My first surprise of the day was the crowds. When my daughter and I were invited to a Gem and Jewelry show, I envisioned a small setup you could walk through in less than an hour. I should have paid more attention. It was held in the main part of the Houston Convention Center, and apparently we were late to the game for this phenomenon.

If you’ve ever attended any large trade show at a major city’s convention center, you will have some sense of what appeared before us as we walked through the doors into the main space. And remember, this is a gem and jewelry show. To say that the place sparkled would not be an exaggeration. We weren’t sure where to start. But then, off to the right, something caught our eye.

It was almost like a small corral. A fenced-off area inside the main room. At the entrance was a small gate, and several tables sat at the front. But the back seemed to be just a massive pile of rocks. All shapes and sizes, but basically a pile of brownish, rather dirty-looking rocks.

A small sign read $5.00.

Were they selling the rocks? Why would anyone pay $5.00 for an ordinary rock? It seemed that many would, as a line was already forming.

Our curiosity was piqued, and so off we went to that corner of the grand ballroom filled everywhere else with gems and jewelry.

As we neared the front of the line, we could hear the person at the gate giving instructions. For $5.00, you could choose a rock from the pile. Any rock. Some were quite large, others much smaller. But they were all $5.00. I soon learned you weren’t paying for the rock. You were paying for a roll of the dice for what was inside.

I handed over $10 so that we could each choose a rock.

Then the real surprise of the day happened. We took our rocks up to one of the tables where chisels and hammers awaited us. We cracked mine open first. It was just a rock. An ordinary rock.

Then we turned to my daughter’s, and when hers cracked open, the delight on her face was something I have never forgotten. The inside of her rock was beautiful. Incredibly beautiful. An exquisite amethyst was waiting for her inside.

Our first experience with geodes. What a wonder they are.

That revelation was over 25 years ago, and yet it remains a vibrant memory for both of us. In that moment, amethyst became her forever favorite gem. And since both my Mom’s birthday and hers were in February, that worked out well for future gift-giving!

Often, their gifts were jewelry, especially for my Mom. But I also took delight in helping my daughter create a collection of natural amethyst and other forms of quartz from geodes. As she looks out her kitchen window today in Alaska, she looks through the prism of those gems toward the mountains in her backyard.

Perhaps this memory surfaced after all of these years because over the past few weeks, surprises have been on my mind. Why sometimes we fear them, why sometimes we welcome them, and how what lives inside of them can bring us closer to the miraculous than any of our well-laid plans.

Think of all the times that people have walked by those rocks, never knowing what was living inside, just waiting for someone to care enough to look.

I’m beginning to think that the best moments of life are found when we least expect them.

What about you? When was the last time you were surprised?

Are you ready for your next surprise? It is closer than you might think.

The post When was the last time you were surprised? appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

When I was a young girl, I asked a lot of questions. Most children do. But in our house, a question rarely got a straight answer back. Instead, my parents would ask one of their own.

Why do you ask?
 
At the time, it felt like a dodge. I wanted an answer, not another question. But they weren’t avoiding mine. They were looking for it — the real one, underneath the one I’d said out loud.

It took me years to understand what they were doing. They knew that why someone asks is almost always more important than what someone asks.

That single exchange, repeated a hundred different ways across a childhood, turned out to be my first lesson in paradox. The question that felt like it was blocking me from an answer was actually the thing building my capacity to find one. It was, perhaps, the most meaningful question I’ve learned to ask.
 
I spent most of my career living out a grown-up version of that same exchange, even if I didn’t recognize it at the time.
 
I worked in integration — sales with operations, operations with finance, our systems with the systems of every vendor and client we touched. My job, in plain terms, was making things that weren’t built to talk to each other actually talk to each other.
 
What I learned there was the business version of “Why do you ask?”
 
A client didn’t just need data. They needed to know what the data meant to them — why it mattered, not just what it said. The value was never sitting in the fact by itself. It was sitting at the intersection of the fact and the person trying to use it. Sometimes you had to break the obvious logic of a thing before the real logic showed up underneath it.
 
So the child’s question and the executive’s dashboard turned out to be asking the same thing, just in different places: not what this is, but why it matters, to whom, and what it makes possible.
 
That’s the part I didn’t wholly see until recently. Questioning things wasn’t just a childhood habit or a professional skill. It was possibility thinking in the making. Because the moment you stop accepting a question — or a paradox — at face value, and start asking what it opens up, you’re not just understanding something. You’re building a door someone else can walk through too.
 
Over these last several weeks, in my weekly newsletter, I’ve walked through five of these pairings: learning and teaching, grief and gratitude, courage and fear, discipline and freedom, letting go and holding on.
 
At the time, each one felt like its own destination. Looking back now, I see they were never really separate stops. They were the same question, asked five different ways: Why do you ask? Why does this matter enough to hold both sides of it at once?
 
Take learning and teaching. I didn’t fully see that pairing as a true paradox until I watched it happen in real time—leading two webinars this spring and discovering, once again, that the moment I began to teach something, I understood it differently than I had a moment before.
 
That’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen teaching as my next season of work. Not because I have answers to hand out, but because teaching has always been one of the ways I keep asking better questions. Every workshop changes me before it changes anyone else.
 
Every pairing on this list did the same thing to me. It didn’t resolve into an answer. It opened into a bigger question. And that, I’ve come to think, is the deeper shape of possibility thinking — not solving the paradox but staying in it and curious enough to keep asking why it matters.
 
Here’s what I would like to leave with you:
 
Paradox was never really the point. Curiosity was.
 
So before you head into whatever comes next, these are the questions I invite you to consider:
 
What paradox have you been trying to resolve, when maybe it was only ever asking you to look closer?
 
Where in your life have you mistaken a question for a dead end, when it was actually a door?
 
And if someone asked you right now — why do you ask? — what would you find underneath your own question?
 
And as for what’s next for me, I don’t have a clear idea for that yet. But I know it’ll start the same way it always has. With a question I can’t quite let go of.
 
Because questions, like paradoxes, are never just what they seem. They are doors.

The post A funny thing happened on my stroll through paradoxes appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

I love stories. It seems that I always have.

Even my spiritual heritage lives there. My first experiences with faith came from teachers who shared stories from the Bible. Not just lessons. Stories that helped us understand them and remember them.

Then as a young girl, a librarian invited me into the world of other books, and I’ve never left.

This week is one that in the past I’ve tried to just get through without fanfare. It’s my birthday week. I’m sure many of you can relate to what I mean. We grow up excited to be getting older until we realize that we are. Then we want to slow down our own aging, just as we used to want to slow it down for our children.

But here I am at this juncture, and this year it feels different because this checkpoint is one where I am fully appreciating the gift of it.

I will tell you right up front that this post will be longer than most I’ve written because, in writing this message, so much surfaced that seemed important to share. I hope, though, that you will read it to the end because I believe that somewhere in what I’m sharing, you will find your own story sneaking in there and you’ll also find, once again, a reason to celebrate you.

Not surprisingly, I’m sure, I decided to approach this from a place that I cherish. Books. So as my Dad used to say to us, seemingly every Sunday afternoon, let’s take a ride and see what’s waiting for us.

This is the story of a life told through the books

and the people who arrived at just the right time.

Let me begin by saying how I see birthdays now began on my 59^th birthday. My oldest granddaughter was being a bit cheeky (lovingly though) when she reminded me that it really was the start of my 60^th year. It felt a bit like a cold plunge in the moment. But there was, in fact, wisdom in that observation. Something that frequently happens with her.

So this year, it’s my 71^st birthday. But really, I’m stepping into my 72nd year. I love that shift.

Writing this has been an excavation of those years through the lens of how I got here, specific to the books I’ve read and the people I’ve met. We’ve all heard that sentiment – where we will be in the next five years or ten years will be determined by the books we read and the people we meet.

But it’s also true in retrospect. It’s also true that where we are in this moment is because of the same influences.

So let’s get started.

Let me begin by saying that I have a feeling that a librarian who once put a book into the hands of a fourth-grade girl would smile if she knew where that simple act eventually led.

Since that moment, I have read thousands – truly thousands of books over the course of my life. I decided to do a bit of rudimentary research and found that I’ve purchased over 2000 books since 2005 alone from Amazon – just to give some perspective.

I was already fifty years old by then.

But don’t be too alarmed – we’re not going to talk about all of them. This is about the ones that shaped me in some significant way. To give myself some guardrails and to save this from becoming a book on its own, I decided to limit myself to seventy-one books worthy of having a place in that roster.

There are three more that sit above those that I’ll mention later, but for now, let’s get started with those seventy-one.

This is not going to be a chronological list because I’d end up repeating myself on some things, but I am going to start with where my reading journey began: fiction. With stories.

I’ve mentioned the Bible stories, but beyond that, let’s just look at a few that even now have stayed with me.

First up takes us back to that librarian. My elementary school didn’t have its own library. We were just down the street, barely the equivalent of a city block from our local library, so that’s what we used. Once a week we would all walk together to the library. But for some reason, I never took any books home. My fascination at the time was music, and I preferred reading music back then.

But my piano teacher lived just across from the library. So another walk each week was to the library to wait for my piano lesson, then I would cross the street for that. And on one of those days, the librarian decided to reach out to me and ask about what I might like to read. I honestly didn’t know, but she thought she had a possibility for me.

She placed a book in my hands titled Sue Barton, Student Nurse, written by Helen Dore Boylston. She recognized I was more mature than most of my classmates and thought I would enjoy the story. And I did. In fact, I loved it. But it also introduced me to character-based stories, or chapter books, as we now call them.

There were seven in that series, and I still remember every single one of them. In fact, one of them included a story about when Sue Barton had to have emergency surgery to have her appendix removed. When I went through the same thing when I was twelve, I wasn’t afraid. I already knew what to expect.

Later in life, I shared that story with one of my team members, and for my birthday that year, they found an old copy of that book, complete with the library envelope and card still inside, and gifted that to me. It remains one of the most treasured books in my library.

Other books and series followed that. I later came to enjoy C.S. Lewis and his mythical and magical worlds, and I can still remember listening as a teacher read to us the magnificent tales in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

For a long time, though, fiction fell away for me. I did read some, but it wasn’t the same. It was more entertainment or escape. And then I discovered Rosamund Pilcher. Her book The Shell Seekers remains one of my favorites.

Here’s what is remarkable to me about that one: I read that book in my 30s. The main character, Penelope Keeling, was in her 60s. But for some reason, I identified with her.

When I look at my life and how it has unfolded, what I see is that many of the traits I so admired in that character in that season of her life are now mine. It is as if that became a road map for me to follow. It’s one of those books where you really wish the story was true and that you could go find the characters and become friends.

After that, I was a faithful reader and devoured everything she wrote, including all of her short stories. It also introduced me to a new part of the world where I would later travel and feel like I’d already been there.

A few others worth mentioning here are the book Straight by Dick Francis; The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows; and A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.

Dick Francis became another prolific writer who seemed to always have something just right for all the Friday nights I was a single mom who needed some escape. But his book Straight told the story of two brothers, one of whom kept a journal that ended up being the key to the mystery. That stayed with me and, not surprisingly, turned me into a journal writer myself.

The other two demonstrate how people often come before the book. A dear friend of mine gifted the second one on that list to me and said I would be delighted with it, and I was. I’ve gifted it to others many times as well, but what I remember most is how it deepened a friendship across a distance because of a shared love of books. He’s gone now, but the books we shared remain, and I think of him every time I see them on my shelf.

But the last one (A Man Called Ove) is one of my favorites because my oldest granddaughter introduced it to me. We shared a love of books and had many conversations about them, but this time, she found the book and recommended it to me. What I remember most was her delight when I loved it. There was something affirming to her that she had given me the gift of knowing me. We’ve both read everything he’s written, and his work will forever be linked for me to those moments with her.

There are two more in this category that are more contemporary. A dear friend, Kathryn Brewster Haueisen, wrote the first. It is the story of one of her ancestors, Mary Brewster, told in a fictional setting: Mary Brewster’s Love Life: Matriarch of the Mayflower. This one made the list not just because my friend wrote it, but because we both resonate so strongly with the women in our lineage. For me, it was Molly Mackenzie, my great-grandmother. She didn’t come over on the Mayflower; she lived in a later time, but both of them were influential in their time and in ours because of their legacies.

The last one is a book some of you may have also read this year. I wanted something quite contemporary, and this was an easy one to choose. It is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I would almost put this one on the same level as The Shell Seekers. The act of writing beyond books is so important, and the story told in the books through the sharing of notes, letters, and e-mails is extraordinary.

So that concludes the fiction part of the journey.

The next part does go back to my roots, though, and is my spiritual reading.

First, let me say that I have always had a daily reader beyond the Bible that has spiritual teaching in it. I haven’t included any of those. Those change my life daily. But six books have made, and continue to make, a profound difference in my spiritual life.

What surprised me when I stepped back and looked at them was the fact that they have a very common theme: Prayer.

I first came across Mark Batterson many years ago when someone online posted about his book The Circle Maker. I read it, and even after many decades of thinking I knew what prayer was about, I found I hadn’t even scratched the surface. His books If and Soulprint are two more on the list that were just as transformational.

The other three have their own stories about how they deepened my spiritual experience, and all of them are books I have read many times.

Here they are:

The Miracles in You by Mark Victor Hansen (I was honored to get to meet Mark in person and have him sign my copy of this book – a true-life moment.)

2 Chairs by Bob Beaudine (I first heard Bob speak and then got his book. It helped me through some very tough days.)

Holy Moments by Matthew Kelly (This is only one of many in my library from Matthew, but this one taught me that spirituality can be found in every moment, not just those reserved for it.)

The next group of six focuses on the craft of writing. My craft.

First up is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I was attending a conference in Portland, Oregon, and a woman I met there recommended it. Little did I know just how much I would need it. I got it as soon as I returned home and just after that faced one of my most difficult years. Julia’s Morning Pages were right there with me and made that experience not only bearable, but investable. They also reinforced the power of daily writing and journaling.

And speaking of conferences, Jeff Goins was hosting a writing conference near Nashville that I was going to attend. I was researching the speakers and came across Jon Acuff. I got the audio version of his current release and listened to it on the drive. Because of that conference and Jon’s book Finish, my own book found its own finish line. The other book from that conference that pushed it forward came from Jeff with his work in Real Artists Don’t Starve. Two examples of how books bring people together and create real change.

Another conference introduced me to Michelle Prince, which also led me to her book The Power of Authority. Her book and subsequent coaching helped me to fully understand the value of the book beyond its pages to what it can make possible for the reader. One of her signature lines was that you can’t spell authority without the word author. That resonated with me.

But then, as is always the case, reality can set in, and it gets harder. That’s where the next two books have made the difference for me. First was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Every author should read it, but it’s about life as much as it is about writing. And you should never pass up an opportunity to hear her speak. That’s where I first found her. She was speaking, and I had the opportunity to attend.

Second in that season came from another favorite, Steven Pressfield. My nemesis is resistance. Always has been. I re-negotiate everything with myself to the point of exhaustion. He still helps me with that every time I pick up my copy of Do the Work, read it, and then get back to business.

This next group is perhaps one of the most telling for me anyway. These books fall into the category of biographical writing. But for each of them, what happened within me was life-changing.

Let’s begin with an early favorite.

Gilda Radner’s story in It’s Always Something. The title was borrowed from a phrase she often heard her father say. I can’t say I was a fan of hers. I didn’t watch Saturday Night Live. In fact, I had barely heard of her before reading this book. But I was a fan of her husband, Gene Wilder. His movie, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, released in 1971, was one of my Dad’s favorites, and I watched it with him many times.

When Gilda passed away in 1989, Gene Wilder’s devotion was very much a part of that story, so I got the book. It was timely for me as my Dad had passed away in 1988, also from cancer. There were so many things in her story that were healing for my own with him because it gave me a clearer understanding of what cancer looks like and feels like from the other side. One review noted that the book shows us that not all poems rhyme.

Then came my fascination with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. I have long admired her work but was completely in awe of what she did with her book Tomorrow is Now.

She was quite ill near the end of writing it but was determined. It has been said often that she willed herself to stay alive long enough to finish the writing of it. That gave me a very different perspective on what it means to be the messenger and not just the writer.

Years later, I wrote a blog post about her and asked this question: Would Eleanor Roosevelt Be On Twitter? and to my surprise, her foundation picked it up and asked if they could reprint it. What an honor that was. And of course, the answer was that she would. She would have taken advantage of every possible channel and tool to spread the messages that needed to be shared.

The next three came from women in times when I needed them.

Joan Didion’s offerings in The Year of Magical Thinking changed how I saw our journey through grief and re-shaped my own.

Shonda Rhimes story in Year of Yes was a wake-up call for me at a time I really needed one. I was another one of those who said no to everything that was outside of my work-focused existence. I had my own year of yes thanks to her and met incredible people and had experiences that shaped the rest of my story.

Then came the recent offering from Ina Garten – Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir. She’s been a shero of mine for many years because of the way she reinvented herself. Going from being an analyst in the White House to buying a specialty food shop on a whim after seeing an ad in the paper to her later success as a television host and author is what many dreams are made of.

But in this book, for the first time, she talks about the person who was on the journey. She is someone I share with my daughter, Lauren, who loves her recipes! We both have every one of her cookbooks, but her memoir gave me an even deeper appreciation and respect for the woman behind them.

Which brings me to the last one in this group, which is another book written by a dear friend. Her name is Bobbie Casolino-Lewis, and her book is So That’s What 70 Looks Like. It’s not easy for me to articulate what this one has meant and still means to me. I have never liked to have my picture taken. I’ve never been comfortable in my own skin. She is. She’s not a traditional beauty, but she is beautiful. She’s not traditional by choice. Because she’s inexplicably herself and she is stunning. This book is where she shares where that emanates from, and it has beautiful imagery throughout.

When she first published the book, I was not 70 yet, but it was looming and, to be candid, I was dreading it. Her spirit comes through in every word and image, and it is inspiring me to live into my 70s with a very different perspective. And it’s inspired me to write my own memoir about what aging means.

In the last section, which is primarily non-fiction about life and business, forty-five remain. That is far too many for me to share every reason with you here, but you can go to the end of this post and get the full list.

Here are some of them that bear mention.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

This book was a gift for Christmas the year my daughter married. The story itself became the real gift, and it gave my journey as an empty nester a very different beginning. I read it now every year between Christmas and New Year’s.

The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday

I have a shelf of books by Ryan Holiday, and others could have easily found their way here, but this one was my clarion call that everything makes something else possible.

Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields

Jonathan Fields is a fascinating person who never fails to help me see things differently. This book is where I first began to see myself as a possibilitarian. It was a permanent lens change for me. I am now a faithful listener to his podcast and subscriber to everything he writes.

The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann

I honestly do not remember how I first discovered this book. It’s become such a part of my life that it’s hard to even remember how I first encountered it, but no book has influenced my life to the same degree as this one. In addition to the impact the book’s story has had on my approach to my life and work, it led me to a community of extraordinary people that I cherish. I was also privileged to get to know the authors and can count them both as friends and mentors. I joined John David Mann’s Writing Mastery Group, spent three years there, and am now writing my own parable.

The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making by Scott Plous

When I went back to college at 52, I thought it was to get the degree and, initially, it was. But it became so much more because of this textbook and class. It not only changed the trajectory of the rest of my career in supply chain logistics, but it is also now the basis of my own work with founders.

A Passion for Excellence by Tom Peters

I still remember burning the midnight oil to read this one. I couldn’t get through its pages fast enough. It answered a burning need in me to understand why mastery was so much a part of what drives me. It allowed me to accept that as a core value and also learn how to leverage it in a meaningful way.

Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud

This is perhaps not only one of the most important books I’ve read, but also without question the one I have gifted and recommended more than most any other. It is not as you might think a tome about quitting. It is a beautiful road map for pruning our lives just as a master gardener would do. It is not allowing the good to get in the way of the great. I refer to it often when faced with the start-stop-continue questions.

Reinvent Yourself by James Altucher

This is another voice with many offerings on my bookshelf. But his words go beyond the usual shelf-help so many are. I chose this one for here because it is what I have been able to do because of this book. We don’t just live by days, weeks, years, or even decades. We live by our seasons, and each one calls a different form of us forward. This book showed me not only that it’s possible, but how to claim that.

Start With Why by Simon Sinek

If I have a philosophical hero, it is Simon Sinek. I could listen to him speak or read his words every day and never get enough. My own work now comes from what he teaches in this book. It helped me define my own work.

The Pivot Year by Brianna Weist

I’m wrapping up this section with this book because it’s the only daily reader that made the list and there’s a reason for that. I first read this book the year I resigned from my long-time corporate career and decided to go full-time into writing and teaching. It’s also the year I decided to sell my home of thirty years and move.

It was, in every way, my pivot year, and this book was my therapist and guide. I read it again the following year. I now pick it up from time to time whenever I need that boost re-orienting can bring.

Going back to the beginning, though, for my three honorable mentions, here they are:

The Bible – I mentioned Bible stories, but the Bible itself is a life-changing book. No list of books that have changed my life would be complete without it.

My Journals – I’ve mentioned journals throughout this message, but this is about my own journals. Especially the Jim Rohn leather journals I’ve kept over the years. The first one was a gift to me from Kyle Wilson, Jim Rohn’s business partner for many years. I was privileged to be part of his Inner Circle Mastermind, where I met people and discovered many of the books that would change my life.

And lastly, there is my book- Adjusted Sails: What does this make possible? 

What I can tell you is that beyond any of the other books on my list, this one has brought about the most significant change because no book will change you like the one you write. But it’s true for any of us – whatever our creative calling is – while we can curate and learn and admire with great enthusiasm and even passion the work of others, none will change us like what we ourselves create.

As I was writing this post, I found myself going back to something Emma Thompson once said. Perhaps she was only half right when she said that books are like people and arrive just when we need them. Books do arrive when we need them. But I’ve come to realize that, more often than not, someone places them into our hands. 

That’s one of my desires for you in sharing all of this: that you may find a book among these that is your next invitation to something in your life.

The other gift from writing all of this has been the reminder that since the last 71 years were shaped by books that arrived right when I needed them, that means there are more out there, unread, waiting to do the same thing. There it is again as I’m walking into my 72nd year: Hope.

That’s wonderfully true for all of us — and for me, there are more of my own coming.

Here is the promised full list of the 45 books for Life and Work:

The post Is your birthday the end of a year…or the beginning of one? appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

Recently, I had the chance to listen to an interview with Simon Sinek. I’ve always appreciated the way he brings things to a human level—helping us find a different perspective so that we can make better choices.

The question they were discussing was how we should introduce ourselves. An age-old dilemma. It usually starts with “What do you do?” or perhaps “Tell me something about yourself.”

Our first response is almost always to begin with whatever we see as our most dominant role at the time.

I am a business executive.
I am a business analyst.
I am a business owner.
I am a teacher.
I’m a proud grandmother.

Or we lead with our industry, which for me was supply chain logistics.

Simon Sinek’s view was that we’re getting this wrong. And honestly, his take came as a relief to me—because all of those answers, while true, don’t really say anything about who we are.

His answer is quite different. He’ll tell you that he is an optimist and an author. Simple. Not comprehensive. But it reflects the heart of everything he does.

It made me pause.

What would I lead with?

For me, it is this: I am a possibilitarian and a writer.

I’ve always embraced that idea personally, but only recently have I begun using it as my introduction. And since I have, it has led to some meaningful conversations—and even better questions.

The first question is usually where the word came from. I first encountered it in Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. With all of the lessons in that book, that is the one that stayed with me.

Part of the reason it resonated so deeply is that it wasn’t new. It was something I had already been witnessing my entire life.

My heritage is filled with stories of people who were each possibilitarians in their own way—people who saw beyond what was in front of them and acted accordingly. Outside of my spiritual heritage, that may be the greatest gift I’ve received.

The second question is almost always this:

How is possibility thinking different from positive thinking?

It’s an important distinction, because we tend to fuse them together—as if they represent the same point of view. We reduce it to whether the glass is half full or half empty.

But that’s not what this is about.

It isn’t about how you see the glass.
It’s about what you see as possible from what is already there.

What could you do with it?
What might it become with just a bit of stretch?

In the end, nothing may shape our lives more profoundly than our ability to do just that.

Peale captured it this way:

“I challenge you to become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see the possibilities—always see them, for they are always there.”

I’ve always been curious about where our words come from, and the root meaning of possible is telling:

Being able — having the power to act.

Capable of making happen.

Not hopeful. Not hypothetical.

Capable.

But capability only matters if we believe we have choices worth acting on.

We’re often told that life is shaped by our choices. But that’s only part of the truth.

What actually shapes our lives are the choices we believe we have.

And too often, we limit those without even realizing it.

We choose between A and B, never imagining that C might exist—or that we could create D ourselves.

Another way to think about it comes from something as simple as color. If the choices are blue or red, but what you really need is purple, you don’t choose—you create it.

We make decisions inside frameworks we didn’t design, without questioning whether the structure itself is the constraint.

What if the problem isn’t the decision… but the assumption that the options in front of you are all you get?

Poor decisions are rarely about bad judgment. More often, they begin with a narrow set of choices.

That’s why possibility thinking matters.

It isn’t about choosing better.
It’s about seeing differently.

Because sometimes, the most powerful option isn’t on the palette yet.

We have to create it.

Urgency pressures us to decide.
Possibility invites us to imagine.

You’re not always responsible for the options you’re given. But you are responsible for questioning them.

Some choices are clear. Others ask more of you. They ask you to redefine what’s possible.

And in doing so, they begin to define you.

That shift—from choosing within to creating beyond—is where being a possibilitarian begins to take hold.

And over time, it changes not just what you do… but how you do it—and who you become in the process.

Emily Dickinson wrote, “I dwell in Possibility—” and each time I return to those words, I’m reminded that dwelling is not passive.

You don’t wander into possibility by accident.

You choose it.
You inhabit it.
You live from it.

And when you do, what once felt out of reach begins to feel… possible.

Originally posted on The Possibility Factor (Substack) by Kathi Laughman on April 22, 2026

The post Are you a possibilitarian? appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

Author’s note: Selecting the right image for each article I write is part of the work. But it’s also a part I relish because I’m a visual person myself. When I come across something that halts my eye, I know I’ve found it. As it happened this week. What you see in the image above is something hikers will recognize. It’s a trail marker. It’s information for hikers, left by someone who went before. For us, it confirms that failure can be framed as a useful signal rather than a warning. Either from our own previous experience or that of others.

You delay the decision. You research it one more time. You hold onto the thing longer than you should. You avoid the conversation.

Do any of those sound familiar? They certainly do to me.

We tell ourselves we’re being careful, or just thorough. That we’re being responsible. But most of the time, we’re only fooling ourselves with those platitudes.

We’re not weighing the decision at all — we’re avoiding what we think failure would mean if we got it wrong.

We’ve been taught to read failure as a warning sign. Something to flinch from. Something that shows up at the end of a bad decision, confirming we shouldn’t have made it.

But what if we’ve been reading the signal backwards?

What if failure isn’t the consequence of a decision — but one of the inputs required to make better ones?

Here’s the line I keep coming back to from the work I’m doing now:

Everything makes something else possible. Including failure.

Failure isn’t there to stop you. It’s there to work for you — if you’ll let it.

That shift — from failure as risk to failure as a resource — changes everything downstream. It changes what you’re willing to try. It changes how long you will sit with a decision before you make it. And it changes what you do with the ones that don’t go the way you hoped.

All of that brought me to the thoughts I want to share with you here and to walk through what failure actually does for us when we stop treating it like an enemy and start treating it like a collaborator.

Seven things, one for each letter of the word itself.

F — Freedom

A — Awareness

I — Interrupt

L — Leverage

U — Uncover

R — Reframe

E — Elevate

That’s a progression.

Release. See clearly. Break the pattern. Use what you’ve got. Expand the possible. Change the meaning. Rise with it.

That’s the arc. Let’s walk it together.

FREEDOM

There are many reasons we avoid decisions. But the reason most people will give, when pressed, is fear. Not just any fear — the fear of failure. What if I get it wrong? What if this derails everything? So fixated on what could go wrong, we lose sight of what we’re resisting on the other side of the decision.

That’s why, to fully embrace failure as not just an unavoidable part of life but a necessary part of success, we have to free ourselves of that fear. Once we recognize that we have agency over the decision and everything that follows, we can see it as part of how and what we build, rather than a verdict on our worth.

For many years, I passed up opportunities to advance in my career because I was afraid I would be rejected for not having a college degree. I didn’t think I would fail at the job. I thought I would fail at getting the job. Rather than have to face that rejection (failure), I just didn’t try.

I decided to call my own bluff and went back to college in my 50s, finishing the degree. What I found out was that the opportunities had never been beyond me. I was placing myself beyond them. What I learned from going back to college was that the degree didn’t open doors. Deciding I was allowed to knock on them did. And when I looked back, I saw how many doors I’d walked past because I’d decided — before anyone else got a vote — that they weren’t mine to open.

I realized there were many lost chances due to that false narrative. That’s what fear does. It gives us a picture that’s meant to contain us, not free us. Failure, on the other hand, is there to do just the opposite. It sets us free from that fear so that we can move.

AWARENESS

I spent a good portion of my career in business intelligence. We gathered data, studied it, sorted it, and handed it back so others could make better decisions. But no matter how thorough we were, it didn’t always lead to the best choices — because there’s no way to fully exhaust the data or model every scenario that could happen. In many cases, what we missed only became visible after the decision had already missed the mark.

That’s the hard truth about information. It can only tell you what’s knowable in advance. And most of the decisions that matter live in the space where the knowable runs out.

Failure is what reaches into that space. It shows you what the research couldn’t — not because the research was bad, but because some things simply cannot be known until you move. Over-research is my trap. And what I’ve had to learn, slowly, is that over-research is fear wearing the costume of diligence. It looks productive. It looks responsible. But past a certain point, more data isn’t making the decision clearer — it’s just delaying the moment when you find out what you couldn’t have known anyway.

Failure gives you that information in a way no report ever could. It also does something else, something I didn’t expect: it shows you how much of what you feared was never real to begin with. Most of the catastrophes we spend our energy trying to prevent never actually arrive. The ones that do arrive are usually smaller and more survivable than the version we built in our heads.

That’s awareness. Not just seeing what happened. Seeing what was real.

INTERRUPT

There’s a meeting you’ve been meaning to have. A hire you know isn’t working. A direction the business took eighteen months ago that hasn’t played out the way you thought it would. You keep moving. The calendar fills. The quarter closes. And the thing you know isn’t right keeps getting ignored.

Then something happens. A client leaves. A number comes in low. A conversation you weren’t expecting forces the issue into the open. And for a moment — usually an uncomfortable one — everything stops.

That moment is the gift. Most of us treat it like a setback.

Failure interrupts. That’s its job. Not to end the journey, but to break the momentum long enough for you to see what the momentum was hiding. It’s the trail marker on the tree — the painted exclamation mark that tells the hiker the path just changed, pay attention. It isn’t telling you to turn around. It’s telling you that autopilot stopped working a while ago, and you didn’t notice until right now.

The hardest part isn’t the interruption itself. It’s what we do with the pause it creates. Most of us rush to fill it. We explain the number. We reframe the client departure. We tell ourselves a story that puts the momentum back where it was, because momentum feels safer than stopping. But the pause is where the choice lives. The pause is the whole point.

When you let the interruption actually land — when you let the failure do what it came to do — you get something you can’t get any other way: a clean look at the path you were on, from a standing position. You can see the turn that’s already happened. You can choose what comes next instead of inheriting it from what came before.

That’s what failure is offering when it interrupts you. Not a verdict. A vantage point.

LEVERAGE

What does this make possible? It’s the closest I have ever come to having a true-life mantra. It’s not about being opportunistic. It’s about leverage. If you believe, as I do, that everything makes something else possible, failure has to be in that realm as well.

When I wrote my first book nearly 10 years ago, it focused on resilience.  The title is Adjusted Sails: What does this make possible? I had gone from an empty nest season to losing my job to facing a significant health scare. All within a condensed amount of time. Wave after wave of what felt like getting knocked down. I had to find a way to get back up. It started with understanding each of those situations as something other than failure.

That’s where I realized we already have what we need, when we need it — if we’re willing to see it. And to invest it as a resource into what’s next. That’s the essence of leverage.

What we might initially see as failure is ripe with possibilities for leverage. Not just within that moment, but for the future as well.

I learned that the failures I was trying to hide were the very ones that could be teaching the most. And not just because what you bury, you repeat. Because it is also often where you have the most potent opportunity to serve others.

UNCOVER

There’s an old saying — it’s been attributed to Alexander Graham Bell, to Helen Keller, and to Cervantes before either of them — that when one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and regretfully at the closed door that we miss the one that has opened for us.

The quote has traveled through so many voices because the pattern it names is that universal. We stare. We linger. We replay the closing. And while we’re doing that, something else is becoming available that we aren’t looking at yet.

That’s what failure does at the level of a single decision. It closes a door you were counting on, and while you’re standing there trying to understand why, it’s revealing something else. Information you didn’t have. A possibility you couldn’t see from where you were standing. A version of the path that was never visible to you until this door had to close.

The same pattern shows up in the physical world all the time, at a much larger scale.

Earthquakes reveal to us what the Earth is made of. Seismic activity has taught geologists more about the planet’s interior than any other source of information. When the plates shift, they expose rock that had been buried for millions of years. What feels like a catastrophe from the surface is also — at the same time — the only way certain information about the world becomes available.

The science is one thing. Living it is another.

When my daughter and her family moved to Alaska in 2018, they experienced a 7.1 earthquake that November. What I watched them learn over the months that followed wasn’t just how to prepare for the next one. It was how to live alongside the knowledge that the ground could move again at any time. They had to make peace with a kind of uncertainty most of us never have to reckon with directly. You see and feel things differently when you’ve been inside them.

My own version was milder. I was stuck in an elevator in California during a quake once. The whole building swayed. There was nothing to do but wait. When it stopped, and the doors finally opened, I walked out into a world that had been rearranged by something I couldn’t see and couldn’t control. I couldn’t tell you what had changed. But I knew something had.

That’s what failure does, too. The shaking ends. The doors open. And the world you walk into is not the one you walked out of.

REFRAME

The idea of framing and reframing was more literal for me before I decided to pursue life coaching as a possible next career season.

I love art. I always have. Some of my treasured pieces go back decades. But of note is the fact that I rarely kept the artwork in its original frame. In fact, sometimes I bought a piece just for the frame because I had a different, but perfect painting for it.

So when the master coach who led the training cohort said that one of the key values coaching brings is the ability to help ourselves and others reframe situations, events, and ideas — it became an extension of what I’d already discovered in a physical application.

How we see things depends, in part, on how they’re presented to us. But only in part — because we can change the presentation. That’s what reframing is. And it’s led me to one of my favorite discoveries: perspective is truth in motion. Because we can change where we’re standing, we can see what’s true from a different place.

But changing perspective isn’t spontaneous combustion. It needs a catalyst. And quite often, what we first see as failure is exactly that.

The question then becomes what the failure is trying to show us. Not to review what happened, but to change what happens next.

As a possibilitarian, I try to live by another often-quoted truth: when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Failure is one of the forces that lets that shift happen. It hands you the new frame whether you asked for it or not.

Failure doesn’t change the facts of what happened. A different frame doesn’t change the actual painting. But in both cases, the meaning changes. And the meaning is almost always what we were really responding to in the first place.

ELEVATE

Some of my favorite memories from childhood and my teenage years are of family trips from our home in Ohio to West Virginia. We went to visit my grandparents and to see the places where my parents had grown up.

One spot that my Dad and I frequented was Hawk’s Nest State Park. We climbed the peak of Gauley Mountain for the breathtaking view of the New River below. I didn’t just see a place. I saw history. My Cherokee ancestors had lived along that river. They had walked where we were walking. They had stood on this ridge. I didn’t have anything to prove that other than how it felt, but their story became real to me from that elevation.

Sometimes, we cannot see what it is we need to see until we can go to a higher plane.  It’s still about perspective, but it takes stepping out of the frame for this one.

When we are in the throes of what feels like failure, it can be easy to see only what is staring us in the face when what we need is to rise above that and see the whole vista. When we do, two things happen. Where we are becomes clearer. And what’s just beyond us — the thing we couldn’t see from the ground — comes into view. Failure is often what lifts us high enough to see both at once.

You don’t get better at decisions by making more of them; you get better by letting each failure raise the floor you make the next one from. Because once you’ve experienced the view from above, you’ll know how to find it again.

Which of those attributes of failure resonated most with you? While these do show a progression, it doesn’t mean that every failure does all of them every time. And, you may find, as I did, that as you work through them, you also begin to improve your overall decision framework because the lens keeps adjusting.

In his recently released book, How to Get a Return on Failure: Fail Smarter—Return Stronger, John C. Maxwell talks about this as moving from apprehension to appreciation of failure. His thesis is that to get a return on something, we have to first appreciate its value.

“Appreciating failure means properly estimating the advantages it brings as you learn from it. The ability to deal with failure opens doors to the exploration of new territory and a life of greater potential.”

That progression from apprehension to appreciation is what the seven letters are tracing. Freedom is where apprehension loosens its grip. Elevate is where appreciation finally settles in. Everything in between is the work of getting from one to the other.

Here are three ways you can begin that practice for yourself:

1. Pick one decision you’ve been circling for more than two weeks. Not the biggest one — just one. Now ask: am I stuck because the decision is actually unclear, or because I haven’t decided what failure would mean if I got it wrong? (Write down the answer before you do anything else.)
2. Look at the four behaviors I’ve mentioned — delaying, over-researching, holding on, and avoiding. Which one is running right now, in your life, today? (Name the decision underneath it. That’s where failure can work for you.)
3. For the next decision you face this week, don’t ask “what if this fails?” Ask “what could failure here make possible?” (Then decide.)

The decision you’ve been avoiding isn’t waiting for more information. It’s waiting for you to decide what failure would mean — and decide it doesn’t mean what you’ve been telling yourself it means. That’s the only decision underneath the decision. Everything else is just the path.

When we stay focused on finding the good in every situation — and on what it is making possible — success becomes inevitable.

That’s what I want for you, for all of us.

The post What do we keep missing about failure? appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

One of the most fascinating things about the power of a decision is how many channels it opens for us to take action. Quite frankly, that’s how I know I’ve truly decided about something. The way forward stops being about the decision. That isn’t a variable any longer. It’s the foundation.

In situations where the decision keeps coming up as an option, I know I still have work to do to get clear.

That’s not always as easy as we may think for a number of reasons. But one of the most challenging is when we don’t understand the decision we are making.

In several conversations this past week, working with people within the Decision Brief tool I’m developing, this became really clear.

Before any decision can be internalized in a way that is sustainable, it must first be fully understood.

What does that mean? This is where walls come into the conversation. Yes, I know, it’s an odd pairing, but bear with me because this insight is important and will prove helpful.

What do walls have to do with decisions? Let’s take a look.
 
What walls and decisions have in common
 
In the simplest terms, it’s about their function.

Decisions are what keep us functioning, focused, and safe. Isn’t that also what walls do?

Before you build a wall, you need to know its purpose. And the purpose of the wall is going to give you all of the specifications you need in order to build it in a way that ensures its success.
 
It is the same with decisions. The purpose of the decision is what ultimately defines it.

What’s protecting the foundation?
 
If you’ve ever done a home remodel or watched one of the many shows about them, you’ve experienced the dreaded discovery that the wall you want to take down due to our modern-day obsession with open concept living is, in fact, a load-bearing wall.
 
What does that mean? It means you cannot just remove it. You must take on the work of that wall another way before it can be removed. That can be with overhead framing or in other ways, but that wall distributes the weight of the entire structure across the foundation so the house can stand.
 
Load-bearing walls are more than just a wall. They do serious work, and they are the visible evidence that the structure has a foundation. What does that bring to mind? You might think of values—but it goes deeper. Your beliefs are part of the structure, too. They’re what keep the weight distributed and the whole system standing.
 
What’s protecting how you function?
 
But what about the other walls? When a structure is framed out, those other walls are doing just that. They are creating a frame. They are about what will happen within the structure. These are not as permanent, but they are as specific. You wouldn’t frame a kitchen in the same way you would frame a bathroom, a bedroom, or a carport. Once again, the wall’s purpose gives you the specification for it.
 
It’s the same with many of our decisions. They aren’t fully permanent, but they are meant to be defining. We have to understand what the decision is meant to allow us to do before we can fully understand it.
 
This is where binary thinking often becomes our nemesis. We think we are deciding between two options, but the real decision is about what the options are meant to make possible.
 
This applies to both our businesses and our lives.
 
What’s protecting how you stay the course?
 
The last type of wall is my current focus: temporary walls, or scaffolding. Sometimes, the decision we need to make is temporary from the onset. It is needed because of specific circumstances or conditions. When we approach those decisions with that level of understanding, it can be much easier to figure out which temporary measure will get the job done for us and allow us to reverse out of it when the time comes with ease.
 
What I find interesting with this type of wall is that we often carry guilt about them, as if temporary means uncommitted or weak. We need to leverage a bit of a pun here and reframe temporary decisions as purposeful and self-eliminating by design.
 
If you’re still reading and with me on this, thank you. I know this is not as straightforward as just giving you a five-step plan or a set of prompts to help you make a decision. But this is at the heart of the work I’m doing, and it is growing clearer to me every day that, before we can start, we need to get better at understanding just what it is we are deciding.
 
The question we’re really asking each time we are faced with a choice is this:
 
Do you know which kind of decision you’re making?
 
Because most people don’t. They treat load-bearing decisions like scaffolding and wonder why things collapse. Or they treat scaffolding like load-bearing walls and can’t let go when the job is done.

Reflection

One of my favorite insights from Andy Andrews is right on point this week.
 
“One way to define wisdom is the ability to see, into the future, the consequences of your choices in the present. That ability can give you a completely different perspective on what the future might look like.”
 
Decision models are important. Just as architectural models show us how things will function, they allow us to make critical changes before they become problematic. They give us that glimpse into the future consequences of our choices.
 
Here’s what I’d like to invite you to consider:
 
Choose one area of your life or work to examine what your walls (decisions) look like now.
 
That can be your work, your finances, your health, your relationships, your creative endeavors, your spiritual life – choose one aspect of the building that is your life.
 
Now look at what foundational decisions you have in place. Where is your load-bearing wall? How are you ensuring that the weight of what you carry is always coming back to the foundation?
 
Staying with that same segment of “YOU” – let’s look at your framing of it. How are you supporting it? This can be your processes, your habits, your daily practices – anything that is about your “how” for that particular “what.”
 
Finally, check whether you have any temporary walls or scaffolding in place for it. If yes, is it doing the job? Is it effective? Do you have any that it may be time to let go of? If you don’t have any, is there a place here where that would be helpful? This could be finding a mentor, a spiritual advisor, a health professional – any number of things can apply here.
 
Once you’ve examined that part of your life or work, step back and determine how any of the walls you have found might also be supporting other parts of you, and move there next.
 
Become the inspector of your own life by looking at the basic decisions you have already made before determining what the next ones need to be.  
 
Because until you do, you will keep building the wrong kind of walls for the life you are trying to live.

The post What walls can teach us about decisions appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

I’ve noticed something about my inbox lately. It’s been filled with renewal notices—publications, insurance, and everything in between.
 
The message is clear: Do you want to continue?
 
It has reminded me that March often brings its own kind of renewal notices—signals that it may be time to question the decisions and choices we made coming into the new year.
 
In some cases, that’s because we’ve gone through changes that have shifted things, including our focus.

In others, it might be that we’re just not seeing the progress we had hoped for, and discouragement is beginning to wave its flag of surrender.
 
Still other factors might be at play. The list has no definitive end for why we don’t, won’t, or even can’t finish everything we start.
 
I’ll admit that this was a struggle for me for many years. It may have come from childhood, where we had to finish everything on our plates. Ugh. But more likely, it came from the bombardment of messages we have all been subjected to: ‘winners never quit.’

But the reality is that winners quit more often than they finish. They’ve just gotten very good at deciding when and what to quit.
 
That’s been on my mind this past week as I’ve been looking at my own spectrum of ambition for this year. My focus word is RESOLVE. I knew that was the secret to my success in everything on my roster. I had to practice resolve. I had to do what I had resolved to do.
 
But what is interesting about that is that our resolve can remain to do something while still allowing us to find another path to get there.
 
That’s without question the most looming message for me this year. The path to success isn’t limited. The divergent thinking I’ve been talking about is showing me ways to achieve things that I had never considered.
 
The resolve is still there. But it’s now my resolve to get something done. Not for the way to make that happen.
 
We must each continuously adjust our decisions based on our own feedback, what we learn from others, accurate information, and changes around us. That is how we can stay responsive, relevant, and effective as we move toward the destination we’ve chosen.

This isn’t a new topic for me. So instead of writing something completely new this week, I went back to three pieces that each address a different perspective and approach for revisiting our decisions.
 
For those times when you just want to quit!
 
This article is from the blog, and it meets you in the moment before the moment. The one where you’re not sure if you’re being resilient or just stubborn.
 
The first part talks about the fact that there are two very different lenses we can use when we look at the question of whether or not to stay the course.

The second part includes five things to consider when you have decided you want to stay the course and need help doing that. I’m working on some follow-up thoughts for this now that talk about how to convert motivation to momentum.
 
If this is where you find yourself, the five points here are a good starting point.
 
Does This Still Matter?
 
Some of you have already joined me on Substack and are following my publication there, which is unfolding the story of my upcoming parable, The Possibility Factor.
 
Sometimes the question isn’t just whether to continue. It’s whether the destination still means what it once did. This one sits with that question.
 
This article looks at what happens when meaning changes and what we once thought was our center shifts.
 
Here’s a line from it that might meet you where you are:
 
“There are times when what we do doesn’t change, but our reason for doing it does. Sometimes that comes from a deepening awareness; other times it’s a natural realignment with a new season of life or work.”
 
It also looks at the value and need for refinement, at times, and draws on lessons I’ve learned as a potter.
 
Growth Doesn’t Always Announce Itself
 
This is the one I saved for last. It’s about the work that happens before the proof shows up.
 
It is from the Yes I Can Living community’s blog, where I am a contributor.
 
This article is my most recent post there, and it’s very specific to my opening for this week’s message to you. It’s about March, and it closes with this thought:
 
Growth doesn’t always announce itself.
 
Sometimes it unfolds in hidden layers, building roots before blossoms, strength before beauty. Sometimes it asks for patience before proof.
 
March holds the tension of that truth. It reminds us that life can be very active even when it appears still.
 
The bloom will come in its season.
 
Until then, there is important work happening underground.

Reflection

One of my favorite quotes, which remains at the front of nearly every journal I have kept for a number of years, comes from Andrew McCarthy, written during a time of his own personal reawakening.
 
“There’s a certain moment in every memorable journey, often recognized only in hindsight, when the trip you are on presents itself, and the one you thought you were taking or had planned is jettisoned. It’s then that you begin really traveling, not merely touring.”
 
Across the three articles I’ve shared with you, there’s a shared message, even as they take it on through different lenses.
 
The questions for each of us are simple.
 
Where are you in your quest?
What needs to be examined?
What is it that it may be time to release?
What needs more time to grow?
 
If you’re unsure, remember this: You’re not in this alone.
 
Legacy is communal. Honest audits benefit from witnesses. Named desires get stronger when spoken to someone who can hold them with you.

I am here to help.

The post Keep going, quit, or start something new? appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

That dreaded question.  What do you want for dinner?
 
The question has many variations. But they all require the same thing. A response. A decision has to be made.

Sometimes we care about the answer. Sometimes we don’t. More often, we care, but we don’t actually know what we want until someone else starts making some choices. Then at least we know what we don’t want. 
 
It sounds so easy. And yet it’s not, just like many of the other decisions we face.

Let’s explore what’s at the heart of the dilemma.
 
Imagine walking into a restaurant you’ve heard good things about. You’ve been looking forward to trying it for a while now.
 
You’re seated, and the wait staff approaches you. They are carrying what appears to be a menu. They hand it to you with a smile.
 
But you’re not sure what to say to them. The menu is blank.

Your first thought will be that they’ve made a mistake. Surely they have given you the wrong menu.

But when you ask the question, you’re answered with another smile and told that there isn’t a menu.

And then they ask a question of you:  

What can the chef make for you today?
 
Now, before you fully settle into that scene, imagine with me a different restaurant.

This one will bring a very different experience. In fact, quite the opposite.

As you’re shown to your seat, just as before, the wait staff approaches with the menu. But this menu is very extensive. You’re going to need those pesky reading glasses!
 
But then, you’re surprised when what you hear next is this as you open the menu.
 
You should know that no substitutions or changes are allowed. I’ll be back shortly to take your order.
 
Two different starting points. Neither leads to the meal you were hoping for.
 
We face these extremes more often than we realize, and the result is usually the same for both.
 
The paralysis of infinite possibility and the resentment of no choice at all usually mean no decision gets made.
 
The restaurant (and life) we actually want is neither of those two.

What we want is a thoughtful menu. Curated. Intentional. Enough choice to feel like ourselves, enough structure to make the choosing possible.
 
That kind of menu is the curated life made tangible.
 
If you’re like me, and judging from your responses last week, you are, when the waiter asked “What can the chef prepare for you?” — that moment of unexpected openness — you recognize that’s the moment you’re in right now.

With so many options, how can you choose?

The question is genuinely open, and it seems that we’re not quite prepared for it.

The confusion and frustration we feel in this moment are genuine. It’s the gap between having been handed restrictive menus our whole lives and suddenly being invited to actually choose.
 
Some time ago, a book caught my attention because of its title: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It.
 
It was written by the late Barbara Sher. I went on to read several of her books, and they all pointed me in a direction very different from what I had been told most of my life.
 
The advice had always been to choose your work based on what you were good at and that the market valued. The pressing question at that time in my life was not about what I wanted. It was about what the market wanted. Not a bad question, just not the right first question.
 
Her insights helped me to shift my approach. I began thinking not just about what I knew how to do, but also about what I was willing and wanted to learn. 
 
Unfortunately, though, over time, because of the pressures of life, I drifted away from that strategy. Now I’ve found myself back here again.

Once again, staking my claim in what I want.
 
I want to write about ideas and subjects that matter and can make a difference.
 
It took me longer to say that out loud than I care to admit.

But now I have said it.

Saying it didn’t make the whole path clear. But it made finding the path possible. And the moment I said it, the real work began — which is also where you may find yourself right now.

The Logical Next Step
 
What I have found is that the moment after we make that initial choice and declaration can be rather disorienting.
 
The logical next step may not be the best one. We’re carrying layers of thoughts, feelings, and influences that may still be blocking the way.
 
The real first step is almost always something internal. 
 
In addition to all of that, the times we’re living in have a way of making even a clear direction feel suddenly uncertain.
 
You name what you want, and then the ground shifts. That’s also not a personal failure — that’s the actual terrain.
 
What’s important is to be cautious while also remaining curious.

It seems paradoxical at times, but it is true that we won’t know with certainty until we take the first step, and then each step after that.
 
Sometimes We Need to Make Space
 
Which leads us to the next part of getting started.

Sometimes what you stop doing matters as much (if not more) than what you start.
 
While I do advocate for plenty of white space in everything we do, I’m not a big fan of blank slates. There is richness in our experience and history that we should protect.

But not everything needs to stay. At least not on display.
 
What we usually find is that once our next direction is clear, something almost always has to be released.
 
That’s the lesson we’ve learned from gardening. The best gardeners know what to prune.

If this is where you find yourself in the decision path, Dr. Henry Cloud’s work in Necessary Endings can be invaluable.
 
It’s about first knowing and then making space.
 
Where the First Step Lives
 
If you’ve been with me for a while, you know that I’m an advocate of divergent thinking, questioning our choices before we rush into a decision. That’s true here as well. And that’s why this next part is important.
 
We must interrogate the question before we answer it.
 
Because it’s also possible that if we don’t know what we want, we’ll just keep reaching for more. The list of what we want can become overwhelming. Especially when we are examining every part of who we are and how we want to show up in the world.

The answer to that is discovering what’s actually underneath those wants.
 
Sometimes, the better counter-question to “what do you want to do?” is “how do you want to feel?”
 
Because almost always, there’s a common root.
 
Finding that root is where the first step lives.
 
The key to finding it is knowing that it’s not even on the list. It’s below it.
 
Here’s an exercise you can do to discover it.
 
Choose your top five things that you want to consider.

Write each one on the front side of a 3 x 5 card.
 
Now imagine you’ve accomplished each one. Stand in that moment.
 
How do you feel?
 
Write that on the back of the card.
 
Quite often, those answers are all going to be similar, if not the same.
 
That’s where your first step is found. Knowing how you want to feel is your first step.
 
In the meantime, remember that it’s not just that the first step is hard.
 
It’s that we arrive at the question of what we want, still carrying contradictory burdens simultaneously.
 
We were handed a script we didn’t write.
We were told the sky was the limit.
And then we were handed an infinite menu with no guidance on how to order.
 
The resulting confusion is not a personal failure or a lack of imagination or courage. That’s a genuinely difficult condition to navigate.

If you are still struggling, then start here: 

• When you get up each morning, how do you want to feel? 
• When you end each day, how do you want to feel? 
• What are you doing now that brings you that feeling? 

Remember that this is about what you truly want.

Not what you think you should want.
Not what others expect.

Just what is true.

The post What would you like for dinner… really? appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

When I first retired from the supply chain industry, I didn’t realize how much the lessons I learned there would continue to travel with me.

When we are fully immersed in something and live it out over time, we can lose track of how much it shapes us beyond the work itself.
It’s shaping how we think and how we see our lives.
 
I’ve long believed our lives aren’t nearly as siloed as we imagine. That realization was another gift from my working life, born of what I learned about the value and power of integrating processes and systems effectively.

What we see in one segment or season of our lives almost always influences other areas.
 
It’s the truth that lives behind the common statement that how we do anything is how we do everything. I’ve always rejected that sentiment because I know that it’s over-simplified. But this is the statement I do believe: How we do anything affects how we do everything.
 
It began as an appreciation for integration. Over time, it became something deeper: the ability to recognize patterns.

Think about that for a moment. If we can step back and see a pattern, we can see beyond just what is in front of us in any given moment. We can begin to fully appreciate the meaning behind cause and effect.
 
I took some time this past week to look at where I’m at so far in 2026 with my focus on resolve, and the achievements I’m putting that to work in. As usual, some moments inspired me to try and high-five myself – not an easy task – while others had me shaking my head.
 
As I looked at what was underneath all of that, some definite patterns emerged, and those patterns are lessons that may be as valuable to you as they have been for me. 

• Clarity grows through engagement.

We tend to think clarity is something we arrive at — as if we’ll wake up one morning and feel certain enough to move.

But what I’ve seen (and experienced) is this: Clarity sharpens while we’re in motion.

I explored this lesson more deeply in the piece on Clarity as a Lens — the idea that clarity isn’t a destination; it’s something we use. The act of choosing, refining, and re-evaluating is what sharpens it.

Clarity isn’t waiting for you. It’s waiting to be used.

• The visible decision is rarely the real decision.

This one has threaded its way through the Cooper North essays and several conversations I’ve had behind the scenes as I’m writing that book.

What looks like a tactical choice — sell or stay, launch or wait, hire or hold — is often a structural decision underneath: Who am I becoming? What am I stewarding? What am I unwilling to trade?

The surface option distracts us from the deeper alignment question. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

• Obstacles refine direction.

Earlier this year, I wrote about fear — not as something to eliminate, but something to interrogate.

Resistance is not always a red light. Sometimes it’s a refining fire.

When we expect obstacles rather than interpret them as proof we chose wrong, we respond differently. We adjust. We strengthen. We learn what we’re actually committed to.

The obstacle often reveals whether the direction is reactive… or rooted.

• The people around you shape what feels possible.

This surfaced in the piece on directional friendship — the reminder that ideas travel through relationships.

A book recommendation.
An introduction.
A question someone asks at the right moment.

We spend a lot of time thinking about tools and tactics. But more often than not, momentum enters through people.

Who you’re listening to quietly shapes what feels normal, risky, or possible.

• Courage may be quiet — but it’s not passive.

This one weaves through everything.

Courage isn’t loud. It rarely feels dramatic. It’s the steady willingness to choose without guarantees.

To move before the full picture is visible.
To decide before certainty arrives.

And to own the decision once it’s made.

This has been a core lesson for me this year because I’m spending time in new places — not just physically, but in every sense of the word. And that takes courage.

Reflections

This week, I’m inviting you to explore one place.
 
We’re far enough into 2026 to see patterns. Not just in what I’ve written and shared, but in what you’ve been living.

If you flipped back through your journal — or even just your calendar — what would your own 2026 highlight reel so far this year reveal?
 
What ideas, tensions, or lessons keep resurfacing?
And what might they be preparing you for next?

The post Patterns Worth Paying Attention To appeared first on Kathi Laughman.

Two women were born in 1933. One in France. One in America.

The woman born in France was Jewish. Her name was Francine.

The American girl was born in a small town in West Virginia. She was a second-generation Cherokee. Her name was Peggy.

They came from different parts of the world and would face very different challenges. What they shared was coming into the world in the year Hitler came into power. That became part of both of their stories.

By the time Francine was eight years old, her father had been taken into custody as a prisoner of war. She had to wear the yellow star on her chest, marking her as Jewish. She and her mother were eventually taken to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. Francine’s mother took two small pieces of chocolate with her, knowing there would be hard days ahead. She told her daughter she would save them for when they grew weak and needed strength. The chocolate would help get them through.

When another woman gave birth in the camp, Francine’s mother asked her if she thought they should give their chocolate to the struggling woman to help her have the strength to survive the birth. Francine didn’t hesitate and readily agreed. Despite dire conditions, both mother and child survived.

Six months later, British troops rescued them, and the camp was liberated. Francine and her mother were able to return to France, as did the other mother and child.

Life moved on from those dark days for all of them. Francine went on to write books and poetry and give lectures about her time in the camps. And give birth to her own daughter.

Many years later, when she was in her 80s, her daughter asked if she thought it would have helped her and the others freed from the camps if they had been given access to psychiatrists. She said she couldn’t say, mental health wasn’t something they even spoke of then. It was about survival. But that question inspired her to put together a symposium on the subject.

When one of the psychiatrists who had come to speak took her place at the podium, she began by saying she had a special gift for Francine and took out a piece of chocolate. She smiled warmly at Francine and said, “I’m the baby.”

Can you imagine the depth of feeling as the two women meet again after all those years? 

We don’t often get to see what comes from those moments of sacrifice. I found it very moving that they had a second divine appointment to meet. Somehow, you begin to understand from that moment that Francine and her mother gave so much more than a piece of chocolate.

The power of story always remains.

Listen to her tell her story in her own voice and words

Going back to our young girl growing up in West Virginia, her life took on a very different shape because of the war as well. Her mother worked as a tailor, making uniforms for soldiers fighting in Europe, to save those like Francine and her mother. Other friends and family lost loved ones who wore those uniforms. Their sacrifices were different. None compared to what Francine and her family experienced. But that time shaped everyone who lived through it.

That girl grew up, married a Marine, and moved to Ohio, where, in 1955, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter. Me.

I knew that my grandmother’s life had been changed by that war, but I hadn’t thought about the fact that my mother’s life began during that time. When I first heard Francine speak, I realized that they were contemporaries. The children also have their own stories to tell.

Listening to Francine talk about her conversation with her daughter, I thought of my own conversations with my mother.

I remember a telephone conversation with my Mom one summer, when I lived with my great-aunt and uncle in downtown Cleveland. My great aunt was recovering from heart surgery, and they needed help. On our call, I lamented missing home and my freedom. My mother reminded me that I wasn’t there for me.

She said I was born to fulfill a purpose, and that opportunities to make a difference would come throughout my life. They would never be a burden in the end, but a gift. It was the genesis of my understanding of having a purpose in the world and in my life. And the joy that would bring. She prophesied that into and over my life many times. She also modeled that in her own life. I have never forgotten it.

I find myself yearning again for conversations about her life with questions I never thought to ask. But still, I am comforted by the conversations we did have and my memories of her.

Thinking about both of these women, born in 1933, I’m reminded that no matter what our circumstances may be at any given time in our lives, we all have something to give. We are all called to give of ourselves, even to sacrifice at times. And, it is always a gift for us to have that opportunity.

It’s an important reminder and question to ask of ourselves with every encounter. How can I best serve in this moment?

The post The stories of two women born in 1933 appeared first on Kathi Laughman.