Two Great Videos to Share

I've been introduced to two really thought-provoking videos I'd like to share with you. One is called Shift Happens and the other is The Winning Movie.

Since my company is called Bock's Office, you can see why I like movie metaphors related to living a full and complete life, both at work and outside of work.

Each of these videos gives me a lot to think about as I grow my business - and as I grow myself. Actually, I realize that what gives me the most satisfaction in both arenas - personally and professionally - is not to grow them, but to allow them to grow. There's a huge distinction for me in that language.

Please check out Shift Happens (below) and The Winning Movie. Tell us what you think!

Join the SOBs in Chicago in May!

Some of my favorite blogging buddies are putting together a really great blogging conference in Chicago May 11 & 12 you won't want to miss!

Check out Phil's site or Liz's site for information or just head over to the SOB Con 07 site to find out more about this great event!

Every session is designed to give participants opportunities for connecting with readers and other blog writers to take their blogging to the next level!

Here's the schedule:

Information Sessions, Saturday, May 12, 2007, 8:00 AM – 4:30 PM

• 8:00 - 8:30 - Registration
• 8:30 – 9:10 - Phil Gerbyshak, Make It Great! Relationship Geek
• 9:15 – 9:55 - Liz Strauss, Successful-Blog online & print publisher
• 9:55 – 10:05 - BREAK
• 10:05 – 10:55 - David Armano, Logic+Emotion Creative VP at Digitas
• 11:00 – 11:45 - Rodney Rumford, PodBlaze & Ben Yoskovitz, Instigator Blog - Video Blogging and Podcasting
• 11:45 – 12:45 - LUNCH
• 12:45 – 1:25 - Drew McLelllan, Drew’s Marketing Minute, Mike Sansone, Converstations, Mike Wagner, Own Your Own Brand
• 1:30 – 2:10 - Panel (Tools) Chris Cree - SuccessCREEations, Moderator, including Scott Rafer - MyBlogLog, Janice Myint - Technorati,
  Diego Orjuela - Evoca
• 2:10 – 2:20 - BREAK
• 2:20 – 3:00 - Wendy Piersall, eMoms at Home, Blog Coach
• 3:05 - 4:00 - Terry Starbucker, Ramblings from a Glass Half Full, Liz/Audience – Blog Critiques: What’s a Successful-Blog?

My Day with Steve Farber

I had an opportunity to spend most of Friday with Steve Farber, author of The Radical Leap and The Radical Edge - what a treat! Steve was speaking for a conference here in Fargo, and invited me to join him for lunch before his presentation and then also invited me to sit in on the presentation.

If you haven't read The Radical Leap yet, run out right now and get it for yourself. Steve had this group of North Dakota insurance agents on their feet at the end of his presentation, which was based on the four ideas that make up the Leap: Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof. What an inspiring message!

As I was dropping Steve off at the airport, I was reminded of my friend and self-proclaimed relationship geek Phil Gerbyshak who told me to always record my adventures with my camera. So I parked in the unloading zone, got Steve's bags out of my car, and ran in with him to snap a photo, since there were no people outside. I ran in, got the photo, and ran out - and had to wait as a security guy wrote me a parking ticket for leaving my car unattended.

Got the photo - got the ticket. Oh well ... it was worth the fine! Thanks for a great day, Steve!

Thursdays With Jodee - 4

Well, last week's question failed to create a dialogue opportunity, so I'll try again with a new genre.

This week's question for dialogue is:

What is your favorite way to spend time with friends?

As is my custom, I'll begin by giving you a couple of ways I would answer that question today. One is here on my blog. I've met SO many amazing people through this medium and have ended up talking to some of them on the phone and even meeting some in person (I'm actually looking forward to more opportunities for that in the future!).

As for my local friends, I love nothing better than meeting for a beer or a cup of coffee and just creating dialogue together. I'm not all that great at small talk anymore, so the most fun times for me are talking about the really important issues of the world.

I also love board games, movies and travel, and am looking forward to a vacation the week after next when I'll take some of my Spiritual Cinema movies and a game or two with me as a couple of friends and I head to Phoenix for a week of R&R. Ahh - now that's what I call an enjoyable vacation! (Of course, I'll take my computer, too, so I won't miss out on my blogging buddies, either!)

How about you? What is your favorite way to spend time with friends?

Love and Work in the Same Sentence?

What better week than Valentine's Week to talk about LOVE and WORK in the same sentence? I'm working on a presentation for next week called "It Doesn't Have to be A Dilbert World," and it's becoming clearer to me as I read about Scott Adams and the great living he's been able to make by calling attention to the way we've known our working world, that there could be another way to look at things.

However, I also see that the Dilbert world is alive and well, as I took one look at Scott Adams DilbertBlog and I see that there are 347 comments to his post about having sex with a robot.

I guess that is one way to talk about love and work, but I'm more interested in how we can talk about our work - and talk with the people where we spend the majority of our time.

The photo you see here is from Southwest Airlines' website. Southwest uses Love Field in Dallas as their headquarters. Their corporate annual meeting is held on February 14. Their stockticker is not SWA, as you might expect, it's LUV. Talk about spreading the LOVE!

Some people, like Steve Farber and Tim Sanders, to name just two, have paved the way to having conversations about love and work. In Steve's first book, The Radical Leap, he says that LEAP is an acronym that demonstrates what all extreme leaders possess: Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof. His second book, The Radical Edge, goes on to say how we can do work that we love in the service of people we love for customers who love what we do. What a great way to think of work!

Tim Sanders, Chief Solutions Officer and leadership coach at Yahoo! and now a world-famous speaker and author, has written a couple of books about love at work. I'm a big fan of Love is the Killer Ap, where he talks very openly about the advantage those businesspeople who use love as a point of differentiation in business will "separate ourselves from our competitors just as world-class distance runners separate themselves from the rest of the pack trailing behind them."

Tim's definition of love in the workplace is simply "the selfless promotion of the growth of the other."

How different would our workplaces look and feel if we knew that everyone was loving everyone else? It can happen.

So, for tomorrow, think about loving everyone you come into contact with - using Tim's definition (not Scott Adams'). Come back and leave a comment about what you witnessed at work on Valentine's Day 2007.

What's the Secret to The Secret?

Did you see Oprah on Thursday? So what happened with Rhonda Byrne that she was able to bring so many people together to create the mass appeal that so many people have been talking about individually for so long? Why are those of us who are attracted to the message of The Secret so passionate about this information?

What I know from seeing the process of bringing the production of the movie together is that that power is in each of us - and if we all put our heads together around one higher intention, look what can happen!

That's why I love blogging so much. I haven't met most of the people I consider "friends" from my blog (at least not in person), yet I feel so much connection with them all across the world.

What is missing when we have things in our lives that don't seem to work? Is it conviction? Is it confidence? Is it resignation? Is it cynicism? What causes our "glass half empty" mindset?



Here is my vision board - this is what I look at every day and focus on to bring into my life. What is your vision board? Do you know what you want in your life? Are you doing what it takes to bring that to you? As we learn from Michael Beckwith - we need first to be grateful for what we currently have so we can open ourselves to what is in store for us.

What are your thoughts about The Secret? It's certainly not new information, but what's new is how it is impacting us today, in 2007, and how it will impact us in the future we are allowing.

Thursdays With Jodee - 3 (Friday edition)

Yesterday's post was delayed because of travel - so here it is a few hours late!

Thanks to everyone who participated in last week's dialogue about favorite teachers. We heard from Tracy and Deb who had very interesting recollections about the people who made a difference in their lives. Tracy said:

I recognize that the teachers that stand out in my own history are those that recognized my uniqueness and strove to bring those qualities out in me and allowed me to be an individual in a world full of sheep in flocks. They knew I would never be happy marching to someone else's drum and showed me ways to dance to my own music.

And from Deb, who leads training sessions now, we learned of three of her favorite teachers.

All three of these teachers knew their topic well, told stories as a way of connecting, made the topic relevant, and brought a passion to the topic that spurred me on to continue learning in those areas for the rest of my life.

So this week, the question will be the same question I submitted to Raj Setty's blog Life Beyond Code, which he calls a Quoght (a question which provokes thought):

Where in your life might the fear of criticism be greater than your desire for success (however you would define that)?

So, I guess I need to answer the question first. It is only in retrospect that I'm able to see the results of that question in my own life. Since I learned of and named my genius in December (thanks again, Dick!), it's been much easier for me to give up the fear of criticism. My genius is "Inviting Dialogue," and there have been many, many times in jobs and also in relationships where I haven't said what I really believed for fear of being rejected or ostracized or criticized. I can remember being in fourth grade and asking my teacher why sometimes there were 2 lines through the S of the dollar sign and sometimes there was 1 line and my teacher giving me an exhausted sigh, implying not to ask so many questions. At home I remember my mom's standard answer to my many questions being "look it up."

I understand now - and thanks to those experiences - that I have many, many resources in which to look up answers to my many questions - and that it's OK to ask questions as long as my intention is to invite dialogue ("dialogue" being suspending assumptions for the purpose of learning something).

As I've learned to step into my power and to be who I am, I realize that success doesn't have to be daunting thing (I can redefine success to be joy and fulfillment instead of being a standard to live up to) and I have much more joy in my own life when I don't worry about - and don't take personally - other people's comments or actions. If my intentions are joyful and loving, I have no fear of criticism anyway!

How about you??

Filling in the Gaps

I'm thinking right now about the Sam Cooke song "Wonderful World" that starts:

"Don't know much about history, Don't know much biology, Don't know much about a science book ..."

because I really don't know much about science in general. Yet I've been thinking a lot recently about the concept of a vacuum (and not because I'm looking around at all the cat hair on the floor!).

I was talking with my friend Dave a couple of weeks ago about all things philosophical, and since then I've been wondering more about the scientific and philosophical implications of a vacuum. I've said before that humans don't exist in a vacuum - we need other people in our space - but I never really understood that scientifically.

I've also theorized that whenever there is a void - a space - a vacuum, if you will - we will fill it up with negative, since that tends to be our conditioning. If your friend doesn't say hi when you pass in the hallway, you will probably make up a story about it meaning something like "he's mad at me," or "he thinks he's better than me," or something with a negative connotation. We tend to jump to all kinds of conclusions and most of the time they have a tendency to pull us down.

Wayne Dyer narrates a really important meditation CD called "Getting in the Gap" in which he talks about how it is the space between the bars that holds the tiger - it is the rests between the notes that defines the music - and it is the gap between our thoughts where we can connect with our Creator. The beauty of our lives can be best felt and experienced when we just get quiet and be OK with the stillness.

I still don't know much about science - or the real story of a vacuum - but if spaces have to fill up with something, why don't we see if we can notice the positives instead of the negatives? What do we have to lose?

The Secret Featured on Oprah Feb. 8

I received an e-mail this morning from Rhonda Byrne, producer of The Secret, announcing that Oprah will be featuring this movie on Thursday, February 8.

Set your DVR and invite some friends over to watch. This provides great opportunities for dialogue!

Thursdays With Jodee - 2

Thanks to everyone who participated in last week's dialogue. It turns out we have quite a few teachers out there - although we may not be teaching in the traditional sense.

This was brought to mind again in a different setting at my study group for A Course in Miracles earlier this week. Here is a portion of the text we were reading:

"A good teacher clarifies his own ideas and strengthens them by teaching them. Teacher and pupil are alike in the learning process. They are in the same order of learning, and unless they share their lessons, conviction will be lacking. A good teacher must believe in the ideas he teaches, but he must meet another condition; he must believe in the students to whom he offers the ideas.

"Many stand guard over their ideas because they want to protect their thought systems as they are, and learning means change. Change is always fearful to the separated, because they cannot conceive of it as a move towards healing the separation. They always perceive it as a move toward further separation, because the separation was their first experience of change."

I find it interesting that this lesson really supports those of us who either wanted to be teachers but aren't - or didn't want to be teachers but find ourselves in that realm at some level. Some of the people who responded to last week's question learned that if we're not doing what we wanted to do as children, there might be a hidden message for us. For those who can remember what they wanted to be, that probably is in there somewhere, dying to get out. For those of us who can't remember, maybe we can just think about what we are being in our lives and celebrate those times of ecstatic engagement, knowing it is honoring the child within us.

This week's question relates to our hidden desire to be teachers.

Who was your favorite teacher? What made him or her special?

I had two that I can think of: Mrs. B. and Dr. Hoppe. Both were English teachers - one in high school and one in college. Mrs. B. first introduced me to Richard Bach (author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull) and also to Kahlil Gibran, two authors who have many more similarities - to each other and to me - than I ever could have imagined at the time. Dr. Hoppe introduced me to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became one of my all-time favorite philosophers. It's funny that I've always thought of those particular characters whenever I think of those two teachers, but it's not been until just this minute that I realize how uncanny it is that I would feel as strongly connected as I always have to those three people (Gibran, Bach & Emerson).

In connecting that right now, I see that both Dr. Hoppe & Mrs. B. must have recognized my need for support in my nonconformity because that is the link between what I remember most about each of them.

What shows up for you in the question about your favorite teacher or mentor?