I remember the moment it happened.  I was in an elementary school art class and the teacher – a woman with strawberry blonde, disheveled curls – gave us a large sheet of tan construction paper and a crayon and told us to put the crayon on the paper, close our eyes and draw.  When we opened our eyes we were to examine our creation and decide what it was.   Mine was a man delivering a pizza in a box.  That was the last time I remember being satisfied with a drawing of mine. [Read more…]

Where does inspiration come from?  I wonder about this as I notice an idea energize me or a string of words in my head turn into a poem.  Often I feel something stirring inside my stomach – kind of like the whirling of a small ball of energy and if I pay attention to it, it often lets me know there is something brewing that I need to bring to the fore.  When I wrote my novel, Rosie’s Blues, the inspiration came from a woman I had seen on the streets many years before.  Her appearance struck me because she was dressed in all white – and I was captivated by the way she walked slowly down the street, clearly in distress, yet almost ghostly in her appearance.  I never forgot her and ten years later she became the voice for the protagonist in my novel.  She stirred something in me and that is currently one of the ways I understand inspiration. [Read more…]

When I heard Robert Gass, co-founder of Rockwood Leadership Institute, explain the difference between change and transformation – it was a powerful moment of clarity for me.  “When you undergo a true transformation,” he shared, “you never go back to the way you were.  So many organizational and personal change efforts fail,” he continued, “because people only pay attention to one or two areas of the wheel of change (hearts and minds/structures/behaviors), but don’t fully address all three.” [Read more…]