May 26th, 2022 by Kelly Kienzle
With the massacre in Uvalde, Texas this week, I am feeling a tangle of emotions: anger, repeated disbelief, hollowed-out sadness, and despondency. These are all emotions that I hold, yet I do not show them when I am at work, talking with neighbors or sending email.…
April 28th, 2022 by Kelly Kienzle
It’s a risky bet to depend on others to validate your self-worth. A Precarious Position Sure, we all appreciate, strive for or perhaps crave feedback and assurance that we have done well. Yet when we become dependent on hearing those encouraging, supportive words to know that…
March 24th, 2022 by Kelly Kienzle
As a leadership coach, people often ask me how they can motivate their teams. They want to know how to speak so that their team is aligned on the mission and excited to execute on it. I also speak with managers who wonder how to give…
February 28th, 2022 by Kelly Kienzle
As I see signs of us moving towards more normalcy in our lives and a few warm days reminding me that spring is coming, I become hopeful. I have thoughts of “I’ll be happy when…I can be outside more… I can eat at a restaurant… I…
January 18th, 2022 by Kelly Kienzle
I pour a lot. Don’t you? I pour my heart into my family. I pour my energy into my work. I pour my resolve into my exercise. I pour my care into others around me. Pouring happens as almost a reflex now, because I have been…
December 9th, 2021 by Kelly Kienzle
I was cruising through the summer preparing for my first in-person race in 2 years, scheduled for early November. I felt an annoying pain in my left hamstring that I had successfully ignored for the previous 3 months and I was pretty impressed by my toughness…
November 12th, 2021 by Kelly Kienzle
We all feel the burnout. We all sense our energy dropping. The bars of our gas gauge are dwindling faster than a cell phone in the desert. We are surrounded by negativity and struggle, such as political finger-pointing and systemic inequity. While these struggles are very…
October 20th, 2021 by Kelly Kienzle
I don’t like the phrase, “self-care.” Self-care sounds indulgent, pampered, lazy, and literally selfish. The phrase “self-care” makes me think of a privileged life and pedicures. And yet that is not at all how I regard the ways in which I take care of myself. I…
April 27th, 2021 by Kelly Kienzle
This month’s article is not about how we could work part-time at the office. Instead, I will talk about our inner work sometimes needing a part-time schedule. Specifically, how I want to shift to part-time work on myself and demand less of myself, when I need it.…
February 3rd, 2021 by Kelly Kienzle
Walt Whitman wrote this line 165 years ago, yet it contains present-day advice on how to create variety out of the boredom and perseverance out of the strain of the pandemic. Whitman wrote (and Dylan elaborated on it in a song last year) about how he…