If I were to ask you what a plant needs to survive - what might you say? Water… Sun… Dirt… Nutrients… Imagine what a plant looks like right now. I bet an image of something sitting in a pot, or in the ground, comes to mind. This is likely because most plants, while they may look different in nature, are roughly the same. They need soil. They need water. They need Sun. This is also the image we are given when we are very young: potted plant, maybe with a flower growing out of it. For those of you that have a green thumb, you may already be disagreeing with me, which is good because you know that all plants don't actually need dirt. While most plants can also grow in a hydroponics system, a system designed to replace the soil with nutrient-supplied water, there are some plants that don't need the system at all.

Exactly two hundred and one weeks ago, I started a weekly email called the Sunday Starter. The first post was called How to Start When Starting is Hard. I find myself thinking about it in this first post of 2025, three and a half years later, because I am thinking about creating an audio version of these posts. I have been thinking about it for a while, but like any new thing that we want to start, it feels daunting. How do I know this is the right move? How can I be sure that it will be worth the effort The image of the Roman god Janus I think is very fitting when it comes to setting goals…

Today, is my 200th Sunday Starter. That’s 3.5 years of consistently sending something out on Sunday mornings. Now, if you’ve been reading this entire time, then you know that some weeks were better than others. Some weeks, I was barely crawling (Crawling). Some weeks, I took breaks (Rest) or ran reruns (Vacation Mode). And some weeks, I wrote something I was very proud of (The History of Pink). I love that the 200th happens to coincide with the New Year. It is a time when many people are setting resolutions and the reason most people don’t follow through on those resolutions is because they forget to factor in consistency.

One of the many benefits of owning my own business is that I have the flexibility to say yes to things that I wouldn't have been able to say yes to in the past. This morning, for example, I got to choose not to work so I could decorate cookies with my nephews. After a few hours, just before nap time, I put on my bright red coat and started putting on my shoes. Why are you leaving? One of them asked…

Lately, when people ask me that common question strangers ask, so what do you do? I’ve been trying to shift my mindset from saying what I did/do I work with change management in IT product migrations, to what I do/want to be doing more of, which is I am an author and speaker. The reason I am intentionally trying to make this mental shift is because I know the importance of Identity when it comes to achieving our goals.

You know those little libraries some people put outside their homes? Well, the last time I was in upstate New York at the family home in Hannawa Falls, I put my book into two different libraries. When I was up last week for our third annual trip for Thanksgiving, I was excited to check them to see if someone had taken it.

You’re walking down the sidewalk on a very hot sunny New Jersey day. This was the only time for you to get a workout and so you went, but you can feel the sweat dripping down your face. As you walk down the path, you see a large branch blocking the way. It’s big enough that you can’t step over it but small enough that you could move it aside for future pedestrians. My question for today is, would you move it?

When I went to post my Sunday Starter for this week, which was on an entirely different topic, I remembered that in the USA it was the week of Thanksgiving. Since I was feeling particularly thankful for all the amazing things this year has brought me, I decided to delay my other post a week so I could write about it. Before I began, I wanted to see what I had already written on the topic; with this week's post being #195 (cannot believe it's been that many!) I went to my website and used the search to make it easier. I searched for words like Thankful, Grateful, and Gratitude which surfaced many posts, but nothing I found was fully themed around the topic. Great! I thought, I'll write about Thankfulness and Gratitude. My mind was focused on my new business and how great everything had been going. So many things to be thankful for. Before I start though, let me see if anything comes up for Thanksgiving…. The first search result was last year's Thanksgiving post, Won't you be my neighbor? When I re-read it, I immediately started crying.

In SCRUM project management methodology, there is something known as the Definition of Done (DOD). The purpose is to align the entire team and the stakeholders with their vision of success. Without the DOD it is all too easy for one person to think they have reached the end, when others think there is still work to be done. When you have budgets, timelines, and resources to work with, this can have drastic impacts to a project. Defining done makes it clear what success looks like. In our lives we might not always have a specific goal or project that ever reaches a done state, but we do have expectations for ourselves on what success looks like. Recently, I realized that my definition had been drastically off.

When it hurts to talk, you start to choose your words more carefully; when every utterance is a strain, you start to realize how many words aren’t worth saying at all. Instead, you start to listen more, think more, and save your comments for when it really matters. I think every human should have laryngitis at least once a year, so they get that very important reminder: just because you had the thought, doesn’t mean it’s worth saying….

I wrote those words several weeks ago when I was sick with laryngitis, but I’ve been thinking about them a lot this week. I’m not sure what your hopes were for this election, but I will be honest…

The first week of March 2020 I got on a plane to fly to Houston, Texas. COVID-19 must have just been starting to become a concern because I remember I questioned whether or not I should shake the client's hand when I arrived. I finished that engagement and flew home, not realizing that it would be the last time I would travel for work for the next 4.5 years.

I dislike the word management. As a change management specialist, it is built into my title and yet I dislike it very much. I even more so dislike it when its referring to managing people. If you look at the dictionary definition of management, you'll understand why: management is the process of dealing with or controlling things or people. I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of someone viewing their role as needing to deal with or control me. It immediately puts a negative connotation on the idea; someone or something is broken, and they need to fix it. The way to thrive on a team or in an organization is to remove this idea that you need to deal with your people and replace it with enable your people.

Recently I started running on a track again. While I usually prefer the twists and turns of winding aimlessly through the streets of my town, the soft rubber surface of the flat track was a nice change of pace. I had intended just to finish up my three-mile run but as I finished mile three, I decided to run some intervals. Intervals are when you run a chosen distance at an increased pace, and then slow down for a chosen distance at a decreased pace. Then you do it again. And again. And again...

Many of us involved in this AI wave find ourselves using the phrase “it’s not the magic bullet.” This is because the expectations of stakeholders who invest in bringing AI tools to their organizations find themselves disappointed with the current capabilities. In my experience the products themselves, while they are new and filled with room for improvement, are still rather remarkable. The disappointment doesn’t come from the product but in the expectation of the product. People wanted a magic bullet, and they didn’t get it.

Today is the first day in a while that I am sitting down to write. It's been almost two months of being my own boss and yet all the time I thought I would now have has quickly gone to other things; even with a more flexible schedule the task of writing is one that still remains difficult for me to start. I used to think it was that I didn't have enough hours in the day but now I can clearly see that time is not the problem but rather instant gratification...

Have you ever paid of a lot of money for a fancy dinner and then been disappointed in the outcome? The steak was good, but was it $50 good? If we never have to eat there again then we'll feel a little annoyed that we wasted our money, but we'll move on; we learn from the bad experience and eat some place different next time. But what about decisions that last longer than a meal?

I’ve been at the airport for a few hours now, stuck at Newark because of a storm. With my headphones on and lightning streaking across the sky, I have found the most perfect flow; that moment when you become so fixed on what you’re doing that everything around you fades away, a feeling of bliss descends, and you know you could do what you’re doing forever...

A few years ago, Andrew and I were at a wine tasting near Niagara Falls. We walked into the small winery and over to the counter to sample what they had. The first wine was poured; Andrew took a sip, noting the flavors that stood out to him. I then took the same glass from him and had a sip. I also noted those flavors but then picked up on something different...

Sometimes, as humans, we are irrational; we don’t always know why we’re upset. When those moments happen it’s hard to articulate what we need because we don’t know. Sometimes, there’s nothing that caused it, which means there’s no amount of rational discussion that can fix it. This summer I had a day like that...

A while back, I went to a two-day conference to develop my public speaking skills. One of the owners and leaders of the event, Michael Port, wrote a book called The Referable Speaker. In the book he gives guidance to people like me who have gotten to a place in their career where...