Before we get going with the newsletter this week, I must hoot and holler about the upcoming Becoming You Three-Day Intensive on May 8-10, our eleventh cohort, and sure to be our best ever! OK, fine, all of the Intensives have been our best ever. But I’m excited!
I love the Intensives ardently because they change lives, but also because they give me a chance to meet Becoming You people in the flesh, hear their stories, feel their challenges, and share encouragement and laughter. (Yes, there is a party at the end.) So if you’re considering joining this time, click here to learn more, or send us any questions by replying to this email.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
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I think, just possibly, that I made a student cry this week. Hooray.
I didn’t mean to, but seriously, again, hallelujah.
It happened during my class Management with Purpose, where I spend 14 weeks teaching the blocking and tackling of leading teams, projects, and people, in other words, the hit parade of all the things I had to learn the hard way.
One of those things: the essential managerial skill of Mattering – showing your people that you notice them, affirm them, and need them.
No boss does that as much as he or she should. Guilty as charged.
There are a lot of ways to teach, but I lean toward the experiential. I introduce a concept, then quickly get my students practicing it on each other.
This week, I also decided to demonstrate mattering, because it’s hard and awkward, and requires you to be very vulnerable, which no one likes very much. To help, I invited my lifelong best friend Susan Jacobson, a superb people manager herself, to join me up front (we also did Mattering on the podcast). |
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It was all going along merrily until we got to the “needing” portion of the lesson. (Incidentally, the mattering curriculum I use was created by Zach Mercurio, a wonderful professor at the University of Colorado State University, and a friend.) First, I asked students to practice by writing an email to a coworker – or anyone in their life – telling them how much they depended on them, and how much they would miss them if they were gone.
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For privacy reasons, I did not ask my students to share, but offered instead to go live with what I would say to Sue.
Sue and I met when we were teenage camp counselors, and to sum up the 50 years that followed, let’s just say we grew up together.
We grew up because of each other. As mothers, wives, entrepreneurs, and finally, as the years went on, as leaders. But first and foremost, we were always just…besties.
Then, two years ago, Sue contracted a rare brain virus. She hovered on the knife’s edge of life and death for eight weeks. It felt like eight years.
She fought back, we fought back. I would enter her hospital room and shout at her – in a coma, no less – “You just knock this off, bitch! I cannot take it!” We laugh about it now. We laugh because she is perfect again, more perfect than ever, if you ask me.
I told her that in class. I described in as much detail as I could muster how scary it was to face life without her, and how the possibility of losing her made me confront how much I depended on her for strength, and solace, and the kind of real talk that keeps my head on straight.
“Please know that you are so, so needed by the world," I said, “But by me most of all.”
When I looked at the class to check in, I saw a student pressing his inner eyes with his fingertips. We glanced at each other and I smiled at him.
Being a teacher is a very beautiful thing sometimes.
Especially when you are teaching something you know is true. It is never too late to tell someone they matter.
Or too early. |
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Speaking of all this same stuff – friends, and mattering, and love, and needing – this week marks the two year anniversary of the passing of Eva Evans, who was my daughter’s best friend, and a brilliant, unique, profound blithe spirit I’d known and loved for 15 years myself. She was 29 years old, and although the world needed her desperately and still does, that same world was too much for her to bear.
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Eva’s death changed my daughter, and it changed me. I think it probably changed thousands of people. I realize now how much I did not know about suicide before I was forced to learn.
I loved my students before; I now experience them with so much more concern and tenderness. I had to teach the same day as Eva’s funeral; in fact, I walked from the church directly to my classroom. I can’t remember the official lesson for that day. All I know is I started class by saying, “Here is all I need you to know today. Everything is going to be OK. And even if it’s not OK, someday it will be OK.” Then I wrote my cell phone number on the board and said, “This is yours forever. You can call me 24/7 for the rest of your lives.”
I have been called.
I hate that and I love it. But I love it more. |
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I am in the middle of making a podcast about a medical study that I’ve written about before – the one that found that you can stop the aging process, or even age backward, if you have a purpose in life.
Heck yes!
For the pod, I am speaking to “third-halfers” who have found new zest and momentum in their post-55 years. Their stories are so uplifting!
They are also all from women. I have searched my brain and asked around, and I cannot for the life of me find an older member of the male species who has a start-again story.
Riddle me that, my friends. Or better yet, if you are a man or know a man who found a new purpose in his retirement years, send him my way. I need him.
Until then, know that I need you too, |
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What's coming?
→ May 2026 Three-Day Becoming You Intensive here
→ June 2026 One-Day Becoming You Intensive here
→ Becoming You Certification Program here
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Sixteen Words That Give You Permission…to Admit What You Want (Part 2)
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In Part II of this special three-part series, I'm doing something I've never done before: ranking all 16 of my personal values from The Values Bridge, in order. Because once you can name your values with precision, everything changes: your career decisions, your relationships, your sense of purpose. And I can promise you that by the end of this series, you’ll be fluent in the language of values.
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