I’ve been coaching a new leader who moved her family halfway across the country to take a dream job only to discover the week before she started work that everything had changed. It was March 2020 when the work world entered into pandemic lockdown, and so many of us began adapting to work from home.

Starting any new job is incredibly exciting, but it is not easy. Those first few weeks can be filled with mixed emotions ranging from excitement and joy to overwhelm, feelings of uncertainty, insecurity and the constant need to prove yourself. Starting the journey of a new hire in a virtual environment amplifies these challenges. As more and more companies decide to continue with remote work even as the pandemic subsides, the difficulties of being a new employee rise.

Have you ever stumbled across something that turned your world around? That’s what the odd-sounding philosophy and methodology called APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY did for me. And, it’s available to you, too.
In late 1996, my friend and colleague Ravi Pradhan called me late one night from the Albuquerque airport saying that he had just attended a four-day workshop on something called Appreciative Inquiry [AI]. The instructor, Dr. David Cooperrider, was a professor of Organizational Development [OD] at Weatherhead School of Management within Ca

This has been a challenging year for us all. It is easy to turn inward, as individuals and as organizations, to become focused on our own needs, stability, and for some, survival. It is not a year where most of us would naturally extend ourselves and look for ways to give back or to search out avenues to share our time, money and talents with others.

Gratitude is good for us, so much so that November is National Gratitude Month in the U.S. And this week brings Thanksgiving celebrations. For those of us who opted to show our gratitude to others by staying at home with less family around than usual, it’s a good time to reflect on what and whom we value.

Ongoing uncertainty seems to be the theme of the year, and this US Election week is no exception. The whole world is watching to see the results and what our choice will be. It is clear that no matter which candidate prevails, a large group of people will be very disappointed and angry. There is much we must do to better understand our neighbors who may think very differently than we do by beginning to communicate, ask questions, listen to understand and start building bridges to unite our country again.

At Continuum, we believe that the best place to begin the conversation is to “Choose Love” as our starting point for every interaction, conversation and decision we make. We are proud to sponsor the Let’s Choose Love social movement. The Manifesto below outlines the invitation and the foundation of the movement. Please join us!

Connecting with people we love and care about via Zoom no longer has the same allure as it did in March when many of us enjoyed the novelty of hosting virtual family check-ins and coffee dates with friends.
As the pandemic drones on, so does the increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness and a whole host of other mental health issues. It turns out that our need for physical touch and meaningful, face-to-face human interaction is paramount to our ability to be resilient and maintain our mental stability.

Have you ever wondered how some leaders, who undoubtedly have an overflowing workload, still find time and energy to enjoy life with family and friends or engage in their favorite hobby or sport? They typically are the same leaders whose people clamored to be on their team, consistently obtain profitable business results and have enviable levels of employee and customer satisfaction ratings. Who are they and how do they do it?
They are leaders committed to, and intentional about, being less transactional and more transformational in their day-to-day interactions.

Throughout life, some of my best memories were the times I spent hanging out under the stars. I have sweet memories of childhood sleepovers in my parent’s back yard, big sky evening vistas in Montana, and wilderness white water rafting adventures with friends camping along the western rivers of our country. The magic of the night sky fueled my curiosity and imagination.
My knowledge of astronomy is minimal, but my pride in being able to identify the Big Dipper, the North Star and the Milky Way is solid. I know the Big Dipper. To this day, the first thing I do when I walk out at night is look up to see if I can find that one thing I know. There is comfort in the knowledge it is always there and that I can see it.

Many types of birds make annual migrations, necessary for their access to food and breeding grounds. The distance record for these massive survival journeys belongs to the arctic tern, who flies a wandering path of 40,000 or more miles roundtrip from the northern Arctic to Antarctica yearly.
Migrating through this time of COVID, and all the challenges it brings, can feel like the arctic terns’ adventures. We keep flying without really knowing when or where we might land.

We have rolled into the sixth month of the pandemic and all that brings with it.
For many in front line care or leadership positions, the past few months have been especially challenging, and there’s no end in sight. We talk about defining a new normal, but what that might look like keeps shifting on us. After all the adaptations, uncertainty, and losses of innumerable varieties, we’re hearing that people are hitting walls of deep fatigue.