TThen & Now When I started as Executive Director of The Arts Partnership in 2010, I was pretty much an absolute nobody. I didn’t come from a family name that mattered in my community, I hadn’t done anything that identified me as a powerhouse and I wasn’t married to someone whose name, title or reputation held any particular significance. In short, I had to build my credibility from the ground up. So I did. I made one phone call after the other, read one leadership book on top of another, drank one seemingly never-ending cup of coffee (eventually moving entirely to tea), introduced myself to one person and the next…
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Lead from the Outside, ruffled feathers and the attempted sound of silence
This assignment asks us to be vulnerable, honest, brave and willing to both praise and censure ourselves as well as accept praise and censure from others. What could happen in your life if you got honest with yourself and if others were willing to go to a place of loving honesty to really give you the opportunity to reflect and grow as a person? Could you take it? Would you hear it and ponder it, or would you ruffle your feathers and defend your actions?
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Manage your stress or it will manage you
Stress is inevitable. Jobs, families, money, personal anxiety, mental and physical health, politics, the economy, a global pandemic...the list goes on and on. But almost nothing is ever better accomplished by a panicked frenzied state of being. And if it is, the price to pay is with your own state of mind.
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Leveraging Your Passion: or Getting a Job and Learning That You Care a Whole Lot About It
This is a version of the talk I gave at the Ladyboss summit in June 2019. Caution: it’s long because it was a 15+ minute talk and it’s not absolutely complete because I made bullet points where I wanted to just talk to the audience. So if you know who I am, which you absolutely may not, you know that I run an organization called The Arts Partnership. If you’ve only vaguely heard of me, you know that I am somehow involved in the arts in the Fargo-Moorhead community. Ask various people around the community who I am and you’ll get everything from a fierce arts warrior activist to a…
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Finding my passion by talking about living my passion
I was invited to present at the Ladyboss summit recently. Founders Laura Caroon and Danyel Moe asked me to talk about “living your mission passion.” I could have given that talk in my sleep, and it would have been true…but it would not have been absolutely authentic, and that’s what I’m striving to have more of every single day. I countered that I would be happy to talk about passion, but that I actually wanted to talk about my unwieldy journey to passion for The Arts Partnership. I wanted to unpack my first passion, which was to be a movie star. I wanted to talk about settling into your role…
