Margie’s Insights & Interviews
Welcome to Margie’s blog where she shares personal stories, interviews, tools and more for living bravely.
Five Ways To Bolster Your Resilience For Tough Times
Resilience is crucial to our success in the bigger game of life. Not only does resilience help us to cope better with major crisis and traumatic experiences, but it helps us cope better with the smaller, more mundane, events and circumstances that often take the biggest toll on our health and happiness on a daily basis.
Oh, how easily we can veer off the path of integrity.
Athletes, educators, corporate heavyweights, religious ministers – none of us are immune to the temptation to surrender self-respect for self-interest. All of must remain vigilant about whether we are stepping into a slippery grey zone that is often hard to retreat from. Integrity doesn’t come in shades of grey. Living and leading with integrity means that we must tune into our conscience to guide our decisions, and refuse to compromise on what we know is right regardless of how inconvenient, costly or politically inexpedient it may be. That doesn’t mean we don’t work to find mutually agreeable solutions with those around us; it just means we don’t sell out to our principles for the sake of our ego, our status, our hold on power, or bank account.
Hardships needn’t harden the heart. A lesson from Cambodia.
While no-one I know has ever had relatives executed or brutally tortured, few people I know have escaped loss, hardship or heartache. The truth is that wherever we live, life will bring its fair share of struggle, sorrow and setbacks. As I was reminded time and time again in recent weeks, while our adversities can shape our lives, they don’t have to define them. Rather we have to make a conscious choice how we will respond to life when it fails to conform to our plans, our hopes and our expectations.
Is “False Pride” doing you a profound disservice?
When I took on the role of “Kyle Comfort Services Manager” I couldn’t afford to be too proud. I had bills to pay, and wanted to save money for more adventure travel. Yet I constantly encounter people who let a false sense of ‘pride’ – driven by a fear of losing face and maintaining a certain image in the eyes of others – keep them from doing things that would ultimately serve them.
Nigella Lawson, Domestic Abuse and Saying “Enough!”
While the future may be looking very uncertain for Nigella, one thing is not. That the pain in her private life is now in the public domain and that millions are cheering her on to be the strong woman we’ve always seen her to be – not just in the kitchen, but in her life beyond it.
Do your big dreams overwhelm you? Focus on the step directly ahead
Martin Luther King Jr once said, “You don’t have to see the whole stair case, just the first steps.” And so when it comes to doing something that leaves a wide cavernous gap between where you are now and where you ultimately want to be, don’t think that you need to know how to bridge it before you take the first step forward.
What matters most is knowing the direction you want to head, even if you aren’t clear on a specific end-point destination (I sure wasn’t at eighteen!) Once you know the direction, then think about what you would like to be doing 12 months from now that would be moving you toward it. Then think about what you’d be doing 6 months from now. Then 2 months from now. Then 2 weeks from now. Then tomorrow. Then today.
Life rewards action!
Is Facebook making us lonely? Why we mustn’t hide behind technology
As our online networks have grown ever more expansive, our relationships offline have thinned, leaving many people feeling more alone with fewer confidents than they had in the era “B.F.” (Before Facebook.) As social media appeals to our vanity and vulnerability, we must be vigilant not to hide behind the technology in communicating with the people around us, escaping the ‘real work’ of addressing the issues which arise in real (and truly authentic) relationships.
Why you are wired for inaction!
we human beings are wired to be risk averse. In other words, we find it much easier to settle with the status quo, keep our mouths closed and our heads down rather than to make a change, take a chance or speak up and engage in what I call a “courageous conversation.” When weighing up whether to do something that makes us vulnerable to failing, losing face or some other form or loss, we have an innate tendency to over estimate the size of risks and under estimate our ability to handle them.
Angelina Jolie’s Choice: Being Decisive Amidst Uncertainty
If Angelina Jolie’s bravery has a lesson for us all it is this: That sometimes life calls each of us to decisive amidst uncertainty; that sometimes after weighing in all the probabilities and measuring out the pro’s and con’s, we each need to tune out all the noise and opinions around us and turn inward to listen the voice within making whatever decision feels most right for us, even if we’re not 100% sure it’s 100% right. We then have to trust ourselves more deeply to meet whatever challenges those choices may give rise to.
How do you define success?
Is how you define success keeping you from achieving it? How you define success determines not only how successful you feel throughout your life, but how successful you become in terms of the impact you make on those around you, the quality of your relationships, and the value of the contribution you make along the way. Taking time to decide how you want to measure your life, framing those measures in ways that enable you to feel enjoy success today – and tomorrow –enables you to stay more purposeful, more courageous and more optimistic, even when your efforts don’t produce the outcomes you’re working toward. Which, let’s face it, can be more often than we’d like.
Moving the apostrophe in MOTHERS’ DAY!
As you go about getting your mother a token of gratitude this Mother’s Day, think about also about how you can help support the millions of equally deserving mothers (as well as their daughters) in those parts of the world who’ll never get to experience the joy we’ve come to associate with Mother’s Day. As Nicholas Kristof, author of Half the Sky wrote in his New York Times column, it’s time to “think about moving the apostrophe so that it becomes not just Mother’s Day, honoring a single mother, but Mothers’ Day – an occasion to try to help other mothers around the globe as well.”
Are you “shoulding” on yourself?
Don’t should on yourself and don’t let others should on you. This term was originally coined by Dr Fritz Perls to describe people who let others expectations and judgements determine what they will do and say ahead of what they truly want for themselves. I’m sure there are people who think that as a mother of four I shouldn’t be gallivanting off to the far side of the world for two weeks of book/self-promotion. But here’s the deal, and what I had to remind myself of this morning:
How can I tell my kids to follow their dreams if I’m not following my own?! Who say’s I shouldn’t?! And why would anyone else’s opinion matter more than mine?!
Say No to the GOOD to make room for the GREAT!
Making changes to our regular schedule, much less our life, is not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it. If it were, I wouldn’t be falling on my sword right now! But whether in our work, relationships or how we manage our daily lives, sometimes we are called to make a change, to let go the familiar, and say no to something that is “good” to open up the possibility for something better.
Are you living by default or design?
Indeed there’s a science to success when it comes to achieving goals and making life changes – whether on January 1st with your New Year Resolutions – or any other time of year. On the link below are 7 strategies to help you make the changes you want in the year ahead – including making the right resolutions to begin with. I hope you will read it, but more so, I hope you will apply them so that 2013 will truly be the best year of your life. Not because everything will go as you want, but because you be firmly at the helm of your own life – living by design rather than by default.
A Marathon Like No Other: The Ultimate Call To Courage
The marathon is an event that challenges those who enter it to dig deep into their reserves of strength, determination and courage in order to cross the finish line. Many didn’t get the opportunity to finish this one. Yet if ever there was a marathon that challenged us to dig deeper and called us all to greater courage in an increasingly fearful and turbulent world, it was this one.
Out of work? The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Job Seekers
Losing your job is tough, whether it had everything to do with your performance or nothing at all. But regardless of why you lost your job, it’s how you respond in the days and weeks that follow that will set you up to get back to work quickly and successfully. Here are 8 keys to helping you do just that.
Margaret Thatcher – An icon of Courage
Margaret Thatcher once said, “You can’t lead from a crowd.” She certainly didn’t. However it would be a mistake to think that she didn’t have moments of doubt, nor fear the wrath she would face by standing up against the powerful unions of 1970’s Britain. However her conviction to stand by the principles over rode her fear of the consequences for doing so. When many might have cowered, she stepped forward. When many may have watered down their stance, she held firm to hers. And when many might have succumbed to the pressure of their peers to take an easier path, less frought with conflict and volatile emotions, she kept walking straight along the only path she saw would create the changes Britain so needed.
“Courage is…”
Courage is saying ‘Enough!’ to the fears that urge you to play safe, speak safe, love safe and live safe, knowing that becoming vulnerable to you fears lies at the heart of everything worthwhile.
Ten years. Four kids. Five homes. Seven lessons learned.
Ten years ago today my son Matthew arrived into the world. As I made the kids a special celebratory pancake breakfast this morning (complete with chocolate milkshakes and a special operatic rendition of Happy Birthday) it dawned on me that it’s also ten years today that I became a mother of four kids. So I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on some of the lessons I’ve learnt since..
Lesson # 1. Forget perfect…
Know any “Emotional Vampires?” Surround yourself with energy givers, not takers
When we surround ourselves with people who believe in our success, it makes success so much easier to achieve. And so if you want to achieve something exciting, or make a big change in your life, it’s crucial to deliberately surround yourself with people who will support you and cheer you on, particularly when the going get’s tough. (Sometimes they may also give you an equally much needed kick in the pants.)
