Swinging for the Fence to Slow Productivity

We swung for the fences and came up short…Yeah, you win some, you lose some, it ain’t always home runsAnd that’s just the way life plays…Morgan Wallen A few years ago, I was facilitating a DiSC training session with one of my colleagues. We use a motivation checklist tied to the DiSC Personality Model to emphasize that different things motivate different people. We always encourage people to ask a peer what they think motivates them. Based on the behaviors you observe in another person, “What do you think makes them tick?” is the question we ask. I asked my colleague

How To Toss Around Ideas

Today I saw a giant raccoon throw light bulbs to people at Space Camp. That’s a real sentence.  Sprocket, loveable mascot of the Rocket City Trash Pandas, threw Horizon Point stress balls – made to look like light bulbs – to attendees of the 2024 Launch Tank Competition. It was a wild and wonderful moment. But let’s back up.  John Kvach and his Singing River Trail team partner with LAUNCH and Innovate Alabama to host a business pitch competition for entrepreneurs in North Alabama, known as Launch Tank. “Our vision goes beyond the competition,” Kvach says. “We want to connect

Open the Door to New Experiences

3,098.0 miles away Traveling 3,098.0 miles away from my home to live with the Ward family and shadow Mary Ila and HPC surely is a completely new experience for me. Since February and until May, I have been in the United States. This is the longest time I have ever been away from home and family. In one of the training sessions I got to shadow Horizon Point, we did an exercise where we selected two things that motivated us at work, and two others that did the complete opposite. The two that least motivated me from the list were

Open the Door and Expose Toxic Workplace Cultures

Last week I had the absolute pleasure of attending NASHRM’S 2024 Spring Workshop supporting my team member Lorrie Coffey. She gave an energizing presentation on Handling Toxicity in the Workplace, complete with getting knocked upside the head with a Horizon Point lightbulb stress ball. So, what does a toxic workplace look like? Let’s open the door and expose toxic workplace cultures. Lorrie started off by giving the definition of toxic and said that it’s an extremely harsh, malicious or harmful quality. She went on to give examples from social media of people talking about their current workplaces. One employee said,

Open the Door to Vulnerability and Courage

woman talking to her therapist

Last week Emily complimented me in her blog post when she spoke of the struggles I have faced in the last year and my ability to persevere through them. (Thanks, Emily!) And she’s not wrong. I have been that way for as long as I can remember; not letting anything stop me or get in my way. My dad taught me to have determination and I am so grateful that he did. But that determination and perseverance go hand in hand with the ability to be vulnerable. And this is where I used to fall short, very short. It wasn’t