You’ve GOT to be looking to the year ahead right now, right?
Over this past week I’ve heard people talking about just making it through to the end of the year.  

You, a leader, are designing the end of your year.  You’re leveraging the time you have to make your difference now AND in the future.  

The turning of a calendar page really is THAT significant.  While it doesn’t have to be, what it represents is closure. And it represents starting anew.  


YOU GIVE IT SIGNIFICANCE

Leverage That

Here’s the point:  You can give ANYTHING extra significance.  

Deadlines and end-goals add significance.  That’s their purpose, by the way. Leverage them for yourself, for your team, and for your personal relationships.

Whether you produce one unit more of whatever it is you do or you do one more squat or take one more step or clean up one more thing or eat one less bite to get to whatever goal you’re after…...

(source unknown)

You overcome multiple obstacles daily and, in doing so, you have developed strengths that have gotten you through.  Congratulations… Yes, there’s more.

Leaders become GREAT leaders because they continue to build character.  Leaders who reach a level of success and stop working on themselves, fail.  They fail themselves, in the process letting down their organizations, their families, and their community.

Your character isn’t something that stops needing work.  The person that you see that is a man or woman of good character isn’t born that way.  Character is chosen by every decision, every single day.  

Your choice to engage on a particular path for your products or services says a lot about you.  Your choice in how you communicate that to your prospects, your current clientele, and your colleagues says a lot about you.  How you engage with your family pet before engaging with your family member as you...

YOU are in my circle and whether or not we’re on the same path (of course we’re not, you have your own path), I’d like to think that we can both challenge AND support each other along our different paths.  

Having just watched a compelling video released by Trent Shelton, I was struck by the part where he talks about people who say they support you but aren’t really there for you.  It’s a tough one to think about.  I think the message needs to be that they’re not really there for you in the way YOU want them to be there for you.  When you invest in growing yourself, people don’t tend to celebrate that. It can feel as if you are being dragged backwards or anchored to where you were.

Remember that people pick their own paths.  Sometimes their path of growth isn’t your path of growth, so what feels like being dragged back or lack of support is simply a fork in the road.

What support do you really need?
And, as a...

Whew – Thanksgiving is behind us.  We survived round one of family get-togethers. Now what?

In this week’s Wednesdays With Wayne, we’ll have some fun.  You get to observe the madness around you.  Because, here come the winter holidays.

Watch as the people around you become manic buyers and planners.  Watch as the people around you, who just celebrated “giving thanks” become focused on a practice that looks like not having enough.

You get to watch because you are blessed with the gift of perspective.

When you see it, you get to choose whether to participate in it or not.  

Here, I’ll urge you to think differently.

Keep that kindness you felt last week alive just a little longer.

Be a little nicer in the lines at stores and in parking lots.  Look at the faces of the people who are frantic and choose not to be one of them.  Relax your forehead and your jaw. Your life is different because you choose to make it...

We each have a lot to be grateful for and this week, Thanksgiving here in the U.S., gives most Americans an opportunity to give thanks and then, to binge-eat.  It’s a strange tradition that either brings families together or makes them want to cringe and hide out. You can admit that some people in your family treat you in ways you can’t understand.  You might also admit that you find yourself falling into patterns with family members that might actually cause them to respond in ways that you wish they wouldn’t. But they do. And they do because, well, you started it.

In fact, your relationship is up to you.  All of it. What you stand for, what you agree to, how you engage with others, how you let them engage with you.

A young woman just reached out to me to ask about how to respond to someone who is always right or, really, always needs to be right.  We encounter these people at family gatherings. It’s harder when that’s the person...

The world has been a mess since, well, since it has been around.  There has always been competition. Think about any era, any country, any snapshot in time.  There have been winners. There have been losers. There have been bullies. There have been heroes.  And a lot of who has been what has depended on which side you’ve been on.

Through it all… there have been people like us.

In this week’s Wednesdays With Wayne, I’d like to celebrate you – the builders, the supporters, the ones who give-a-poop.   (It doesn’t sound quite as strong that way, but you know what I mean!) You care. In fact, you go out of your way to show that you care.  You don’t do it for the accolades, the applause, or the parade. You do it because it’s right.

So with all the noise out there, with the world in chaos, be that center of calm, kind, love.  Be that oasis. Draw people toward you, not because you want them to come to you,...

My dad’s car flipped last week.  He’s 96. He went to the hospital.  He’s out of the hospital. And, he’s doing okay.

This kind of image gets you thinking.  You think about connection to others. You think about the fragility of life.  You think about resilience. You think about circumstances and who else was (or wasn’t) involved.

This picture of my dad’s car stirs something deeper and it had me going through a range of emotions… a really wide range of emotions!  Think of one, I probably felt it.  

And so, this Wednesdays With Wayne is for me.  AND… it’s for you.

As I cleared through the array of “feels,” I landed on one.  Sure, there’s synchronicity in that this month is November and (at least in the U.S.) we tend to focus on Thanksgiving.  

The emotion that continues to resonate through me is that of gratitude.

Yes, I’m grateful.
I’m grateful for my...

He storms out the door on a mission.  She’s left in whirlwind, facing her multiple job roles and tasks wondering when they, as a couple, will actually get to spend time together.  He knows she needs him, just to spend some time together, but he rationalizes - he’s doing all of this for her.

I’m writing my next book on relationships and this scenario is one that’s all too common.  Truly, it’s all too common. He beats his chest and storms the castle. She stays behind perplexed, juggling all of the tasks that she has and not needing the same recognition for holding it all together.  All she wants is time. Time together.

The pronouns don’t need to be He/She.  No matter the make-up of the relationship, the scenario of one partner on a climb while the other partner feels left alone means that there’s a mismatch of communication and values.  In high-achieving couples, each of the partners could be on their own climb....

We all have “stuff,” that baggage, the stories, the clutter – whether figurative or literal – that we need to let go of.  It weighs us down. We know it no longer belongs in our lives and yet, you and I have trouble letting go.

Inspiration for Wednesdays With Wayne comes from themes I’ve heard, coached, or had appear in some way on several occasions over the course of the week.  This week, I did A LOT of work on cutting through the noise and letting go of things that don’t belong.

Maybe it’s that article that you think you’ll come back to and read.  Maybe it’s that person – a hanger-on – who is more of a taker than a giver.  Maybe it’s a thing (even clothing) you bought that, because you paid for it, you’re keeping because you can’t stand to let it go and not get your money’s worth.  

Sometimes the stuff we need to let go of are thinking processes.  

What stories...

Leading the StuckAtTheTop™ Breakthrough Retreat this past weekend was an honor, a pleasure, and hard work.  Leaders from across the country came together to create their new personal vision for themselves.

The Wednesdays With Wayne challenge: Design what it will take to make this year your best year yet and creating the new version of your Best Self.

What struck me was that the way to get there was through exploring, honing in on, and then disclosing personal values in a very heart-centered discussion.  These high-achieving leaders each brought forth the things that mattered most to them.  

Think about that.  Could you, in front of a group of relative strangers that you had only just met recently, declare what your very personal values are?  It’s harder than it sounds and yet, these amazing people brought it.

Each of them dug deep to bring their unconscious thoughts into consciousness.  They sorted those out.

They personally affirmed those...