Recent Blogs

The kids are back in school! Now it’s time to focus on you!

You just dropped off the kids for their first of day of school. Thanks to you they had the right clothes, the right supplies and the right attitude. You’ve spent hours planning after-their school activities. For the next year they will have the opportunity to expend their minds, make new friends and reach new heights.

What about you? What are your plans for the year? What are you going to try and master? What goals are you going to reach before the end of the school year?

As women we are fabulous caretakers, so much so that m…

There are only a few real rules in writing. In fact, there are so few rules to good composition that the best-ever book on the subject, The Elements of Style, is only 105 pages and tucks tidily into a Kate Spade handbag.

In business writing, and especially in writing essays for business school applications, there’s one big rule above all else: Answer the Question.

Most of you reading this blog have written business memos – even if your boss hasn’t specifically asked you a question, you know there’s a qu…

I had the opportunity to talk to some second and third year law students this past weekend. Even though they had only completed one week back at school, I could tell they were gearing up for another year full of too much work and too little sleep. You don’t have to be a busy law student to feel drained and disconnected. The following 5 questions will help you assess what changes you can make to get back more time in your day.

1. Do I Need a System? Systems are specific and consistent processes you follow to give structure to certain tasks. For example, I helped coach a client to dev…

Like many, I had been searching for that path to my deeper self and to a more meaningful life. I never could have imagined the events that would ultimately show me that path. Given the choice, I would have certainly opted for another path, but so much that comes our way in life is out of our control. I discovered that the only control I did have was that over my responses to life’s up’s and down’s. It was hair, or the loss of it, that showed me my deeper self and allowed me to connect with women across the world in far deeper and more meaningful ways. I now feel that baldness has been …

In the 1950s, there was almost no separation between the diagnosis and radical treatments for breast cancer. My grandmother, thinking she was being anaesthetized for a breast biopsy, awoke to find that both her breast and chest cavity were gone. This disfiguring surgery involved the removal of all her breast tissue, her lymph nodes, and her chest wall muscles, as well as part of her rib cage.

Just a few years later, my 36 year old maternal Aunt underwent the same radical procedure, resulting in the same disfiguration. Not only was reconstruction not an option in those days, women diag…

There’s been a lot of MBA-bashing lately and I’d like to join the conversation to provide another point of view. If you’re looking to someone else to determine whether an MBA is a worthwhile investment, then you probably shouldn’t pursue this path. People who want an MBA can feel it in their bones and there isn’t anything anyone can say or do to stop them. Their mantra is, “MBA or die!” I know because I’ve been there. I was a former long-shot liberal arts major whose destiny called from a b-school application.

My b-school experience was transformative and remains one of the highlights…

“The cobbler’s children go unshod.” It occurred to me recently that many of us are living our lives like that proverbial shoemaker. Sadly, this phenomenon isn’t limited to the family of the poor shoemaker. In fact, the English phrase is actually a translation from a Spanish proverb that says, “In the blacksmith’s house, the knives are wooden.” Sound familiar? I’m betting this is resonating with at least a few of you. How many of us have wonderful expertise in our craft that is highly sought after and in great demand, yet we don’t practice what we preach? What does that say to others?…

Quick recap on the mundane topic of lawyer bios – then to my discovery.

It started with Matt Homann’s post “Your Clients Don’t Care Where You Went to Law School” which the ABA Journal remarked upon in “What a Famous Husband’s Bio Can Teach Lawyers About Better Drafting” (ABA included my pet peeve, being, most lawyer bios “lack personality, life, vibrancy, interest.”). The “drafting” theme (sins actually) was really expanded upon in Robert Ambrogi’s “The Art & Science of Lawyer Bios“.

Mundane topic. Maybe. However, for professionals who reside in the realm of referrals and word-of-mou…

Erica wrote in an email to me today:

Last night, I went on Hardball with Chris Matthews ([youtube.com]) to talk about how politicians of both parties are fostering a dangerous environment of prejudice against Muslims – and furthering their personal ambitions in the process. The appearance was the result of a video released yesterday by the Agenda Project which connects the leading politicians from both parties to the attack on a Muslim taxicab driver in New York on Tuesday.

[youtube.com]

We created “Hate Begets Hate” …

I followed the suggestion of Laura Day this morning to write a reality tale of how what I want came into being. I wrote a story about how my desire to be a published novelist manifested. It was a good exercise that I recommend to anyone who is creating something new in their life. It put me in that place of having it already.

But it also got me to thinking how we sometimes write these stories in our head of how things are supposed to unravel and hold too tightly to what we think it should look like.

I have dreamed of one day writing full time for most of my life. My fear of not being g…