Week #1 of 52 for 2025!

📚 Adventures in reading in 2025 … 

Work-Life Tango by Kristel Bauer 

What’s the best way to settle into a new year? Think about your whole life - and what you want from it. Fun for me was being on a commercial airplane with my husband as the pilot for the first time in his almost 10 year airline career. 

📘 This book could help anyone struggling to sort through work/life and finding what works for them, with focus on remote/hybrid and many tangible takeaways. 

A few insights from my reading:

⏳ We are all given checkpoints in our lives. Moments and experiences that help us define who we are & what matters most. 

🤔 The most stressful relationships are actually the ambiguous ones. (citing Dr. Michelle King) 

😳 Sacrificing key parts of yourself to please others is always a lose-lose situation. 

❣️ Don’t leave yourself behind on your own leadership journey. Don’t leave yourself behind on your own life journey. (Quoting Susan MacKenty Brady) … I want to make a sign for this one! 

⁉️ Where are you saying “yes” in your professional life when you should really be saying no? 

❓What can I do today that my future self will thank me for?

💯 Assumptions just open the door for miscommunication & tension. 

Read the book: https://amzn.to/4gPGh1e

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Unravel Me by Tahereh Meh

Read on the beach in Cancun for an unplanned quick trip. A little windy, a little sandy. And perfect with a book 🙂

And it left me on a cliffhanger … again. I am understanding why for a week or two I didn’t find my daughter without one of these books in her hand. 

Read the book: https://amzn.to/4fQHns7

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The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz 

Listened to while on the treadmill and stair mill. Also listened to while cleaning up Christmas. (Anyone else enjoy the making of something but dismantling it is harder …)

‼️ Don’t judge things by their surfaces. Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything. 

📖 There are no short cuts to knowledge. 

💡Management debt: when management makes a short-term decision at the expense of the long term, usually resulting in an expensive long-term consequence. 

(Why I believe leaders need to learn from their decisions. I’ve seen too many sweeping changes that the decision maker didn’t have to deal with the consequences - or turn a blind eye and let someone else clean up the mess.)

❤️ Skills for master HR leaders:

— Master in process design (live this, as it is an often unappreciated skill to process or journey map and make something better) 

— Diplomat; great HR leaders want to help leaders be successful. 

— Industry knowledge

— Understanding the unsaid 

💯Leaders must: 

— Can articulate the vision

— Have the right kind of ambition (guess what: it isn’t selfish!)

— Be competent 

💯 Courage can be developed. And must to lead well. 

‼️ Holding people accountable for their promises is a key factor in getting things done. 

⭐️ Embrace the struggle. 

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