Have you ever worked really hard on overcoming something, achieved your goal, then you have one bad day and all your efforts seem to flush down the drain and you feel like you are back to square one?

I had a situation like that the other day, and I was starting to despair, all that hard effort destroyed in an instant. I was getting ready to throw in the towel but I stopped for a minute and began to reflect. Before Read the rest of this entry »

I remember as a child seeing Superman II for the first time. In times of trouble, mild mannered Clark Kent, became the blue tight-ed red caped Superman, flying in and saving the day.

If I would walk down the street today in a full body suite and cape, super hero would not be the first thing that would go through peoples minds. Nuts, flake, crazy are much more likely.

But when Superman Returns came to the theaters, I know that 10 of thousands of people flocked to the theaters waiting breathless for the first appearance of that spandex-ed super hero, who represents Read the rest of this entry »

Often the most simple of questions can not only unleash the greatest impact in our lives but it can also be the most difficult to answer.

Often when you ask a person “What are your dreams?” you receive little more than a blank stare. It’s almost as if you just short circuited their brain. I know that for many of you if you ask yourself the question, you will begin to feel a tightening in your chest, or a lump in your throat, you wont even know where to begin.

This is a far cry from the response you get when you ask a child the same question. A child will give you a wide smile and then excitedly share with you all their dreams and aspirations. We were like that too at one point, but somewhere along the way Read the rest of this entry »

Just over a month ago I joined the board of my child’s private school. Before I even had a chance to settle in, I was immediately thrown into the chaos of a school that is way behind in fund raising and over two months behind in paying their teachers. So we got down to work and began figuring out how to raise the funds. After three weeks of this we were no further ahead, at that point we took the course of enough thinking “LET’S GET MOVING”. We compiled a list of the wealthy philanthropists in our community and set out to work. Our expectation was to get at least $10,000 from 15-20 donors, are assumption being that they are very wealthy and have millions of dollars, $10,000 to them is like 10 cents to us, furthermore we were asking them to give from their charity money not their personal funds. Well things didn’t go as expected, though the donors were very generous, the donations were more in the range of $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000. Though we did show sincere appreciation, in the back of our minds there was some frustration and indignation at the fact that these philanthropist would not step up to the plate in a massive way to help a school in need, especially when the people involved are part of their community.

After a week of feeling this frustration, I decided that it was time to try and get some perspective. I don’t function when I am in a negative mode and really needed to change my outlook.

So I asked the power question. Read the rest of this entry »