Passion Power

I’m taking a wild guess you don’t have to venture too far in your friend or family mix to find someone who’s in trouble with alcohol.  I’m not talking about sharing a bottle of wine at dinner or having a couple of cocktails after work.  That’s not problem drinking.  I’ve watched most of my friends gradually dial it back from twenty year old drinking to fifty year old drinking.  I think it’s called drinking like a normal person. The problem drinker is a binge drinker or a blackout drinker.  They drink because they are bored or lonely.  Hide their drinking.  They drink to constantly change how they feel.  They drink when they’re upset.  They drink with dinner, before dinner, after dinner, making dinner.   They drink until they throw up, pass out or both.  They drink because they can’t stop.  Unfortunately as family members we enable them.  Don’t want to upset them by calling it out so we tip toe around them inst...

Grief, funerals and loss remind me of the sobering reality that life is precious and short.   Sorrowful times leave us numb.  We recognize there’s a lot of hullabaloo going on out there about nothing.  Atrocities feel like a heavy burden.  We try and find our way back to a peaceful state as a means of survival.  I wish people the right kind of quiet.  The kind of quiet that feels like a warm yellow blanket.  A permission slip that says it’s perfectly reasonable for you to not be feeling okay right now and doesn’t insist we be anything but ourselves.  Where nature becomes a sanctuary and time softens sharp edges.  I’m wishing you the kind of quiet  that hears a gentle rain or a light breeze moving the trees; where thoughts become flowers and strife is replaced with care and understanding. It is the healing kind of quiet that you marinate in, where you are alone but not isolated.  The type of solitude that welcomes e...

When I first started writing I didn’t understand the plight of a writer.  I thought it was just me.  Writer’s block.  Hell ya.  Who do you think you are writing?  Nobody wants to read your shit.  Writers have one thing in common. They don’t write. Many of us give up before we let that happen.  Before we even start we’ve packed it in. Martha Graham wrote “we are never satisfied with our work.  Creative work is a queer divine dissatisfaction that keeps us marching and more alive than the others.”  This speaks right to me.  There is no satisfaction at anytime even after you’ve arrived and I’m strangely comforted by this. Anne Lamott teaches us to write short assignments shitty first drafts and look through 1 inch picture frames.  We do that for awhile and it seems to settle us down a bit until the next storm hits.   “How’s the writing” someone says so innocently.   I hesitate to call myself a writer because i...

Introduction..   I'm sharing the very best of what I know with you in this article.  I stumbled into my first sales job 20 years ago.   I started out as an administrative assistant for a leasing company.   They still had carbon copies back then, (wow.  I'm old)  and I was a terrible typist.  I had already gotten fired from my first job as a Dictaphone typist for making too many errors.   I was let go from another job because I was unwilling to go down the elevator, stand in line at Druxy's sandwich shop and purchase lunch each day for the gentleman I worked for.  He was one of the Partners in a large accounting firm downtown.  They had two coffee breaks  each day in which one of the girls, (thank God it wasn't me) had to go around with a cart to all the offices and offer the Partner's  coffee;   I believe there was 11 of them.  The coffee was poured to their liking and delivered r...

One day your life just takes a completely different turn.  One partner doesn’t want to work on the marriage anymore.  They bail.  Give up for whatever reason.  Stop pretending you didn’t know it was a possibility that your marriage could end in divorce.  Statistics don’t lie.  It won’t happen to our love should be replaced with,  it could happen to our love. Here are 7 things I’ve learned about divorce. 1.      You become strangers quicker than you thought possible and everything you thought you knew about the other person was a lie. Your best friend becomes your enemy.  Pulling in the driveway feels uncomfortable so you park on the street. The person you slept beside is no longer allowed off the mat in your entranceway. 2.     You can’t control how your ex handles the divorce.   Why can’t we be friends?   Because it doesn’t work that way. How was your day is a loaded question now....

Sales is really quite simple and not nearly as frightening as some people think. If you’re a new business owner or just starting out in sales you may be feeling a little intimidated by the sales activities involved in promoting your product or service but don’t sweat the sales stuff.  You just have to get a list together of why your service or product is of value to your prospect and be willing to promote it.  Always be willing to answer this question; what’s in it for them?  You need a straight forward and honest approach when prospecting. You have to be naturally confident.  Pull it off something like this, “Here’s what we offer. This is what we do really well.  Here’s what’s excellent about our products. Here’s the value for you and this is how much it costs.”  Everyone can relax when there are no games being played. I like to teach salespeople 3 things.  Establish Key Players . If you don’t talk to the decision maker you’ll waste a lot of t...

It’s a great way to control what they say about you.  While you decide for yourself whether it’s an outlandish, morbid or self absorbed idea, here's mine.  Mom’s going to miss rainstorms and the smell of warm scented wax.  She’ll miss fighting with my dad whether to open the windows or turn on the air conditioner. One day she drove us to school and realized we weren’t in the car.   Mom loved herself and never apologized for it.  She had so many passions and interests it was hard for her to pick so she didn’t.  She just did them all.  When driving us around she would point at trees, flowering bushes or a beautiful orange sky and would practically run us off the road. We use to yell at her. I kind of regret that little now. When we were 2 and 3 years old she took us to McDonalds.  Amy got stuck in the tube slide at the very top the same time Kay bolted across the busy restaurant in her red rain boots heading for the toilet and disappe...