With half of the workforce uninspired and unengaged — productivity, morale, and workplace sustainability are at an all-time low. People are thirsting to find leadership they can follow, emulate, and gather energy from. No matter where you sit in your company or organization, this presents an opportunity for you to step up and lead people to their potential.

Work-life balance. It’s an elusive concept that we’ve all considered, but many of us struggle to achieve. The idea of balance is an important consideration when thinking about holistic wellbeing in life and work. But it’s only a starting point to what I consider the more realistic and perhaps even more gratifying path towards an Integrated Life.

How many times have you seen people around you advance in their positions for reasons beyond merit? This is the game of life, and it starts from a very early age — competing for positions on sports teams, classroom favoritism, playground hierarchy, college acceptance, and landing positions in the workplace. It’s not just about excellence in your craft, but also who you know and, more specifically, how strong your relationships are with the people around you.

Evolving as a professional is oftentimes burdened by overt and covert messages that success hinges on becoming a “leader” with acumen for leading the vision, inspiring the masses, advancing on strategy, and growing the business. But what if you don’t excel or have interest in that kind of leadership? What if instead, your ideal career trajectory involves managing and operationalizing the day-to-day work that actualizes that vision?

What is trust, what does it feel like, how do we foster it, what derails it? These are essential questions for any leader to consider as they forge a path to organizational success. Trust is at the foundation of all healthy, successful teams; without it, your team and your organization will not reach its full potential.

One of the most powerful ways to exercise generosity as a professional is to become a mentor. This month, as we reflect on giving, I challenge you to consider taking on a mentoring role as an opportunity to teach, coach, provide feedback, and share your knowledge with someone else… all resulting in community building, a greater sense of purpose, learning (on both sides), and increased levels of joy.

When considering success at work or in life, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is proven to be equal to (if not more important than) IQ. Yet, EQ can evade even some of the smartest and most “successful” leaders because mastery is challenging to consistently achieve. The continually changing landscape of human interactions and the potential for emotions of others to impact our emotional response is complex and dynamic.

Goals, commitments, resolutions… we set them, we intend to achieve them — and for many of us, some of our best set plans to follow through get consciously or unconsciously derailed. What is at the root of our lack of follow through? How do we close the gap between our intentions and our goals?

Over the past five years, I have focused a part of my practice on group coaching for executive women. Bringing powerful leaders together from diverse industry sets, I aim to create a safe and inspiring forum for women to share challenges, celebrate successes, and support each other to stay motivated — and continue forging the way for women coming up behind them. Through this work, two themes have surfaced…

Over the past two decades of coaching professionals, I have found that stress emerges much less in regard to the work itself. While issues like work overload or imposter syndrome can cause real challenge, it’s the tension, conflict, and toxic communication with colleagues that keeps us up at night.

When I was in 5th grade, I had my first encounter with imposter syndrome. Mrs. Bishop asked the class to go around the room, one by one, and read a paragraph from the book our class was reading. From my recollection, I was about 10th in line. When the assignment was given, my entire world became a blur, my face turned red, and the dread that poured over me opened a gateway to an out-of-body experience. I truly was no longer in the room.

Humans are complex, sentient beings, navigating a multitude of dynamics both internally and externally. To ensure consistency and positive outcomes in our social interactions, we go inward; we commit to being deeply familiar with our inner world. Here, we find a landscape within that’s made up of many parts and pieces that, when woven together, result in our unique, individual personality.

The dog days of summer. Long, hot days spent (hopefully) relaxing with the ones you love. For many of us, the last thing we want to think about is the rigor of September that looms around the corner. Back-to-school, the end of Summer Fridays, the full team back in the office, back to the grind…

If you’re a small business owner or solo entrepreneur, you’ve likely been in this scenario before: business is slow, you’re in a dry spell, you feel stuck or bored, and there’s a sense of staleness around work. You know that something needs to change. And when you’re running the show, you don’t have a business development team to lean on for support. It’s all up to you.

So often, we enter conversations from a defensive perspective when power dynamics, egos, and a lack of trust are at play. Our minds race with questions: Why are they asking me this? What have I done wrong? Are they competing with me? Insecurity rears its ugly head and sabotages our ability to be present and responsive. In this reactionary mode, we are not engaged with anyone except for ourselves.

Have you ever been in a room full of people, but felt invisible? Or in a group conversation where you tried to get your point across, but were just not heard? Maybe you started a new job and hadn’t yet found your sea legs to navigate various cliques.

Where is your team going? How will they get there? Do you have the right team? When was the last time you reconnected with your vision and strategy? Where are you going? How will you get there? Do you still have the right team in place to ensure success?

While conflict is ongoing and part of life, there seems to be a radical increase of hate fueling today’s global issues. Seeping through the crevices of society and into people’s hearts, hate is bringing out senseless, ignorant, uneducated, and uninformed reactions.