Earlier this month, I facilitated an off-site retreat with one of my non-profit clients.  This organization has had quite the year with many successes but also a high level of pressure.  As we designed the session, we wanted to make sure there was time to celebrate the successes.

I feel like I rarely get sick, and I credit that to living a pretty healthy lifestyle. I prioritize sleep, exercise regularly (not enough strength work), drink water (not enough), take supplements, and try to eat pretty well (but I love french fries, pizza, wine and cheeseburgers a lot too.)  But, sometimes, living a healthy lifestyle isn’t enough, and our body forces us to slow down because we often don’t do it ourselves.

A few days before Thanksgiving, I sent a group text to gather expectations from my family about what would make Thanksgiving Day a great experience for them.  I’m sure there were a few eye rolls when the text came in, but everyone went along with it and shared what they wanted most from our day together…

Many of us celebrated the US Thanksgiving on Thursday, and I’m sure we all experienced many emotions influenced by our relationships and the circumstances we find ourselves in.

I hosted one of the monthly Leadership Endurance Round Tables earlier this week. The focus of our discussion was on Leadership Endurance: Preparing for the holidays and the year-end sprint.  We got into a great discussion about how we see the “race” we’re running and why we’re doing it which led to setting an intention for the next six weeks or so:

In a client meeting earlier this week, we were talking about priorities and which meetings made sense to defer based on more pressing deadlines.  One of the leaders shared an interesting perspective when we identified a specific meeting to skip…they said, “unless you’re procrastinating on purpose,” and shared that they sometimes do this themselves.

As you’ve heard me start talking about more recently, leadership is an endurance sport, and we need to treat it like this vs. a sprint.  Part of that endurance is finding ways to manage our heavy emotions during a crisis because we’re not just responsible for ourselves…

At least for me, when I feel like this, I start focusing on all the little things that might be contributing to this feeling. This year feels like a lot of unsettled moments, particularly related to my living situation…

Earlier this week In the group coaching session I’m part of, I was sharing that I hadn’t made progress on the items that I took last week.  I knew there were a lot of competing priorities coming - a training session, move prep, speaking at a conference, closing, moving, and unpacking.  Adding something new might not happen but I was optimistic that I would have knocked it out last week because it was just about writing an email and reaching out to ~10 people.

Last weekend, one of my Facebook memories included photos of the Pennsylvania Ragnar Road Relay I did with a team of 12 women in 2 vans last year, each running 3 legs over about a 36-hour time window.  As you would expect from a relay, part of the experience is handing the baton (or something to represent it) off to the next runner. Each time you handed off, there was a…