PIVOT Advice from Top Executive Coach with Donna Steinhorn

 

I’m excited to introduce to you Donna Steinhorn, an Executive, Mentor and Life coach with more than 30 years of corporate and business experience. Donna and I are both members on the Transformational Leadership Council (TLC) and therefore share a common perspective on “the human condition” as she refers to it. Donna shares her “pivot” into coaching and we discuss some fundamental principles that she employs with her clients.

To learn more about Donna, her company, and her non-profit “Coach Initiative” (whose mission it is to be the central gathering point for professional Coaches to volunteer their experience and expertise for the betterment of the human condition and uplifting the human spirit),  visit http://donnasteinhorngroup.com/.

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I’m so excited not only to be with you myself, because that’s an honor as it always is, but I have a dear friend who’s joining us. She has a wealth of wisdom, business experience, and the wisdom that comes from years of being in business and coaching other people in their business pursuits and their pivots. Not only are we going to get to hear from her and learn from some of her life experience and business experience, but some of those experiences that her clients have had. The lady’s name is Donna Steinhorn. She is a dear woman that Randi and I have gotten to know quite well. We are part of a beautiful group of people, a collaborative organization called Transformational Leadership Council. I’ve gotten to know Donna through that that organization and seen what an impeccable person she is and how she has this credible knack for organizing the program itself, the speakers, and the content. She has an eye for the details of things and very elegant in the way that she puts it all together for the group, the Transformational Leadership Council, to have an incredible learning experience and a tremendous takeaway. She has an eye for that.

Her name is Donna Steinhorn and she is an Executive and ADHD coach and life strategist with more than 30 years of corporate business and nonprofit experience. She divides her time between her one-on-one clients, developing and leading conferences and workshops, and multiple projects. She’s the Co‑Founder of Serendipitous Events, which produces the invitation-only Conversation Among Masters for master level coaches and was the Co-Producer of TEDxNavesink for several years. Donna is also the Co-Founder and past President for the nonprofit Coach Initiative and a board member and program director for the Transformational Leadership Council. She blogs for The Huffington Post, and along with Phyllis Haynes, has a podcast and blog called Oh Those Humans. Donna has taught, coached, and mentored thousands of individuals through her coaching and workshops and is the former Executive Vice President of Coachville.
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Radical Self-Loving: A Vital Conversation – PIVOT Advice from Top Executive Coach with Donna Steinhorn

Donna, I am so happy to have you join us.

Thank you for having me here.

We’ve been in drought. Like so many things in life, you can see the cycles. If you live long enough and you have enough perspective, you can see the trends and the cycles in things and we were in a trend and a cycle of drought in Southern California for many years, and this year we’ve gotten enough rain that there are only a few spots in the entire state of California that are not officially out of drought. Mother Nature has delivered the rain that was so desperately wanted and needed as well. Even though I love the sunshine and all that kind of thing, it is beautiful to see the cycle repeat itself and to know that there are so many living things that are feeling very blessed by all the rain that we’ve gotten, so it’s good to be out of drought. It’s one of those things where we talk about what it means to consciously pivot, to consciously change direction. It’s is a very apt analogy. We go through cycles of drought and we go through cycles of floods when all the channels are producing, and then other times when some of those channels, including the channels that bring us our money and other things, are lacking at points in time.

Donna, I would love it if you’d set the stage by sharing a little bit about your personal background and history.

I started out life in corporate America out of college and I did a lot of HRN training. I learned that people could learn new habits and learn to change and began watching and observing the patterns that people had in their lives and when the patterns worked well and when the patterns didn’t work well. I started reading personal development books when I was fifteen, so I got started in the industry early. My pivot occurred while I still had my own businesses and at that point was working from home. My children were in high school and I suddenly realized that in a few years, they would be out of high school and life was going to change whether I wanted it to or not. I had a moment of, “What’s next?” I’ve always been a person that did a lot of things and change was a normal part of my life. I used to laugh that I basically lasted in most jobs three years. The first year I was learning, the second year I was coasting, in the third year I was bored to death. That’s because none of them spoke to my soul. I would bounce from something to something but I would always find a way of taking what I had been doing and bridging up into something new that included perhaps what I had been doing.

It was the mid ‘90s and I had this moment of having no idea of what was next. In the past, I always had multiple ideas of what I wanted to do. I was going to have a lot of freedom and I had no ideas. Someone mentioned to me that there was this thing called ‘life coaching’. I had known about coaching because even back in the ‘70s, when I was in corporate America, top management often had a coach. It was usually a perk. It was expensive, and it was not discussed. It was hush-hush because it was to either teach them some soft skills or teach them presentation skills or polish them up, so they had a better image. It wasn’t talked about but I knew about coaching. When someone said that, “There was this thing called life coaching” my ears perked up and I said, “How do you do that? Isn’t it expensive?” She said, “There’s this woman in Wisconsin. She charges $25 a session and she talks to you over the phone and she coaches you.” I thought, “That’s worth a try.”

 

I contacted the woman and we had our first session. I was underwhelmed. We had a second and third session and I realized at the third session that the last two sessions, I had been coaching her. A light bulb went off over my head that this might be something that I could do. I seemed to be rather good at it. I had been coaching people all my life. In those days, the internet existed. I did what I do, which is I got on the internet and I started researching coaching. I came up with about three schools that taught coaching at the time. I did some research and I picked one and attended it. It took me two years to get through the program. It was intensive. I got involved in another organization that was led by a man by the name of Thomas Leonard. I started working with him along with some other people and the rest is history. I became a coach and I worked with Coachville and started my own coaching organizations, and here we are more than twenty years later happily still at it. I know that pivot caused me to go in the direction of what was my life purpose.

You were in a situation where you were not certain what your future was going to be like or what you were going to be doing. You’d learned along the way that you were going from flower to flower, so to speak, pollinating. I loved that three-year cycles of the first year you’re learning, the second year you were coasting, and in the third year you were bored. Did I get that right?

Sometimes, it didn’t take that long. My shortest job lasted six weeks.

I have had a lot of jobs. I was a junior high school English teacher and a lifeguard and a waiter. I went back to law school, but you got to a certain place where the kids were leaving, and you were looking at what’s this next phase and stage of my life’s going to be. If there was anything that you could look back on and say to yourself that you did something that sets you up for that successful light bulb moment or was it one of those things that you can’t explain?

I started reading personal development books of Maxwell Maltz and several others when I was fifteen. I’d always had an interest in the patterns of people and how people changed and neurolinguistic programming. Nowadays, it would be brain science. I’ve always been fascinated by people and how they behave and what helps them to change. Change has always fascinated me, how people adapt or rebel. That was already there in the bottom. Even in my first corporate engagement, even though I wasn’t hired as a trainer, about a year in I went to the training department and I said, “I love what you do. I love attending. Can I apprentice to you at times?” The whole concept of helping people change is something that I adapted early on in adulthood, so the seeds were there. When the person said to me, “There is such a thing as life coach” It’s a baby industry at that point. Those seeds began to take root, so it was always there. It was that light bulb moment helped them grow faster. The fact that the woman that I spoke to, the coach out in the middle of the country, was so bad inspired me.

Sometimes, the things that inspire us are examples of what not to do or what doesn’t work necessarily, and we realize, “I could do that and I could do it more effectively or better..” You turned around a situation where you could have gotten a judgment like, “Coaching is bogus” or “I wasted my $25 for each of these three sessions and the whole coaching thing is a joke.” You didn’t make that judgment about it. You looked at it in a different way. What I heard you saying was that if you started reading, one of the nuggets that I would pull out of that is that you were a reader, you were a learner. You were curious, in other words. That idea of reading is a big deal because a lot of the people who are on this podcast many of them do not read books. Now, it’s great because people are listening to a podcast that might not otherwise get some access to this information. The podcast is a great vehicle. Listening to a podcast is the equivalent of seeking an expression or an outlet for your curiosity.

Because the technology is what it is, I don’t read books, physically read them, which I love to do and mark them up and dog-ear them and make them unusable basically for anybody but me, but I also love to listen to books on Audible. It was a pleasure for me when I was asked by Simon & Schuster to read Pivot. It took four days, I lost my voice doing it, which is shocking actually because of all the training that I do and I never thought I would lose my voice just speaking, speaking a book into a microphone, but four days later, I spoke the book in, and now it’s in Audible. Reading, listening to books, listening to podcasts, that’s a key ingredient. This is good sign for yourself, no matter where you are in your own process of change and managing change. If you’re seeking inspiration as Donna did by reading, read those personal development books. The other thing that is important is you followed your curiosity. It’s one thing to be curious. It’s another thing entirely, a completely different universe of skill set between a person that is curious speaking and one that follows their curiosity to go do the research, and then start to explore it in a in a deeper way ,which sounds like exactly what you did.

I am definitely insatiably curious and I can’t control that curiosity. If we’re at dinner and we’re discussing something and something comes up and nobody knows the answer, I admit I’ll pull out my phone and I’ll Google it so that I have the answer. I’ll leave that so that when I get home, I can go dig deeper. I want to say it’s not necessary to even read a book if you’re curious. There are so many articles on the internet, if you’re not a full-book length reader. If there’s something you’re curious or you want to learn more about, you can always set a Google Alert. Whenever there’s an article or something that comes up or news or anything related, you’ll get an email and you can go and dig deeper, so you don’t even have to do a whole lot of research. Google will do it for you, if you want.

Every single day, whenever that word or the term is used, you get access to all, whether it’s articles, blogs, or anything. It all comes up in that feed, which is really amazing.

As a professional coach, I’m curious about my clients. I try and teach them to be curious about themselves because before you can change, before you can pivot, sometimes pivots happen because something occurs and you have no choice but to pivot or an amazing thing happens and you get that light bulb moment. More often than not, it takes curiosity about yourself and delving into yourself to get some clarity on what it is you need to pivot around.

We are constantly teaching this Pivot process and part of the reason why we’re teaching it so much is that the world is in this state of profound change. I personally believe that change is constant, and the rate of change is exponentially greater every day. People are having some challenges with that change. There’re two types of change that occur; one that you plan for and one that you don’t. The thing that changes and you’re not expecting it. You’re terminated from your job or your business goes south or where the economy is changing or the political scene is changing or your health. I got an email out of the clear blue from a producer in New York that is creating a pilot show with a major network.

They did some research and sent me an email saying I would be perfect to be the host of the show. It’s all about people reinventing, reinvention stories. That came out of nowhere. I didn’t expect it. You could spin that. You could say that’s positive. I look at these things as often as possible, as neutral, which is not easy because when you’ve got something that seems like a bad news situation, a change that you’re not wanting, it’s very easy to get into a place where you frame it as being something that’s going to cause you harm. What was triggered for me as I was listening to you describe that early pivot in your life was this question that when you’re in that space of not knowing because you realize that change is on the horizon because you want it or change has shown up on your doorstep and you didn’t expect it. There is a very specific question that everybody can ask themselves and that is, “What is the creative opportunity?” Do you agree with that?

I was going to say either one of two questions saying the same thing that I will ask people. One is, “What is the opportunity here?” The other is, “What does this enable you to do?” Sometimes, we’re not sure what the opportunity is, but if you say, “All right,” and that you’re out of a job, what does that enable? “I have more time.” If you have more time, what does that mean? Sometimes, I would say 40% of the time, people have no idea. They are so out of touch with what they want or what they need or what they value that when you ask them about opportunity or what does this enable or even what is it you want in life, they have no idea. The question then is, “What is it you don’t want?” Opportunity is a good question, but sometimes you have to go further.

[Tweet “Opportunity is a good question, but sometimes you have to go further. “]

It’s very interesting that you brought that up because Abraham Hicks is the person who originally said this. We’ll never forget the statement that she made which was “When you know what you don’t want, you know what you do want.” It’s a profound exercise. It is something that we lead people through as part of this pivot process that we teach. Sometimes, it’s more powerful to know what you don’t want in life because it gives you great clarity about what it is you do want. I’m inspired by what I’m hearing, Donna, to ask you to do something which we didn’t prepare for. I get to ask this question of, “How many of you are reinventing some aspects of your business or your life right now?” It seems like almost every hand goes up. I don’t know if you’ve been noticing that in any of your communications with folks but it seems very prevalent that the people are in the midst of great right now. My question to you is, “If you are working with somebody right now and they were involved in a pivot and they were a bit uncertain about what to do next without knowing the details, are there some general principles that you would coach them into?”

It depends on what they’re pivoting around, whether it’s relationship or personal or business or life transitions of other kinds, going through a divorce. There’re all kinds of things. One of the things that I will often ask is to have them describe to me an ideal day like. If they could do anything tomorrow, what would they do if it was something that would happen, not a vacation day, but if everyday could be the same, start out the same, have the same rituals, have the same things in their life, what would that look like? Most people have that fantasy, which can easily become a reality with a little adjustment. That’s one of the questions.

Another question I might ask is to tell me about an ideal vacation because that takes them out of the fear of not knowing what they want. Most people can tell you what they like about vacation and then I say, “What about that do you wish you could do on a daily basis?” Take people out of their current situation whatever it is, a bad relationship, a job they’re unhappy with or a job that they’re happy with but they want to do better. It’s not always a negative it’s sometimes a positive. If you can take them out of the situation they’re in where they’re confused or they keep trying to do the same things over and over again because they feel that that’s how it should be, you put them into a fantasy realm where they can relax and be comfortable and not worry whether it’s the right answer or not. Very often, you will be surprised with what they come out with.

Part of that is because they have some limiting beliefs that are working in that mix. You are pulling them out of that habitual way that they’re thinking? Is that right?

Limiting beliefs and story tapes that they run through. A lot of people I find have this story about what their life should look like. They should want to climb the corporate ladder, or they have a job that they’re happy in but they’re not making a lot more money and they’re not getting a higher title. There are a lot of should’s that go on as well. It’s limiting beliefs, it’s old stories, and it’s old goals, or it’s living life according to other people’s prescriptions.

Those two questions, “What is the creative opportunity?” and “What does this enable you to do?” It could be that you’re being birthed into something new and bigger, even better for yourself. It’s new and it’s different and it’s uncertain. With uncertainty, people automatically have fear associated with what’s uncertain or unknown. Is that your experience?

It’s not always bigger and better, sometimes it’s smaller. I have two great stories about pivots that became smaller but as a result happier. Many years ago, I was working with someone who was a partner in a firm, not a senior partner but a partner. The work that he was doing, he did not like it. It was labor intensive, it was boring. He had plenty to do, in fact so much to do that he was never acquiring new business and therefore he wasn’t climbing the partner ladder. He came to me, he had been divorced and he was now getting remarried. He wanted to make sure that this new relationship didn’t go the way the first one did and that I could give him strategies to last seven years until he could retire because he was miserable. It turned out that the first marriage had ended because he worked so many hours and was never home and wasn’t a good spouse and wasn’t a good parent.

He was afraid that that would happen again because he was still working as many hours. I asked him what he wanted to do in seven years when he retired. He wanted to move to Martha’s Vineyard. He and his new wife were going to retire there. I asked him what is stopping him from going there now, and the light bulb went off over his head. The only thing that stopped him was that he was a partner in this law firm. He didn’t have to be. He sold his partnership back to the firm, moved to Martha’s Vineyard with his new wife, apologized to his first wife, opened a storefront law firm, and is happily working in Martha’s Vineyard. The pivot was you didn’t need to climb and become a bigger partner and work more hours. He needed to do what his soul needed. He needed to be nurtured by being in the environment he wanted to be. All he needed to do was figure out how to do that.

Having been in the practice of law for years and I’m sitting here and I’m nodding up and down thinking to myself, “Do I know that guy?” I might know that guy. Randi and I have had a house on Martha’s Vineyard for a lot of years and we know a bunch of lawyers there. I was a pretty unhappy lawyer at the time when we bought that house. Reinventing away from the grind and the rat race and the incessant quest for more things, more money to buy more things, was definitely a part of my own pivot story. Part of a successful pivot, and by successful pivot we mean to a place where you have a lot more happiness, how you have more success, more peace. It can be better relationships, better health. Sometimes the road that is not in having a bigger job or a bigger paycheck, but is in simplifying and getting back to something that is more of a calling from the soul than it is necessarily buying into the should’s or the stories that we’ve been programmed with for many years. You said you had another client that also had a pivotal story where they were simplifying in some way their life as part of their pivot plan?

Very often, when people are miserable at work, they’re striving for something that they think they should have. It’s not what they want. If you can get them in touch with having more of a life, they can have a lot of clarity as to whether they want to climb the corporate ladder or they should just stop and do the best job they can in the job that they’re in and focus more on their life than they do on their corporate life. A lot of people are so wrapped up into the identity of their title that they lose sight of their life. I had a client who did exactly that and didn’t get the promotion that they had been striving so hard to get and became even more despondent and unhappy. When we started looking at what they really wanted, what they really wanted was a vacation house to get away from how miserable they were at work. While they didn’t quit work to go live full time there, they are in the process of developing a business that is portable, so that they can quit their corporate role and transition into their own business and then travel or live out of there. They recognize that corporate life is not serving them.

 

One of the most important aspects of this is that people can see that they can maintain their hope for a better future. Where it gets to be difficult or when people get despondent, it’s because there seems to be lack of anything that would lead to a new a new way of living or a better way of living for them. For me, I was the proverbial workaholic and unhappy for many years. I couldn’t see a path to anything different. I looked at the people that were in my profession and they were only grayer or had less hair than me, which is funny since I’m bald. I wasn’t always bald and I wasn’t bald when I started practicing law. Looking 20 or 30 years down the line at what could be my future and would likely be my future, if you look at your mentors and things, you’re likely to turn out like that. I was unhappy with what that would look like. These folks were not happy, and they had health issues and poor marriages and none of the money that was accumulated was an answer to those deeper issues and that suffering.

For me, what I found was that at a certain point, I was able to create a plan B that took two and a half years for it to materialize to the point where I knew that I was going to stop. At some point, I would be able to stop doing what was no longer serving me or working or what was causing me suffering, and I would be doing something else. That’s part of what is impactful and why coaching. The work that you do is so important because where we are at any given point in time, we can lack clarity, especially when it comes to the evolution of our work life, our careers, even the evolution of our own personal and spiritual development. We can be lacking in clarity or a bit lost from time to time. I agree with you 100% that clarity is the first step.

In the book, Pivot, the first half of the book is devoted to “What does it take to create clarity?” The second part is about “What does it then take once you got clear vision? How do you get into momentum? How do you create a purpose driven plan for yourself?” It sounds like some of the folks you’ve been coaching along the way have had that same thing where they had to gain some clarity. They used you as an incredible resource for them in uncovering and discovering more clearly what it is that they wanted even if what they wanted might be whether to move to an island and create a simpler version of their life. The clarity came first and that they had to work through that clarity piece. For me, it took a long time to get clarity. You can’t rush that because if you move to strategy too quickly, if you move to the planning stage before you have a clear vision, chances are you’re applying a Band-Aid solution to it. Has that been your experience with folks as well?

It either takes a long time and lots of books or takes the help of a coach or trainer or workshop to begin to get the clarity. Not everybody needs to leave corporate America and go do something else. Very often, clients will come to me or a corporation will hire me because there’s somebody who wants to be promoted and they’re not doing what they need to do to be promoted. I don’t mean they’re not doing their job well, but there are other aspects that are happening or somebody will hire me individually and there are things going on that they are not addressing and they don’t have clarity about what that is or they can’t see into the mirror of what’s going on. We look to see what are their attitudes, where are there limiting beliefs stopping them from breaking out of old patterns and moving ahead and getting that promotion. I had a client who I am still in touch with who had been trying to be promoted for years and she was threatening to leave. They didn’t want her to leave. She was great at her job but she lacked some interpersonal skills, and so we worked on that. There are things that you can do or management skills or sales skills. There are lots of resources out there for people who want to build their business or want to climb in corporate America and need not a pivot in what they’re doing, but a pivot in how they’re doing it.

There’s a question that came to my mind that I heard years ago and it’s, “What don’t I see?” Part of what you’re saying is that when you’re in a pivot, let’s say even within the same occupation or the same career path, it could be that there are things that you’re not seeing and the purpose of reading books and getting a coach and being in workshops and seminars is that you’ve got blind spots. One thing we know for sure is every result you’ve got so far is the effect of your best thinking, meaning our best thinking has gotten us every result so far. If there’s more that we’re looking for, like we want to be in a better position within a company or somehow we want to move our career forward or anything that’s on that list of goals for ourselves, there are blindspots that we’ve got. They would not be blindspots if we could see them, so we need to ask that question, “What don’t I see?”

Sometimes you need help, whether it’s from a professional or someone in your life. I read something in a blog where the person went off and asked all of the people around them what they saw and heard that she didn’t see in herself and got a lot of interesting answers. It was a big “aha” for her.

[Tweet “A lot of people are so wrapped up into the identity of their title that they lose sight of their life. “]

Pivots can be easy, and they can be difficult. Change is the same thing. Managing change, you can do it elegantly. You can do it in a graceful way, and of course you can resist it, and you can struggle with it. Struggle is possible, and struggle is optional. If there are ways to manage change and manage these pivots in our lives in an easy way, in an elegant way, in a graceful way, what are the common elements of managing it in that way and among people that have succeeded? By succeeded, I mean folks that have been able to overcome challenges in life to move themselves to higher levels of performance, raising their consciousness, raising the bar in terms of what they’ve been able to do with their professional lives, what they’ve been able to do in their personal lives, with their families, and any number of ways that people who have been successful have been able to overcome difficulties that other people might not be able to overcome.

When I looked at that in my own life and I’ve studied it in other people who’ve been successful in sports, have been successful in business, and in another personal pursuit, there’s been something of a common denominator, and that thing that I’ve discovered is rituals. When I say rituals, I’m not talking about in a religious context. When I think about rituals, I think about master habits and the distinction from ordinary habits. Ordinary habits are things that we do by habit, by the unconscious, that are involuntary. I read that around 45% of the things that we do, the things we think and what we say, and the actions that we take are involuntary. They are habitual, they are unconscious. A master habit or a ritual is something that we choose to do. We consciously elect to make that a practice in our lives and therefore it has more of a sacred quality to it. Do you have rituals and things that you practice consciously that have helped you to be successful and maybe even have helped some of your clients to be successful?

Rituals are extraordinarily important even for small things. Very often, I will encourage clients to have rituals for their morning routine and their bedtime routine because it helps set up their day for success and it helps set up their night for better sleeping. I try to do that for myself as well. I have a nighttime ritual that includes reading, it includes a little internet, but at a certain point, internet goes off. I turn the light down soft. We very often have lavender or some other aroma therapy going. I have some soft music going, and I’ll read for a little while. I find if I do that habitually every night, I sleep much more soundly and I fall asleep much more easily.

When I don’t do that either because I’m watching TV and got involved in something that I’m watching or I get involved in a book and I don’t want to put it down, if I don’t do my ritual, I don’t do as well. I find that that’s true for my clients as well. When they’re able to do their evening ritual, the next day works much better because the night does. Same thing through the morning. I have a ritual around my cup of coffee. I try to get up early enough so that I have a half an hour just to meditate or listen to music while I drink a cup of coffee, but I don’t read email first and I don’t look at the news first. I don’t do anything that would start my day off negatively at all. I try and do positive rituals in the morning.

I heard it on a podcast with Tim Ferriss. He said, “If you win the morning, you win the day.” That’s been true for me. It’s true for a lot of people that the morning time is key, so I have a gratitude ritual. It is so important to me that whatever those rituals that you start your day with, that they’re conscious ones. They’re not things that you do, habitually like picking up the phone and checking email and turning on the TV. If that’s part of your ritual to do and you want to do it, that’s different. To think about it consciously is a big deal.

I have a gratitude ritual as well. I try and do five a day, but it’s not part of the morning routine. It’s more part of my afternoon routine.

Rituals are personal, so what works for one person isn’t necessarily the right recipe for someone else. When you elect to create these rituals, in essence you’re like creating your day. You’re going about a very conscious and deliberate process to create the day that you wish to have from beginning to end like the bookends of what you do in the morning and what you do at the end of the day. The meat in the middle, the sandwich parts in the middle, putting it altogether. For me, it’s gratitude at the beginning of the day and it’s forgiveness at the end of the day, so the last thoughts that I put in my brain consciously before I go off to sleep at night are thoughts of wanting to ask for forgiveness and give gratitude, be thankful for forgiveness of me and any things I might have done during the day that there were trespassing in any way upon anyone else.

Also, asking and being grateful to the universe for the forgiveness that is there for all of us. That’s the thought that goes in before I go to sleep, wake up, feet on the floor, and grateful for the day. I was with Michael Beckwith and he was sharing part of his rituals, which was great. He said when he wakes up in the morning, he gets into that space of gratitude and he’s quiet. He sits quietly and asks God for his assignment. He specifically asks the question, “What is my assignment?” and waits quietly to be guided whatever it might be that comes up for him. I thought, “That’s a beautiful ritual.” It’s fascinating that we all have different rituals, but again the commonality is in this design feature. A life by design versus a life by default.

What’s important is how the rituals fit in with what you consider to be your success. You mentioned that and it occurred to me as you were talking that my success statement is, “I know how successful I’m being by how eager I am to wake up and greet the day.” The morning ritual is what helps that for me because I look forward to my morning ritual and I look forward to my day because I’ve designed my life to enjoy most of the parts of my life, to enjoy my work, to enjoy my relationships. My success statement isn’t about money or power or fame. It’s about enjoying how I’ve set my life up to be and my rituals help that.

The more the days I get, the more I am blessed to have another day in this life, the more I’m convinced that living successfully is an art. There’s an art and a science even to successful living, and that’s part of what we’re talking about. The pivot in many ways, we’ve talked about career, we’ve talked about people who are simplifying their lives, and then there are others that are wanting to pursue their goals and dreams in a bigger way, within their career space or in other places, creating plan Bs for a new venture, new business, etc. All of these things start with one essential pivot. and that to me is a pivot of consciousness because it’s clear we’re here to be the expression of the abundance of the universe, of the infinite possibility of the universe, of the divine, so to the extent that any of us are not happy to greet the day, where you’re not enthusiastic about the day that you’ve been given, this profound gift that you’ve been given, that’s a wonderful thing to take notice of.

 

I went through too many years of putting my feet on the floor in the dark with my beautiful wife asleep next to me and putting my feet on that floor and feeling dread and even anxiety about the day ahead. It was that pain, that dull but persistent pain, that caused me to question and be curious and to follow that curiosity, which has led to all these other magnificent iterations, version three, four, five, six, seven of this life for me. It is that conscious pivot, that idea that we can consciously create and be moral awake. In that process of being more awake and more conscious, that we can be guided to yet a further development and expression of ourselves and our reason for being.

I cannot thank you enough for spending time and sharing a little snippet of the wealth of experience that you have in your own personal experience and in that experience of guiding people and coaching people, and mentoring people through their pivots professionally and personally. I would love it if you would share with our audience to know more about you and maybe even be able to utilize your services in the future. What’s the best way to reach you? Is it a website that we can go to?

The best one is my website. It is DonnaSteinhornGroup.com.

All of you out there, I hope and I pray and I know for sure that you are having a fun day because you wouldn’t otherwise be here if you weren’t enjoying yourself. I look forward to the next opportunity to serve and for our company to contribute to your fun and your happiness and your purpose. You can find more of our podcasts and more blogs on AdamMarkel.com. You can go to StartMyPivot.com if you’d like to get started on some of the things that we were talking about If you’re in that situation where you are lacking clarity, are you in a pivot or not and you’d like to have a sense of that, we’ve got six powerful questions that we’ll give to you and they are very important questions to answer in order to kickstart a Pivot, and also to know whether you’re even in a pivot situation at present. If you’re curious about that or you know for certain that you are reinventing some area of your personal life or your business life, you can go to StartMyPivot.com and you can download for free those six questions, which are our gift to you. We’ll get to see you through social media and other means. Until then, I’ll say ciao for now. Have a beautiful and blessed day.

 

Important Links

• Donna Steinhorn
• Transformational Leadership Council
• Serendipitous Events
• Conversation Among Masters
• The Huffington Post
• Phyllis Haynes
• Oh Those Humans
• Coachville
• Thomas Leonard
• Maxwell Maltz
• Pivot
• Tim Ferriss
• Michael Beckwith
• DonnaSteinhornGroup.com

 

About Donna Steinhorn

Donna Steinhorn is an Executive, Mentor and Life coach with more than 30 years of corporate and business experience. She divides her time between her one-on-one clients, developing and leading conferences and workshops, and multiple projects. She is also the co-founder of Serendipitous Events, which produces the invitation-only Conversation Among Masters and CAMalot annual events, and co-founder of the non-profit Coach Initiative whose mission it is to be “the central gathering point where professional Coaches can volunteer their experience and expertise in support of global projects that focus on the betterment of the human condition and uplifting the human spirit.”.  She’s also a board member of the Transformational Leadership Council, founded by Jack Canfield so leaders of personal and organizational transformation could support each other in their contributions to the world.  Donna holds both ICF (International Coach Federation) and IAC (International Association of Coaching) credentials.