Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, Jon Bon Jovi did something that most leaders never do. He stopped.

When things go wrong — and they will, in any life that amounts to something — the people who know themselves have a very specific advantage over everyone else.

I’m not knocking traditional meditation. It works. The research is real, the people who do it are better for it, and if you can sit on a cushion and find the bottom of your own mind, that’s a gift and I’m jealous.

But most of us are also living in a quieter kind of captivity that has nothing to do with government or law. We are carrying things — grudges that have long since outlived their usefulness, identities built around old wounds, habits of self-protection that made complete sense once and are now just walls between us and the lives we keep saying we want. We are dragging old narratives behind us like chains we forgot we had the key to.

When someone dies of cancer, we say they “lost their battle.” It’s meant as honor. They fought. They were brave. But the phrase subtly suggests that If the dead lost, they must have been beaten. And if they were beaten, some part of the story whispers that they didn’t fight hard enough.

We spend an entire month raising awareness about mental health, and the demographic most likely to die from untreated disease - men - is the demographic least reached by the conversation.

The scientists can argue the exact number, but the probability of you — specifically you, with your exact genetic makeup, born to your exact parents, at your exact moment in history — has been estimated at roughly one in 400 trillion.

Ask anyone who has worked with me for more than five minutes and they will tell you the same thing. I am direct, move fast in a way that sometimes misses nuances, and I have very little patience for drawn-out meetings that could have been emails or quick conversations.

The willingness to ask — openly, without performance, without already having the answer dressed up as a question — is one of the harder skills to develop and one of the more valuable ones to hold onto.

The uncomfortable truth about comfort is that we’ve been promised it as the destination. Get enough of it and you’ll be fine. What we’ve learned — in clinical research, in organizational behavior, in real life — is that the opposite is true.

Each spring, people attack their homes with a kind of focused energy that the rest of the year never quite produces. Windows get cleaned. Closets get emptied. Drawers get sorted. The clutter that’s been sitting in the corner of the garage since 2019 finally gets its day. There’s something deeply satisfying and cleansing about the whole exercise - not just the result, but the decisions. This stays. This goes. This no longer belongs here. We do this in our homes as the days get

Nobody told me that when I got my cancer diagnosis, I was also getting a leadership test. I found out on a Thursday. By Friday morning I was back at my desk, fielding calls, running a meeting, making decisions for an organization that serves tens of thousands of people. Not because I was fine. I wasn’t fine. But because I was the CEO, and I had spent thirty years believing — without ever examining the belief — that my job was to project stability regardless of what was happen

For most of my adult life, I told myself I just wasn’t a morning person. I’d hit snooze. Reach for my phone before my feet hit the floor. Scroll through email, check the news, absorb everyone else’s urgency before I’d had a single intentional thought of my own. By the time I walked into the office, I was already reactive — already behind — already running on someone else’s agenda instead of my own. And I was the CEO of a $28 million organization, responsible for the wellbeing

About six weeks into my chemotherapy, I sat down to write an email that I had written a hundred times before. A routine “Five Bullet Friday” update to the FCA board. Nothing complicated. I knew exactly what I wanted to cover. And I could not find the words. Not in a poetic, searching-for-the-right-phrase kind of way. In a genuinely frightening, the-cabinet-is-open-and-the-shelf-is-empty kind of way. I sat in front of that screen for ten minutes. I got up. I came back. I tried

Real gratitude - the kind that actually sustains you - doesn’t look like the social media version of Thanksgiving.

This extra hour? It’s a microcosm of every choice we make. We can sleepwalk through it or we can be awake. We can drift or we can steer. We can let time happen to us or we can happen to time.

Cancer changes your relationship with time. Before my diagnosis, birthdays marked the passage of years in a vague, abstract way. Sure, I was getting older, but that timeline stretched comfortably into a distant, hazy future. After cancer, each birthday became something more concrete - less a marker of age and more a testament to survival.

Stopping the free flow of fentanyl into our country is important; that's the supply side of the equation. We need to also address the...

Twenty million Americans suffer from life-altering pain, putting them at risk for depression, suicide and addiction.

As we wrap up 2024, it's tempting to start planning for 2025, but you can't do that without reflecting on the year that's about to pass.