Issue 216 — January 2, 2023
Alicia Keys — yes THAT Alicia Keys — and yes I follow her on all social media — asked this New Year question on social media, and I love it:
“What energy are u bringing into this year?”
Read More
Issue 215 — December 19, 2022
My mother’s Wedgewood Bone china and Tiffany crystal wine, water, and cordial glasses glisten in the hutch I bought, where they could be not just stored but seen.
Mother had kept them packed away for many years. Why? Because she was “saving them for nice,” as she put it.
Read More
Issue 212 — November 28, 2022
If you sent that check — it came last week without information as to the donor — to Take The Lead, thank you! This post will be published to coincide with Giving Tuesday so whoever you are, your timing could not be more perfect.
I just posted the message below on my personal fundraising page for Giving Tuesday:
I co-founded and am devoting this phase of my life to Take The Lead (www.taketheleadwomen.com) because its training, coaching, role models, and thought leadership have been proven to provide women with the very tools they need to embrace their power and elevate their ideas about what they can achieve in their careers and personal lives.
Read More
Issue 211 — November 21, 2022
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi gave the best speech of her political life on November 17, when after the 2022 midterm elections, she announced she would remain in Congress but would not run for Minority Leader again in January when the new Congress convenes.
Her words and her demeanor were a summation of her style of leadership.
Read More
Issue 210 — November 14, 2022
I believe so strongly that #votingisleadership that I created a hashtag for it. Civic engagement is in my view a critical part of leadership. We are all shaped by our communities and so must be part of shaping them.
Politics, as political scientist Walter Truett Anderson defined it, is the clash of uncertainties from which social realities are constructed.
Read More
Voting is a form of leadership. My grandparents, who were immigrants and entrepreneurs, taught me that everyone has an obligation to participate in the community. If you have not already cast your vote in the crucial midterm elections, here is where you can go to make sure your vote counts, where and how to vote in your state, and information about where candidates stand on issues of concern to you. Here is an easy to use resource to find out what is on the ballot where you vote, how to get help if you experience a problem casting your vote, and more.
Read More
Issue 208— October 17, 2022
We celebrated my husband’s life on the first day of the past week, Sunday, October 9. Those are words I never wanted to write, speak, or even think. Yet like many difficult things in life, we have to face them head on, and the only way through them is through them, into the next phase.
I was told afterwards that butterflies fluttered about my head when I told the story of why he volunteered to work the butterfly exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Read More
Issue 207 — October 3, 2022
“You’re going WHERE?” people asked.
“Don’t you know hurricanes are pummeling Florida and the Caribbean? Isn’t Puerto Rico getting hit?”
Um, yes, but when I take a speaking engagement, I show up.
Read More
How do you go from grief to joy?
This week I write about how the examples of recent moments of communal grief--the 21st anniversary of 9/11 and the death of Queen Elizabeth II—can inform us as we grapple with personal grief. And I share a phone call that helped me process my grief by creating a lasting legacy in memory of my husband, and the resulting joy. Read the full story here...
Read More
Issue 205 — September 5, 2022
Something doesn’t compute here, I thought, when I saw a well-meaning but laughable piece of advice to women in an Ad Council campaign in collaboration with AARP.
“Save a larger percentage of your income for retirement,“ it tells women, and cites the data that women are 80% more likely than men to be poor in their old age. “Save 2% more than you are currently saving,” goes the advice.
Read More
There’s a reason Marina Arsenijevic’s story is the longest in my book Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics and Why Women Will Take the Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. She’s the archetype Intentional Woman and the role model for Leadership Intentioning Tool #2: Dream UP, because if your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough.
Read More
The world lost a one-of-a-kind man on July 17 when my beloved husband Alexander Barbanell died following a two-week hospitalization for pneumonia and multiple infections that were too much for his 91-year-old body to overcome. He was just two weeks shy of his 92nd birthday, August 1.
Read More