an orphanage school near his home village, but he felt his destiny was to expand his mission in a larger way. Meanwhile Jeff was dealing with several other issues. An award-winning woodshop teacher, Jeff had gone on to become an internationally known designer/maker of fine, hand-crafted furniture. He had also gained recognition for his JD Lohr School of Woodworking near Philadelphia. Between furniture commissions and working through the waiting list of students for his school, Jeff's business schedule would have provided more than enough excitement for most healthy young men. Jeff, however, was also battling serious health issues. In recent years he'd survived a near fatal hea... posted on Sep 13 2015 (12,853 reads)

tend to have slightly lower levels of self-compassion than men, even while they tend to be more caring, empathetic, and giving toward others. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, given that women are socialized to be caregivers—selflessly to open their hearts to their husbands, children, friends, and elderly parents—but aren’t taught to care for themselves. While the feminist revolution helped expand the roles available to women, and we now see more female leaders in business and politics than ever before, the idea that women should be selfless caregivers hasn’t really gone away. It’s just that women are now supposed to be successful at their careers i... posted on Oct 19 2015 (29,584 reads)

a quarter century ago, at a gathering in Phoenix, Arizona, John W. Gardner delivered a speech that may be one of the most quietly influential speeches in the history of American business — a text that has been photocopied, passed along, underlined, and linked to by senior executives in some of the most important companies and organizations in the world. I wonder, though, how many of these leaders (and the business world more broadly) have truly embraced the lessons he shared that day. Gardner, who died in 2002 at the age of 89, was a legendary public intellectual and civic reformer — a celebrated Stanford professor, an architect of the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson... posted on Jan 13 2016 (16,352 reads)

country. Pauline Tangiora New Zealand Maori elder Pauline Tangiora is a lifelong peacemaker. She is a justice of the peace, a member of the Earth Council, and vice president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Aotearoa. Her work with several NGOs and international organisations seeking peace and respect of indigenous peoples has led her to becoming one of the pioneers of Rising Women Rising World movement. Helena Morrissey Helena Morrissey is a British businesswoman and mother of nine who is helping to change the face of British boardrooms. As the CEO of Newton Investment, she became to founder of the 30% Club, a movement which wants to see women ma... posted on Mar 4 2016 (17,836 reads)

(many more people could be listed), so some of it may feel specific to race. However, these rules apply beyond the identity of race; in fact, these rules only exist in the dynamic of intersections. Below are ten counterproductive behaviors that people who want to do “good” commit and must actively work to correct: 1. Quick to marginalize someone else’s experience. I was walking through a hotel lobby with colleagues. We were headed to a conference social, wearing business attire. There were quite a few conference attendees roaming around the lobby area at that time, all wearing business attire as well. It was a fairly loud, mingling setting. An older white wom... posted on Mar 18 2016 (40,076 reads)

am a Muslim by faith, originally from Pakistan. I ran a computer sales business for 12 years, but after the dot-com bust, business started slowing down. Then 9-11 happened and completely changed my life. I decided I was not going to be a victim and sit at home and cry. That was when my community activism began. Fremont, California where I live is an extremely diverse community. I felt I needed to educate people about who I am, by doing what my faith teaches me. In the Muslim faith, we are taught from childhood to know our neighbors in 40 homes within our radius, to make sure everyone is doing well, has food on the table. These are the values we grow up with. I started small &ndash... posted on May 10 2016 (16,126 reads)

now. Students who learn nature’s principles in gardens and serve their communities through civic participation become more engaged in their studies and score better in diverse subjects, including science, reading and writing, and independent thinking. Designing buildings to conserve energy and water can save enough money to convince finance-minded school boards. Going green helps competitive independent schools to attract students and local communities to attract residents and business. Students and staff members who eat better meals and spend their days in buildings with better air quality are absent less often, report higher satisfaction, and perform better. Schools becom... posted on May 21 2016 (15,606 reads)

how to deal with media, how to deal with other children about media. So we started having potluck dinners and reading things together, and talking to each other. This started in 1996-’97 and the nonprofit grew out of those exchanges, alongside the children’s center, which grew to include pre-school aged children during the day and classes in theater and crafts after school. The non-profit was formalized in 2000. The “umbrella” name is Ariadne’s Children; we do business as Healthy Media Choices.      Then one day this pivotal moment came when we were making bread, six little children and me around a table—we made bread frequently—... posted on Jul 11 2016 (21,403 reads)

lead] us to behave, in our worst moments, like impulsive, out-of-control sociopaths.” The way out of the paradox, he says, is using “power that is given to us by others...” Reflecting on this, I shared the following story at that week’s Awakin Circle I attend in the bay area: In the early 1990s I was excited to land a job as a principal with a prestigious training and consulting firm in Silicon Valley. We delivered leadership programs to management teams in business and government. We were excited about our work and thought of ourselves as having two agendas. The explicit, obvious one: to help organizations accomplish their mission by improving leadershi... posted on Aug 19 2016 (15,076 reads)

raise his daughter. When his mom passed away two years later, Miles says he became more determined than ever to create a healthy environment for his family. “I’m all she has, and she’s all I have,” he said. “I had to build a whole new relationship with my daughter, while building a whole new life for myself.” It wasn’t until October 2015, nearly a decade after he got out of prison, that a cousin told Miles about Lancaster Food Company, a local business that hires people who have difficulty finding jobs. This includes people with language barriers and disabilities—but the company focuses on hiring formerly incarcerated people. Hopin... posted on Jan 9 2017 (10,311 reads)

now entering, distributed. So for a long time, until the mid-1800s, trust was built around tight-knit relationships. So say I lived in a village with the first five rows of this audience, and we all knew one another, and say I wanted to borrow money. The man who had his eyes wide open, he might lend it to me, and if I didn't pay him back, you'd all know I was dodgy. I would get a bad reputation, and you would refuse to do business with me in the future. Trust was mostly local and accountability-based. In the mid-19th century, society went through a tremendous amount of change. People moved to fast-gro... posted on Jan 22 2017 (18,210 reads)

head of Bangalore-based Miti Design Lab, she explores the inner principles of her training in multiple outward spaces as well. Her work is stunningly wide-ranging, yet beautifully integrative. As she explains it her work includes communications design through branding and multimedia products, education design where she works with schools and institutions to help think through the educational process, social design where she works with communities, business design, where she helps people structure and design around their business ideas, and then there is thought design and of course – dance. For Miti all of it is part of a design... posted on Mar 1 2017 (9,157 reads)

objective universal standards possible for Truth or Knowledge. But I would suspect that the human perception of light, for instance, is basically a universally common experience. That cultural variances would be superficial.  Roden  Crater, proposed location of visitor center   JT:  It is a universal experience. It is something that even passes to other species, which is interesting too. The information contained within it may not, but that's not so much my business. I did this work-- my "motel art" is at the Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles-- RW:  "Motel art" did you say? JT:  Yes [laughs] You know, artists have to do di... posted on Mar 26 2017 (15,644 reads)

was never meant to be about closing our eyes and moving away from the world; it was meant to be about bringing our intentions strongly into the work that we were doing.” Laura: I vote for smelling the waffles. That’s the one that’s going to stick with me. You also have written about setting prompts during the day that can help you tap into mindfulness, that give you a pause to reset. Can you describe those prompts? Leah: One of the women in my class at the business school was experimenting with an assignment where I gave everyone an opportunity to pick a prompt in their life. She was one of those “always cell phone in hand” type of people. S... posted on Apr 1 2017 (14,909 reads)

is the heart of our discussion today. Since then, Charlie has come to see the practice of wisdom as integral to social advocacy, and it has been a very important part of his work since CUNY and CLASP. Charlie served as President and CEO of Nathans Cumming Foundation, where he helped develop a number of grants that integrated support for social advocacy, meditation, and inner work. Charlie also helped create the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, which helps lawyers, journalists, and business people develop the tools to approach their work from a place of mindfulness. More recently, Charlie served as the Director of the Berkeley Initiative for Mindfulness and Law, where he's i... posted on Jul 13 2017 (6,818 reads)

people define resilience as recovering from a hurricane or a divorce, a big thing. If you define it as small, you can improve.” Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, the author of the bestselling book Presence, and a speaker whose TED Talk is the second-most watched of all time, with 39+ million views. She recently joined Bonnie St. John, former Olympic champion skier, speaker, and author of Micro-Resilience, for a live Heleo Conversation about overcoming challenges great and small. Amy, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as a teenager, and Bonnie, an amputee who lost her right leg at age five, spoke frankly about their own experiences, di... posted on Jun 29 2017 (12,075 reads)

along with loving interactions with other people—solidarity can be a spiritual experience in itself. Over the last ten years it’s become fashionable to use these practices as tools to promote personal health and wellbeing, financial success, sexual conquest and even the corporate bottom line: “mindfulness opens the doorway to loving kindness,” says Google’s ‘head of mindfulness training,’ “which is at the heart of business success.” Spirituality is no stranger to this kind of appropriation, which is why the rigor and self-sacrifice involved in authentic spiritual growth is so important—it helps t... posted on Jul 12 2017 (11,107 reads)

through these services (e.g., sending messages, responding to comment threads, offering ideas), rather than simply waiting for feedback. In short, it pays to be a giver on social media, not just a lurker or a taker. 2. Professional networks What are they good for? Professional contacts can play an integral role in helping us launch or advance our careers. You might learn that your dream employer is hiring through a post from a seemingly random LinkedIn contact, or meet your future business partner through a colleague at a conference. Researchers have referred to these kinds of ties, as well as other types of looser connections such as neighborhood acquaintances, as bridging ... posted on Sep 6 2017 (7,483 reads)

self-interest, that that's what's really driving people's behavior and I think has Neuroscience more and more uncovers the centrality and in some sense the dominance of other interest of serving others as more primary than serving self in terms of how our bodies are constructed.  Compassion, which is very much a human-to-human, other-centered, other-focused behavior, is something that has evolutionary value but is actually hardwired into who we are. It's again back to the business culture which has elevated self-interest and made this big story about that's what drives human behavior, but we are finding out that this is incomplete, and in many cases wrong. So I thi... posted on Jul 15 2017 (11,812 reads)

questions.”      I wasn’t sure when I first met them, what they thought about women, just based on the culture. RW:   Right. MM:   But it turns out I had nothing to worry about. They were super open. Actually, neither of them are religious or have strict rules about anything, really. They were very, very accommodating, and both were very willing to tell their story. Najah owns his own delivery van. He moves people and has his own business. And he also sells stuff he picks up through his delivery business at the flea market. So his schedule was more flexible, and we usually met during the day. Zahed owns an auto shop almost an... posted on Oct 10 2017 (7,392 reads)