The common definition for energy is the ability to do work. In other words, everything and anyone who can do work has energy. Energy causes or makes change. It is either transformed or transferred every time work is being done. Since it changes form every time it’s used, the amount of energy in the universe will forever remain the same. It’s transference rather than recreation.

More now than ever, women are the driving force behind The Great Resignation: the death knell of hustle culture and the demand for less doing, more being in everything we do.

What if owning the stage actually means… showing up on it less?

What I mean is this: hustle culture teaches us that in order to BOSS UP (and change our lives, apologies to Lizzo) we have to SHOW UP. All the damn time.

News flash: we’ve all been existing in a state of heightened stress and anxiety – yes, even in this post-pandemic “new” world where everything was supposed to go back to normal. In fact, the should and supposed-to aspect of our day-to-day realities make it even harder: if you feel like you should be back to normal even though you don’t feel back to normal, you just pile guilt on top of the stress and anxiety you’re already feeling.

I’ve written about hustle culture here before and its insidious way of glamorizing too-little-sleep, never-getting-away, over-working, and never, ever stepping away from the grind. It’s easy to write about it, but not so easy to recognize the ways this kind of culture has crept into my own life and approach to work/success.

Success is achieved when and only when you can perform at the top of your game with high-level, highly-engaged energy for a sustained amount of time. Engaged energy is the type and amount of energy you are using at any given time on any given day. This is important because engaged energy plays a vital role in your success.

Throughout my own career, often being the only Black person and/or woman in the newsroom, meant that I have experienced my share of microaggressions. The result? I was always pissed the eff off and ultimately feeling as though I didn’t quite belong. As in, always.

I don’t even have to know you to know that you want to have some kind of success in your life. While you may have already achieved your version of success on some level, you know, deep down, you were made for more – you want more; you need more; you feel the passion for more. This doesn’t necessarily mean more money (though no shame if it does), it can simply mean more of how you define success for yourself, for your family, and for your community.

If you always feel like somebody’s watching you (with apologies to Rockwell)... you’re right! If you’re online in the business world in 2022, you’ve been being watched for at least two years: on Zoom, on Teams, on Google Hangouts, Facetime, inside social media groups, and other various interactive platforms. Odds are, you’re probably doing a lot of watching yourself – meaning, you spend a lot of time watching others speak.

But what if you were to watch yourself?

Turns out the desire to get a bigger paycheck isn’t the most important factor when it comes to where you choose to work.

In general, corporate culture is a much more reliable predictor of industry-adjusted attrition than how employees assess their compensation. An MIT Study found a toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company’s attrition rate compared with its industry. So… if you dread going to work, even if the pay is good, you’re more likely to look for employment elsewhere than if you simply want a bigger paycheck.

I received a message this week from someone who asked if I could send her my weekly blog articles via DM. She was a little sheepish: I know you send them via email, but I just can’t face my inbox. I know the feeling! I have a few thousand unread emails myself. Not to mention the Slack messages, Asana messages, Basecamp messages, text messages, DMs across platforms… the list goes on.

We all have too much information coming our way…

Whether you’ve seen the recent Jennifer Hudson biopic on Aretha Franklin or not, you are undoubtedly familiar with the refrain: R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Respect! This can be a make-or-break factor in career success – whether you feel you are receiving enough of it, unable to give it, or simply not being met in a reciprocal way.

Disrespectful behavior in the workplace takes many forms, from subtle comments…

Let’s talk assessments for a second. Everyone knows Myers-Briggs and most have had their Enneagram typed. Then there’s Strengths Finder, DiSC, The Four Color Personalities, Goleman’s EQ Test… the list goes on and on.

The Enneagram test outlines nine different interconnected personality traits, with 27 additional subtypes. The nine traits are then grouped into three different “centers”…

Everyone has been working so hard on their messages of anti-productivity lately. (See what I did there?)

Anyone else notice the current popularity of less-productivity, more ease, a slower approach to moving back into the frenetic pace of real-work-life alongside the typical New Year detox messaging? Detox from dopamine! Detox from productivity! Detox from alcohol, and digital, and…

One of the tools I rely on daily for guidance is tarot and oracle cards. Tarot cards are a vehicle to give guidance, and as shamans like to say, “medicine” around what is happening in your personal orbit: love, money, career, goals, and general life path. Through my intuitive connection with my cards, I’m able to access my “higher coach” so to speak.

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you: 2022 is just days away and with the calendar flip, we can expect the annual rhetoric about making and keeping New Year's Resolutions.

We make pledges to lose weight, make more money, exercise more, spend more time with family, start that business, take that class, etc. All of our most noble endeavors and loftiest desires come flooding to the surface on January 1st.

Our intentions are good. Our efforts are sincere. So, why are these resolutions most often abandoned by February?

Set point theory has generally been applied to the subject of weight loss. It’s an attempt for nutritionists and dietitians to effectively explain body diversity based on our unique biological blueprint. It is essentially a natural baseline, a starting point, from which we shift and move.

However, there is a different approach to set point theory that can actually prove to be valuable when it comes to shifting energy levels, both for internal wellbeing and for a more outward-focused improvement in public speaking skills.

What IF you could control what happens to you? What if you could have an objective POV that enabled you to:

• Observe the situation objectively

• Assess your energy level

• Predict your go-to response

• Intercept that go-to response (stress, worry, fear, anger, etc) with a sudden peaceful, controlled energetic shift that, in turn, created…

• … a new reality.

Gratitude may be the best attitude but creating a gratitude practice is how you initiate, instigate, and cultivate that attitude in order to truly reap the benefits (read: improving your happiness and quality of life).

Here’s the truth about gratitude: it is unrestricted by time. You can be grateful for what has happened in the past, what is happening now, and what will happen in the future all at once: in the present (you know, the gift of the present?)

Excellence in public speaking is not gender-dependent. However, certain psychological traits – such as risk aversion, willingness to compete, or aversion to feedback – contribute to explaining gender differences that occur not only in occupations, wages and careers, but in development in the area of public speaking. The ability to give a good public presentation is relevant for career prospects and leadership positions; presenting information publicly, clearly and eloquently creates an important competitive advantage in a variety of job settings.

Five principles to keep you focused while you create your life (and a chance to win a seat at Phony PPL’s ongoing tour!)

You don’t have to know anything about astrology to know the past few weeks (uh, maybe even longer) have been I-N-T-E-N-S-E.

Many of my clients, zodiac-literate or not, have come to me exhausted, overwhelmed, frustrated, or just generally freaking out, saying things like…