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When You Were With Nan, You Had Nan

My Nan recently celebrated her birthday. I say “celebrated” even though she’s been gone for almost thirty years. Because birthdays don’t just disappear when the person does. I’ve been thinking about Nan a lot - about what she taught me growing up. This blog is built around three ideas: Think. Teach. Show up. And if I had to point to someone who taught me what that last one really means, I’m not sure I could find a better example than her. When you were with Nan, you had Nan.  One hundred percent. She listened. She paid attention. She made you feel like whatever you were telling her was important, because to her, it was. Not necessarily because the story itself was important, but because you were. That distinction matters. As kids, we didn’t recognize everything Nan did for us. We just knew that she somehow made things happen. Nan listened. She worried. She laughed. She made time. She paid attention. She loved us unconditionally. There are people who teach us by sitting us down and...
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But... We’ve Always Done It This Way

It's impossible to work 25+ years across several disciplines without picking up some "words of wisdom." Dad sayings. Grandpa sayings. Frank-isms. Whatever you want to call them. One of the phrases I come back to pretty often is, “We’ve always done it this way.” That phrase gets a lot of criticism, and it’s often for good reason. If the only explanation for doing something is that it’s the way we’ve always done it, maybe it’s worth asking why we’ve always done it that way. Sometimes it started for a good reason. Sometimes there still is a good reason. Sometimes nobody really remembers. That doesn’t automatically make the old way wrong. But it makes it worth a look. What problem were we trying to solve? Does this still solve it? Is there another way? Is there a better way? Years ago, I managed an ambulance service that was part of a fire company. Technically, I was the ambulance captain, although functionally the job was really emergency medical services (EMS) chief. A...
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The Family Table

This summer, four baseball players from the local minor league team called my place home. And a couple days into the season, our kitchen table picked up its own identity: The Family Table . We gathered. We laughed. We told stories. We listened. We gave each other a hard time. We were unapologetically ourselves. Every conversation added to it. Every inside joke. Every debate. Every dare.  No matter what, we showed up for each other.  None of us could create that alone. Life moves pretty fast. The last game was played. The season ended. Bags were packed and the guys headed in different directions. The house got quieter. But The Family Table didn't disappear. Its reach just grew beyond the kitchen. The season brought us together for a short time. But what we built will stay with us always. Pull up a chair. There’s room.
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Unencumbered by the Thought Process

Car Talk was a show on National Public Radio for 35 years. People would call Tom and Ray Magliozzi - Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers - because their transmission was making a strange noise, their car wouldn't start when it rained, or their mechanic had just told them they needed a $2,000 repair and they wanted to know if he was full of crap. And the brothers would try to figure it out. Sort of. Because it usually didn't take very long before the conversation wandered as far away from the car as they could get. They'd start asking about the caller's spouse. Or their job. Or why they bought the car in the first place. Tom and Ray would eventually get around to trying to solve the problem, and often, neither of them really knew the answer. They would proudly announce that they were proceeding "unencumbered by the thought process." That meant that anything was fair game. What if we tried this? What if we turned that upside down? What if we just hit it with a ...
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Teach Like Alton Brown

I learned to cook from my Nana.  And my Mom and D ad, too. They taught me recipes. They taught me technique. "A  little more of this." "A little less of that." " Cook it until it looks right.  You'll know when it's done."  But I learned how to be a chef from Alton Brown.  And no, I don't mean that in any professional sense. Nobody is going to confuse my kitchen with a Michelin-starred restaurant.  Especially Jacob.  We'll get to Jacob a little later. Alton's show  Good Eats wasn't just a cooking show. Sure there were actual recipes. But he  used a unique teaching style - he could take something that was complicated and make you curious about it rather than being intimidated by it.  He didn't talk down to you - he brought you into the process and explained the  science of why things worked the way they did. And once we understood the "why" we could move from memorization to experimentation. Learning to cook by watching ...
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Think. Teach. Show Up.

I'm currently enrolled in a leadership program, and we were challenged to develop our "leadership brand." I'm a straightforward person. "What you see is what you get."  So I found the task incredibly difficult.  I felt like I was trying to make an infomercial about myself.  It felt fake.  I felt fake. A couple days later, I was driving and my mind started to wander.  I think a lot when I drive.   I thought about who I was - and who I wanted to be - as a person. It finally hit me.  It's not about leadership.  It's about working to become the kind of person you want in your own corner... everything else falls into place from there. So, who would I want in my corner? Someone who would: Think like MacGyver. Teach like Alton Brown. Show up like Alan Shore. If you read that out loud, you might think it sounds crazy.  Hear me out. MacGyver  thinks outside of the box. Alton Brown  teaches the "why" behind things . Alan Shore - a chara...
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