founder of "Cherish Your World," Laura Stale y facilitates healthier connections to home, others, and self through decluttering, Feng Shui, and emotional intelligence. She's the author of Abundant Heart, Live Inspired, Let Go Courageously and Live with Love: Transform Your Life with Feng Shui, & the Cherish Your World Gift Book. Summary For good reasons and bad, we surround ourselves with th...

Guest In 2011, coach and author Jane Duncan Rogers was devastated when her husband died.  However, six years later, with two books and a TedX talk to her credit, she now runs her not-for-profit, "Before I Go Solutions." Its mission is to create a world where people are at ease talking about and planning ahead for death.  It helps accomplish this by providing products and programs so people can cre...

Guests Jeff Carver is an English teacher who has been working in New Orleans charter schools for the last nine years.  Before teaching, he spent the good part of a decade working in music and advertising.  Nia DeCoux is a writer, educator, and activist who believes that when done well, storytelling and teaching become the same practice. Her work has been honored by both the National Foundation for...

Guest — John Dietsch is an award-winning author and writer/producer best known for supervising the fly fishing scenes and doubling for Brad Pitt in the classic OSCAR-winning film A River Runs Through It. J ohn's latest book, Graced by Waters , explores our connection to the outdoors through the prism of fly fishing and investigates its transformative and healing power in the face of loss. John cur...

Guest — Rhonda Broussard is an author, entrepreneur, and futurist. One Good Question: How Countries Prepare Youth to Lead is her first book. Broussard is an award-winning education entrepreneur and sought-after public speaker. She is the founder and CEO of Beloved Community, a national nonprofit committed to sustainable economic equity in schools, the workforce, and housing. She is a 28-year educa...

Guest Dr. Nate Zinsser is an expert in the psychology of human performance who consults with individuals and organizations seeking a competitive edge. He has been at the forefront of applied sport psychology for over thirty years. From 1992 to 2022 Dr Zinsser directed a cutting-edge applied sport psychology program at the United States Military Academy's Center for Enhanced Performance. He is the...

Summary — Award-winning food and travel writer Sylvie Bigar found herself in 2008 "writing more about food than travel and had turned into a stroller-pushing Upper West Side Mama." Needing to "escape," as she admitted, "she decided to head to France to research cassoulet, that "slow-cooked carnivorous orgy of pork, lamb, duck, beans, and herbs stewed together in an earthenware tureen." A quick, fu...

Guest Bill Whiteside is a sales and marketing executive turned software salesman turned writer of narrative non-fiction, specifically a forthcoming book about an incident in Winston Churchill's tenure as Britain's Prime Minister during World War II.   Summary In this episode of "Getting Unstuck—Cultivating Curiosity," I talk with Bill about the process of writing, which he's detailed in a new book...

Summary Reflecting on past decisions, actions, and accomplishments can be a springboard to future action or a recurring regret for what we didn't do, impacting our ability to focus on the present. Takeaways √ Western society has slowly eliminated or reduced physical challenges to find food, build and take shelter, flee from predators, and avoid overly risky decisions. But that has resulted in us b...

Summary Debbie Danielpour, an award-winning screenwriter writer, and I examine how screenwriters and speakers use objects to grab their audiences' attention at a particular moment and for a particular reason. This is an abridged — and enhanced — version of episode 219. Takeaways √ Objects can be used by screenwriters or speakers to focus an audience's attention the way dialogue can't. √ Objects ca...

Summary Like the powerful question organizations need to ask — "Why do we exist?" — "Why do I do what I do?" is a powerful question we should all ask ourselves periodically. Takeaways √ "Why does our organization exist?" is a powerful question that everyone in an organization should be able to answer uniformly. If they can't, the organization's purpose and people are likely out of alignment. √ Mis...

Summary In this episode, my friend and fellow podcaster, Steve Miletto , and I discuss the "next big thing," the next chapter in our lives, the "one more" challenge we want to tackle.   My guest Steve Miletto is the Executive Director of North Georgia Regional Educational Services Agency, which provides professional development services and support for 5 school systems in North Georgia. Steve is i...

Summary Central to any focus on change are some looming questions: why change, how to change, and how to overcome obstacles. Looking broadly at change across many fields, what intrigues me about change is the engine that drives it, and that's curiosity. And curiosity is not just a point in time; it's a process : helping people to pause, reflect, ask questions, gain clarity and then change.   My gu...

Summary Research has shown that curiosity can make us happier, increase academic achievement, and increase our emotional intelligence. And of equal importance, as today's guest explains, curiosity is a divining rod in our search for creativity — a key ingredient of long-term business and personal success.   My guest My guest in this episode is Dr. Caroline Brookfield , a veterinarian, stand-up com...

Summary Obstacles standing in the way of progress often seem insurmountable. Leaders who remain adaptable, flexible, and pause to give themselves time to assess options increase their likelihood of breakthroughs. And very often, the solution to the problem sits within the problem itself.   Takeaways √ The seeds of a problem's solution are usually contained in the problem itself. √ Effectively prob...

Summary Much of the teaching profession is in turmoil. Thousands of teachers are leaving the field for a variety of reasons. Among them are: • Teachers exhausted and dispirited after pivoting to remote instruction during the pandemic — and now having to quickly make up for "lost learning." • Teaching has been increasingly politicized through limitations on the content teachers can cover and how te...

As leaders, we can often fall into the trap of focusing most of our attention on the work of achieving desired outcomes. While achieving outcomes is critical for organizational success, authentic leaders also focus on how they are showing up to lead the people doing the day-to-day work to achieve those desired results. Focusing their attention there forces the leader to be vulnerable, to think mor...

Summary There's a lot of talk about why organizations need to have a purpose — why they do what they do on behalf of those they seek to serve — and to have that purpose go beyond being a mere marketing tagline. What's equally challenging to get at is how an organization defines its why, how they get staff buy-in — or better yet, staff input — and then has the discipline to choose activities that w...

Summary In this episode, I talk with Megan Miller , who, at an early age, discovered the power of learning a foreign language and now works to empower others who want or need to have a bilingual voice. Megan is the founder of Aprovechar Language Solutions, LLC, whose mission is to empower anyone needing a bilingual voice. She offers a personalized, habit-based approach to teaching Spanish and Engl...

My pulse quickens whenever we leap into the unknown of space, be it with the 2015 New Horizons flyby of Pluto, or the launch of the new James Webb telescope on December 25, 2021. And so, I experienced that rush on September 26 when the D.A.R.T. spacecraft designed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA was intentionally slammed into a tiny asteroid at some 14,000 miles...

One part of life that I've become really curious about in the past few years is dying. I didn't think about it at all when I was in college and played racquetball on a Saturday morning following a little too much end-of-the-week celebration the night before. There were moments in the four decades that followed when death reared its head — close friends from my college years passed away, and I lost...

"As it turns out, personal finance is like touching an electric fence that you didn't know what electric. Managing our money is not a math problem; it's a behavioral problem." Carl Richards is a Certified Financial Planner™ and creator of the Sketch Guy column that appeared weekly in The New York Times (2010-2021). There, he used simple illustrations to introduce calming financial advice and couns...