It’s often easier to try to be liked than to try to be in integrity.

Remember just a few sweet months ago, when we could hug each other tightly; hold our friends' babies; eat sushi in packed restaurants; and share bites and sips along the way?

Lately, I've found myself grappling with how to 'create from what's happening around us' and the massive uncertainty related to 'what is happening around us' and 'what will continue to happen around us.'

As someone who deeply values kindness, compassion, and empathy, my sense is that I’ll never be quite as comfortable with the straight up “non” as some of those women refusing substitutions in the French restaurant.

Noticing our assumptions and working to set them aside can be a powerful practice to improve our conversations, our relationships, our leadership, and our life.

I’ve been running my experiment since about June 19th.

This is our August update on what we’ve been up to in the realm of inclusion and belonging on the Zing Collaborative team.

Inspired by Cal Newport and a great deal of related research I’ve been doing recently, I have decided to run an experiment in Digital Minimalism.

The main thing I noticed this week - week two of my experiment - was that on several occasions, I simply forgot about my devices.

This summer, over here on the Zing Collaborative team, like many, we have decided to increase our focus on inclusion and belonging.

Yesterday, I walked into a not-to-be-named grocery store to pick up a few essentials.

To really, truly, deeply listen is to, as Stephen Covey has so famously said, “seek first to understand.”

If we want to get better information, we need to ask better questions. If we want to have better conversations, we need to ask better questions. And if we want to understand each other as human beings, we need to ask better questions.

We have been swinging on a trapeze for quite some time now. We’ve been holding on, swaying back and forth, possibly doing some tricks and flips and inversions along the way.

Poop in the Room is the idea that before we can create positive change from hard situations, we need to surface all of the ugliness that exists beneath, within, and out of view.

In our modern day world, it can be easy to conflate “posting our opinions on social media” with “taking meaningful action.”

“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.” - Ijeoma Oluo

Over the last two weeks, I became fascinated by (and mildly obsessed with) a bird nest on my window sill.

Today, I’d like to share a bit about how we are thinking about our business strategy and operations during these current times, and what this means for our work.

“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery