Posts Tagged ‘gratitude’
Aisle. Up. Out. How Crisis Lessons Drive Career Success
The water doesn’t care how you feel about it. On January 15, 2009, I stood in the aisle of US Airways Flight 1549 as the Hudson River poured in through the back of the plane. I was the last passenger out. In the minutes after both engines failed, an old phrase took on a meaning…
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Seek the Mission First: The Miracle on the Hudson Survivor’s Case for Purpose Over Profit
I did not choose my mission. It chose me, on a river, on a Thursday afternoon in January, when I was the last passenger off US Airways Flight 1549. I had spent years building a career in enterprise sales leadership, and none of it prepared me for what I learned standing in that aisle. Five…
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Strategic Effort Prevents Exhaustion: Robbins and Hudson River Lessons
I once worked eighty-hour weeks for an entire quarter and finished with less business than when I started. A mindful strategy for sustainable performance A mindful strategy for sustainable performance That sentence still stings to write. In my enterprise sales career, I was young and grinding through the ADP years. I had convinced myself that…
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After the Miracle: What Odysseus Taught Me
I sat in a theater watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and about halfway through, I stopped watching it as a movie. I started watching it as if it were my own life. Homer’s story begins right after the Trojan War ends. Odysseus should be able to go straight home to Ithaca. Instead, the journey stretches…
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From Miracle to Complaint: A Lesson in Gratitude
Ten minutes. That’s how long it took for a miracle to become a complaint. I was on one of the first commercial flights to offer transatlantic wifi. Think about that for a second. For the entire history of flight, once those doors closed, you were gone. No calls, no emails, no way for the world…
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Are You Being Restored, or Re-Storied? How Changing Your Narrative Builds Resilience
There is a difference between those two words that took me a long time to fully understand. Restored means you go back to what you were. The original condition. The baseline before the disruption arrived and changed everything. Re-storied means you build something new from what you went through. Not back to before. Forward into…
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Why Delayed Gratification Builds Leaders Who Perform Under Pressure
I want to tell you something that took me most of my life to fully understand. Every result worth having made me wait for it. Not because the universe was being cruel. Because the waiting was the preparation. Because the season between the intention and the outcome was where the character was being built that…
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The Greatest Gift Tony Robbins Ever Gave Me
Tony Robbins would occasionally give me advice. He gave me something bigger than advice, and it changed the direction of my entire life. I want to tell you what that gift was. But first, I have to take you back to the night everything changed. The Night of January 15, 2009 A few hours after…
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They Were There When I Needed Them Most: What the Miracle on the Hudson Taught Me About Gratitude
I did not walk into Palisades Medical Center on January 15, 2009. I was brought in. Cold. Wet. Still processing what had just happened on a river that was not supposed to be a runway. I had been at the triage center in Weehawken, New Jersey, in the minutes after US Airways Flight 1549 went…
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The Pen That Survived the Miracle on the Hudson: A Leadership Lesson in Affinity
I lost my Montblanc pen on January 15, 2009. It was my “closing pen.” The pen that I used to ask my clients to approve agreements. I bought that pen in 1994 when I was in enterprise sales for ADP. I did not think about it at the time. When US Airways Flight 1549 hit…
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