Blog
Your Story Matters: leading and living your creative best
Welcome—so glad you’re here. Do you, like me, want to work more creatively, lead lightly, be productive, and design the life you want to live? Are you curious about how storytelling can help you can engage others and shape meaning? If so, I hope you enjoy these posts and I look forward to hearing from you!
In case of panic, try this.
Anxiety is hovering in the air, like a cloud that might let loose with a storm of bad news at any moment. How can you protect yourself if a torrent of anxiety threatens to fall? I experienced one last week, and I used some very simple steps described below to calm and...
Finding the art of the “new normal”
First of all, it's OK. Whatever you are feeling, or doing, it's OK Life today is not normal. How can we hope for normalcy when planetary normalcy has been disrupted? It takes courage, daily, to stand tall and say to ourselves, “This is the new normal.” Given the...
Stop demonizing when there’s so much to learn
My go-to default for almost anything, miserable or exciting, is learning. I would have rephrased Descartes or Hamlet or whomever to say, "If I can learn, I am and that is never a question." COVID-19 has opened the door to a slew of learning opportunities. Zoom is now...
Make your own heart sanitizer
You, like me, may be feeling overloaded by news of COVID-19. People are stocking up on hand sanitizers, (Hopefully not like the bloke in Tennessee who bought 17.700 bottles thinking to price gouge.) If you need any, why not make your own? It's just as good. (Recipe...
COVID-19 can teach us more than handwashing
This post is not another list of precautions about the coronavirus. You doubtless have them already. I won't deny the enormous cost of the outbreak, including the tragedy of lives lost, businesses grounded, families disrupted, events canceled, teaching curtailed, and...
“All shall be well again” (I hope)
Trust. It's not the easiest quality for me to find in these dystopian-feeling days. So I turned to a fourteenth-century mystic who somehow managed to find hers in the darkest of times. Julian of Norwich, an anonymous anchoress (recluse) lived during a time in which a...
How to sing our arms back open
Darkness makes the light stand out. When I was traveling in France after my mother's death, I sought out the prayer candles stored in the shadowy corners of village churches. Even though I'm not Catholic, I'd light a candle for Mom, letting it glow in the dark as I...
Why I won’t “manage” my rage
I ran into an artist friend of mine before a concert last weekend, a gracious, considerate, soft-spoken woman. In a brief "how are you?" we looked into each other's eyes and found a common answer: rage. In that instant, we dropped pretending that "It's OK," (we're...
3 steps for handling environmental stress, bird by bird
On Sept. 19, 2019, the New York Times published a devastating statistic about declines in the bird population across North America, citing research quoted in Science Magazine. Since 1971, numbers had been reduced by almost 30%. How can we deal with such an...
Finding more of enough
How do we know when we have found "enough?" That question propelled me to read prize-winning author Shauna Ahern's just-published memoir: Enough: Notes From a Woman Who Has Finally Found It. While Shauna is best known as "The Gluten-Free Girl," this book is a...
Eight tips to interview like a pro (and have more fun talking with people)
These ideas come from four years of interviewing a captivating group of guests on my Vital Presence podcast. If you're not recording interviews, adapt these ideas to when you're being interviewed (it never hurts to know what your interviewer is going through). Or, use...
An easy way to discover more delight, daily
How might your life be different if, every day, you tracked on delight? I stole this idea from a poet. One of my reading finds at the end of the year was The Book of Delights by poet Ross Gay. Gay challenged himself to identify and write about a delight each day for a...
Before you resolve, absolve (plus a gift for you)
I hope I'm not too late. I wanted to catch you before you make any...resolutions. Tonight, before the clock strikes twelve, whether you're in New York, India, or our soggy Northwest, you may be tempted, as you stand before a slightly soused group of friends, to...
Finding hidden madonnas everywhere
Next week, we enter a new decade. This week, as we move through the days between the years, it seems a good time to spend a few minutes exploring what is mysterious, beautiful or holy around us. A Christmas Story My Christmas was quiet this year, but on Christmas Eve,...
How to welcome back the light
Welcome to the season of light. Whatever your faith, the light, in the Northern Hemisphere, can shine in radiant contrast to the dark around us. But during this fly-by-get-ready-for-the-holidays time of the year, do we take time to appreciate both the light and the...
Before you give, learn to receive
Did your mother ever tell you, “To give is to receive?” She was partly right. What she forgot to add was, “To give with an open heart, you must be able to receive.” Giving and receiving belong together, like inhaling and exhaling. But giving typically gets more of our...
How to find Magic in the Ordinary
Last weekend, our furnace quit. That meant no heat and no hot water. We warmed the house by turning on our stove's gas burners. My husband chivalrously carted buckets of hot water from the kitchen to the bathroom so that I could take a bath (sacred evening ritual)...
Three crazy super-easy ways to add thanks to your life
Many of us in the United States are preparing for the November marathon known as Thanksgiving. While not as intensive as Christmas, it still involves (assuming you’ve invited people over): inviting guests, scanning recipes, cleaning the house, buying and...
Finding fiery hope
"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act." Rebecca Solnit How do we join our hope and rage together? Isn't it time to join Greta Thunberg and rage about the insufficient...
Where in the cycle are you?
To everything (turn, turn, turn) There is a season (turn, turn, turn) And a time to every purpose, under heaven Pete Seeger (and Ecclesiastes) When I first arrived at our island home almost fourteen years ago, I started to garden like a madwoman. This was...
Your blog is an ongoing tonic for the soul, and a reminder of what’s possible.
Stephen SilhaWow! You keep writing the most pertinent, passionate, and clear articles I have the pleasure to read. Bravo!
Doug LipmanAs always, Sally, I am dazzled and inspired by the elegance, eloquence and relevance of your writing…
BIll Veltrop
Meet Sally
She’s an inspiring communicator, an original thinker, she weaves big ideas and practical examples together to help her clients take their next big step forward. She teaches leadership presence by modeling it.
She is visionary and practical, vulnerable and solid, accessible and real. A perpetual learner herself, she’s not afraid to take risks to develop the talents of her clients.
Engaging Presence
