Motivational Leadership Speaker, Bestselling Oprah Author

Archive for the ‘Living Large’ Category

What I want to know is, who changed the rules? I had a lot of time to think about this as I sat in a Tampa courtroom waiting for the judge to consider my case.

Granted, I was guilty. I’d been going 68 in a 50 mph zone, but to my credit, I truly didn’t know I was speeding. I was driving in an unfamiliar area on a six-lane highway in a rural area that was virtually empty on a Saturday afternoon. I assumed the limit was “fast.” Apparently, not that fast.

In my rear-view mirror, I saw a late model, brown Mustang with a Harley Davidson plate on the front speeding up behind me. What happened next was something out of a science fiction movie.  That Mustang morphed into a light-flashing, no-mercy-whatsoever Florida trooper.

You know what a stop sign looks like, so you know when to stop. You know what a yield sign looks like, so you know when to yield. You know what a state trooper looks like and you know when to slow down and pretend you are going the speed limit. How unfair it is that the state I love would betray me by using decoy cars to trap me, a loyal taxpayer. Shouldn’t we have a fighting chance, especially since the cost of tickets have skyrocketed as the state seeks more sources of revenue?

I asked the trooper to consider my good driving record and he said, “I don’t even look it up. You can go to court and try and work it out there.” I live more than an hour away, but the ticket was in excess of $300 and I was ticked off that I’d gotten it. I had visions of standing up and protesting on behalf of all speeders betrayed by decoy troopers, but I sold those principles right out when the the judge told us that, if we had no tickets in the previous two years, he’d withhold adjudication, erase the points, make sure the insurance company didn’t find out and reduce the fine. Just for showing up.

Sold.

I posted Facebook entries that told the world I was heading down to The Keys with some friends for a long weekend. What I could not possibly convey that I was going to The Keys with six of the most special women I have ever met. I met these women several years ago when I began researching my novel, Mermaid Mambo, which is about a 78-year-0ld former Weeki Wachee mermaid who travels to a mermaid reunion to rediscover her soul.

I became friends with “the formers,” which is a cluster of former mermaids who are between the ages of 57 and 70. They are some of the best friends I have ever had. I share them with you so you can see that aging is nothing to fear. It is something to embrace — because you can travel this road with others who will fill your days with heart and adventure and great love. They are all older than I am, but so much younger. So, they are my teachers.

I hope you have friends like these great women. They all face real challenges in their lives, but the support they have from each other is unflinching and true. When you see the trust and connection that exists between them, you will realize that you can always feel true joy in the moment — no matter what else is going on. Count on your friends they will get you through anything.

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One of the best writers I have ever worked with sent me a note asking me for my thoughts on a freelance story he is writing. He capped it off with this personal aside: “Did I tell you that I’m going to start work as a dishwasher in a fancy French restaurant here on April Fool’s Day?”

I thought he was joking, but when I wrote back to ask, he said, “I’ve done the math and I can pay the mortgage working for $9 an hour. That work will always be there and it gives me something to do and maybe I’ll get a story out of it.”

The fact that the trail has led David to the sink of a fancy French restaurant is both shocking and depressing to me. He’s 61 years old. He deserves the world — not this. But when he gets to the other side of the experience — which he will do — he will know so much about his own fortitude and strength.

thelma louise dvd download The same goes for you, as you are tested in your own 2009 ordeal.

You can either use adversity to beat you down or grow you up. The universe is trying to teach us all a big lesson, and this is our growth moment. We may have thought we knew what it meant to be resilient, tenacious and persistent, but now we are being forced to prove it.

More than anything, we are learning about the greater dimensions of faith. We’ve lost a great deal of faith in the system and many of our leaders, but this is a time we can gain faith in what matters most: each other and our spiritual connection. Crisis can bring us together or pull us apart. Our greatest growth comes when we are forced to operate in our discomfort zones.

Obviously, David deserves so much more than this. But, who will he be when he gets through it to the other side of this experience? Does he have faith that it will all work out? Does he know that he is loved and supported and will not endure this crucible moment alone?

My guess is that, if anyone can adapt to something like this, it will be him. And, he will probably emerge from the experience with a bestseller that will wind up with a movie where he is played by the scraggly, bearded, ZZ Top version of Brad Pitt. At least, that’s what I am hoping.

It’s hard to know now why things are unfolding the way they are, but ultimately, there is meaning in the challenge. Whether you spend time as a writer-turned-dishwasher or dishwasher-turned-writer, you are defining who you are in human terms. It’s no longer about the title on your resume, but the grit in your spirit. That can’t be a bad thing.

Hang in there. Someday, it will all make sense. Be brave, be bold.

I’ve been threatening to go to an island to unplug from my computer — which I did over the weekend.

My friends and I wound up paddling our kayaks out to an island that is literally right down the street from me. I live three houses up from the water in Clearwater, Fla. and I never go to that little island – even though it is only a five-minute kayak paddle away.

Five minutes is a million miles when you are desperate to get away from your computer. I’ve never been one to go over the ledge into workaholism, but recently, I slipped into that abyss. I’ve got a book coming out and major marketing for my speaking business. This is the first time I have been so consumed by my work, and I don’t like what it has done to me.

I needed that island. I loaded my camping gear and six friends and I paddled out there before landing on what would be “our” island for that moment in time. We cooked over the fire, made s’mores and told stories. My phone was off and packed away. I never even touched it. But, I did notice some very strange behavior on my friend Cindy’s part when I saw her thumbs moving rapidly. She was texting. On an island! Then, Jen’s cell phone rang. Yikes. Are we that bad that we can’t shut the world out for a few hours?

I didn’t want to come back to the pile of work I had waiting for me. But, I learned something very, very good.

I have my own, personal paradise. It is  just five minutes away.

And I can go there to just “be.”

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“You can do better than this.”

I can still hear my mother’s voice.

I was in the tenth grade and I had brought home a report card that boasted a few As, a couple of Bs, a C and the only  D I’d ever gotten – in geometry. I didn’t see anything wrong with that report card because it wasn’t much different from what my friends brought home, except for that little episode with geometry, for which I still don’t apologize.

But, Mom did see something wrong with that report card.

“You are not average,” she said, “So you can’t bring home a report card like this. If you were average, it would be all right. If I knew this was the best you could do, it would be all right. But, it isn’t the best you can do and you know it.”

I hadn’t really thought about it before, whether I was smart or talented or anything else. I was just a kid who wanted desperately to fit in despite being hindered by a major case of nerdiness. I wanted to be average because then I would blend in with the others. Teenage life would be so much easier blending in with the crowd. No one would expect me to do anything more than the minimum. Hanging there with mediocrity seemed like a pretty safe way to get through high school.

If you think about it, I was right. And it applies to our work situations today. Mediocrity is a very safe place to hang. You don’t have to deal with the risk of being extreme – either too excellent or too poor. You aren’t a problem child that needs to be put on probation or dealt with. You aren’t a model of excellence who is a target for people who are jealous or threatened. You’re just in the crowd.

My mother’s tone of voice made it very clear that I would be making a few changes with regard to my academic approach.

It’s amazing how quickly I turned things around after that lecture. All As, and a B in geometry. I just had to make the decision.

I’ve had to make that decision again and again throughout my career. It is a conscious decision to ratchet things up another notch, to produce more, to concentrate harder, to work longer, to deliver. It is a decision to leave the pack and be excellent.

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books, including an Oprah pick. She speaks to corporations and organizations on courageous and creative leadership strategies taken from her interviews with the best-known leaders of our times.

I have heard so much talk about the book and video for The Secret, which pulls together the old concept of the “law of attraction.” I avoided The Secret

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for a very long time because I thought it was stolen right out of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich,

but then I realize he’d taken it from someone else who took it from someone else who got it from The Bible. So, I now like The Secret or anything that drives home the point that you create your own reality. If you see yourself as moderately successful, you’ll be moderately successful. If you see yourself as wildly successful, you’ll be wildly successful.

If you think you have money problems, you have money problems. It goes on and on. So, people see the video and they get all excited because they get it in their heads that they can talk themselves into fame and fortune.

I just think there is one other component to it. I believe wholeheartedly in the law of attraction. But I believe it only works to its fullest potential when combined with a spiritual element.

Whoa. I am going to “go there.” Please don’t be offended.

I am going to talk about something that corporate speakers don’t talk about — the big taboo. I will never tell you what you should believe in terms of spirituality. Just believe in something.  I absolutely convinced that there is an energy out there that is bigger than any of us, and it is big. I was raised Jewish, but practice in my own, deeply personal way. I think my Christian and Moslem friends are all traveling to the same place via a different road. I don’t think any of us is more right than the other.

I used to reserve my prayers for my most desperate moments, like when my mother had her stroke and it looked like she was going to die. Or when my father was shot in a holdup.  I never wanted to bother God with things like career or finances – things I felt certain I should be able to manage for myself. But when I couldn’t get my first book published and I felt like an absolute failure. I did the only thing I could do. I prayed.

Ever since, I have constantly counted my blessings and been rewarded with more abundance than I ever imagined and, best of all, a stronger spiritual connection. I never, ever feel alone or lonely. I always feel supported and loved.

I have some friends who kill themselves at work, then come home to a beautiful house that has been teetering on verge of foreclosure for about four years. Every minute of every day they feel the weight of looming financial crisis, largely because they bought a great home that they never could afford, and now they can’t unload it because the market has soured.

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There is nothing I can say that will fix their financial situation. I can’t coach them to work harder or take leadership roles at the office because both of them are struggling with companies that have cut budget and staff to the minimum. They have been trying – for years – to find jobs elsewhere, but they haven’t gotten anything.

There are so many sad stories out there. So many people are in turmoil and crisis, and if you are one of them, I have to hope that you will remember that you are never, ever alone.

What can you do when it gets that dark?

Have faith. Believe in abundance and ask your God to be beside you and carry you through to the other side.

Soon after Hard Won Wisdom was released, my insurance agent asked me to save her a signed copy. When I dropped it by her office, she thumbed through it and said, “Maybe this will show me how to juggle all these balls I have in the air.”

I looked at her and said, “The secret to juggling is to let some of the balls drop.”

Simple enough. In my last posting for this series, I talked about how important it is to know what matters most in your life. Once you have that list of what really counts, you will see that you are wasting time on activities and “pulls” that keep you from the things that really move your soul.

First, look at your calendar. How are you spending your time? How much time are you handing over to tasks and people that don’t hold value to you? It is really easy to hand over your time to obligations that are rather meaningless to your life.

I know that, because there was a time when I spent almost every lunch hour networking and trying to build my business. I thought it was necessary. A part of the job. But, I learned something. Time is too precious to hand over to people you don’t especially like or to waste on things you don’t especially want to do. I know how important it is to network. But, I got much, much smarter at it. Instead of doing five lunches a week, I devoted one-half of a day to it. I didn’t waste time driving downtown for lunch every day. I’d meet someone for breakfast, then someone for coffee, then drop by someone’s office, then do lunch. I would do a week’s worth of networking at once. And after awhile, I became much more discriminating about who I would even network. It is amazing how much time I had once I took control over that.

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You also have to be an expert at organizing yourself because there are a million distractions and “pulls” that will keep you from doing the things you really want or need to do. E-mail is a great example. What a great idea that was when it was first invented. Now, we get hundreds of them every day and have no time for our real work. It is absurdity. And then the cell phone. We used to have lives. Now we can be reached anytime, anywhere. We feel compelled to constantly check in to see what is happening. We don’t fully engage in conversations because we are trying to check the Blackberry or Treo out of the corners of our eyes.

We used to worry about balancing work and family demands. Now we can’t even balance ourselves.

It is because we have not realized that we have the power to set good boundaries that give us room to live and breathe. Who is more balanced, the person who checks e-mail while driving in traffic or the person who only checks e-mail once a day? The once-a-day person has set boundaries that create a healthy life.

Then there are those periods when everything is happening and there truly is no time to stop and take stock of anything. I know about this because the speaking industry has some peak seasons that can really exhaust me. One time, I was so stretched that I hadn’t had a day off in six weeks. I was tired and grumpy and one-dimensional. I took out my PDA and opened up my calendar. Two weeks out, there was a Friday with nothing scheduled. I wrote in the word “OFF.” And that is when I learned the secret that, if you block a day off like that, it does not exist. All of my appointments had to flow around it.

I do that all the time now — just keep a day for myself. It is healthy.

So, as you juggle so many balls in the air, realize that you are the one who decides what you are going to keep juggling and what you are going to drop. Stop killing yourself.

My first day on the job at The Miami Herald was an absolute shock. My boss really laid everything on nice and thick as she courted me in the hiring process, but the minute I got there, she informed me that I’d be working some weeknights, every Saturday day shift and, gee, when I wasn’t working until 12, I’d be expected to hang until at least about 8 — even if I was done with my work.

I went there when I was only in the third week of my marriage. At a time when I should have been enjoying life as a newlywed, I was being tested to see how loyal I was to the whims of a newspaper with insatiable demands.

It didn’t seem fair. My work was important to me — extremely important to me. I was passionate about it, and I delivered huge front-page stories. But, I had a relationship that I wanted to tend to. I’d just moved to town and wanted to get out and make friends and learn about my new city. I’d always turn my stories in on time — at 6:30 p.m. — but that didn’t matter. Nobody left that early. Nobody.

So, I would sit there, watching the clock and wondering when I could leave. I was done with my work! Other reporters were turning in their stories late, so why couldn’t I benefit from my always on-time performance and go home to my husband?

A few weeks into my tenure there, editors from The Palm Beach Post

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invited me to lunch and offered me a job with better assignment with better money and much better hours. I turned them down, thinking I owed something to The Herald. The editor of The Post told me that editors at The Herald wouldn’t think twice about cutting me if it benefited them. I didn’t believe them.

A month later — just days before Christmas — the managing editor came to our bureau and announced the paper was shutting the Palm Beach operation down. Half of us would be spared, half would not. I survived the cut. The ones who didn’t make it were the veterans who didn’t have the same paranoia that us newcomers felt as we tried to impress our bosses. I thought about what that editor at The Post had said, and it was so very true.

I was transferred to another bureau and worked weekends and wasted more hours just sitting there late because my bosses wanted me to be part of the team. The politics of those offices were so brutal that I routinely saw one editor setting up the next in hopes of getting rid of a potential competitor. The entire time I worked there, I was on edge. I had no time for my husband or myself.

My first anniversary was approaching and I knew they would never let me out in time for a celebratory dinner out. I knew it. So, I called in sick. I had to take a sick day in order to make sure I could go out at 7 p.m. with my husband.

When I finally took a vacation, we flew to Greece for two weeks. I still have the journal where I was wrestling with the pulls of my work versus the true priorities in my life — God, relationship, family, friends and humanity. I closed it saying, “When I die, it will mean far more to me to have people say that I loved and was loved than I really knew how to write a 12-inch story. I need to learn to live my life for the big picture.” All that wisdom, and I was just 28 years old. Notice work wasn’t even on the list. It was important to me, but it wasn’t central to my being. I came home from that trip and started sending resumes out. A month later, I was gone.

That awakening stayed with me and centered me whenever work would start to take over my life. Work is work. It is exciting and challenging and mandatory. But, it is work.

So, as you start to contemplate the balance issue, ask yourself what matters most in your life. What are the five or six “pulls” that you have to honor, and what do they mean to your world? If you only had one week on earth, how would you spend your time?

The “What matters most?” question will always serve to give you perspective and help you to decide how to divvy up your time. Some people write a personal mission statement that incorporates their personal priorities so they can always check in easily to see if they have veered off course. Before you wear yourself out trying to juggle everything, go within to make sure you are juggling what really matters to you.

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courageous and creative leadership strategies.

“Fawn,” my mother said. Her eyes brightened with recognition, thrilled by the surprise visit. “I’m so happy…”

That was an extreme moment of clarity from a once brilliant woman who has faded into the fog of Alzheimer’s and has been in a nursing home now for three years. She’s not doing well this week — she has the MRSA infection throughout her body and we’ve gotten a mixture of reports from her caregivers. They range from hopeful to dark, and there is a thread of seriousness and worry that connects them all. This is a tough time, and it confounds me because she seems healthy on the outside.

My mom had a major stroke in 1992 when she was 66 years old. The signs of Alzheimer’s appeared eight years ago. My father took care of her until he literally wore his back out and we had to let her go to a nursing home three years ago. It is a place where she is happy and feels safe.

I don’t think anyone would have imagined she would have willed her way into her eighties, but that is what she did. Instead of becoming depressed over her loss of independence and mobility, she embraced life fully, finding joy in everything she did. I think of that all the time, because I sometimes get so wound up in the demands of the day that I forget how meaningless those hassles are.

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Mom can’t communicate much, but she can communicate love. That is what has kept her going and has filled her life with more meaning than most able-bodied, fully-alert people have.

I’d like you to meet her. She’s the most amazing woman I have ever met. This short video tells you a truly inspiring story.

I always tell people to know their passions and indulge them.

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When I was in college, I studied journalism and photography. When I got to my first newspaper after I graduated, I had to make a choice between being a reporter and being a photographer. Reporting won. But, all these years later, I love capturing the moment with my camera. So, here are a few shots from my Alaska gallery that I shot while on a cruise two weeks ago. That old passion for photography still lives in me.

And here is a shot taken of me just enjoying the whole experience:

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