With leadership shifts happening around the world, the next few years will likely look different from the last few. Some businesses are excited about that, but most of those I work with are apprehensive about how things may change for them and their communities. As we enter this time of uncertainty, I would like to share two thoughts I...

I think it's important to know if we're playing small or simply in a fallow period. As a farm kid, I know that it's important to allow the land to rest for a season every few years. Otherwise, the soil degrades and erodes. The same is true for humans doing their work in the world. We can't play full out all the time. Maybe you're playi...

Love is not an emotion. It is a practice built brick-by-brick, choice-by-choice. This week, one of my teachers spoke this line, which I've heard in other variations before. My spouse and I have our fourth wedding anniversary and celebrate 13 years together today (yes, it took me nearly nine years to agree to get married again). So, the...

I am pretty obsessed with habits. For years, building and maintaining them has been at the center of my work with clients and myself. When I facilitate planning with a new group or coach someone new, we always begin with five keystone habits, which are: 1. Daily writing, 2. Daily body movement, 3. Daily meditation, 4. Drinking enough w...

In my Ayurvedic Health Counselor program this week (yeah, I'm going there this year), the teacher said something both intuitive and mindblowing: The quality of the healer's presence is the most important medicine. The statement has me thinking about how present we are as leaders, coaches, and bosses with our teams. Maybe the quality of...

"Renia, you're brilliant." It's a phrase I have heard for as long as I can remember. That might read as a humble brag, and when I was younger, it would have been. But not today. Today, it's just a statement of fact. There's something I see about how the world and the humans in it work that most do not. And that knowing is labeled brill...

I don't believe that romantic love should conquer all. It's not an opinion that earns me many nodding heads, but there it is. A few weeks ago, while visiting the Love Park in Lima, I started thinking about this again. Among all the couples clearly on dates, tourists, and gorgeous mosaic lay the famous lock rail on its side. So many loc...

If you're anything like me, the idea of 80% of marketing jobs evaporating sounds like a pretty good idea at first thought. Don't get me wrong, I love great marketing (it is half my vocation, after all). The problem is that so little of marketing is great, and so much of it is useless noise. So, wouldn't it be better if there were fewer...

Would your friendships, communities, or businesses still have strong ties without mass-market social media? Gartner predicts that a perceived decay in value will drive 50% of consumers to abandon or severely restrict their social media usage by 2025. This predicted trend is largely driven by AI-generated content making the already dice...

I first noticed rows of yellow bumps running down the middle of walkways in the Tokyo Airport. The second thing I noticed were kind signs and braille on the buttons lining the walls of bathroom stalls. Infrastructure is a pretty good way to understand the collective values of a country, company, or perhaps any collective group. How we ...

An entire industry popped up over the last decade focused on optimizing user experience. Everything from buy now button colors to deeply creepy data analytics gets painstaking attention. User experience design is what we call this subset of the tech world. And, when used for good, it has the power to bring new tools to marginalized com...

Over the summer, I spent a few weeks in Japan. I couldn't get over how seamlessly the subway systems work there. As someone whose primary context for subways is the perilous platforms and filthy rides of New York City, it was a revelation to see throngs of people moving in harmonious union from stop to stop in Tokyo. On one early morni...

Ten years ago, I wrote a memoir. It was self-published and little read, but a triumph for me personally. The poor formatting aside, I was proud of the words in that book. A decade later, as best I can tell, Born Hungry has been forgotten by everyone except for the people I most meant to celebrate in its pages, most of whom never actual...

My Goodreads account says I read around one book a week (about 52 each year). That reading consists largely of business books, self-help tomes, and biographies. I'm something of a hoarder of the knowledge and opinions of my favorite journalists, professors, cultural commentators, and scribes. The shadow side of consuming so much of oth...