Yesterday I was leaving a client’s office and found myself in midtown Manhattan, on Madison Avenue in the low 50’s, waiting to cross the street.  Two French women of a certain age, clearly tourists, approached me and asked in heavily accented English if I could tell them where to find St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  I smiled at them and pointed to the neo-gothic spires visible two blocks away and said, “You can see it from here.  It’s just a few blocks in that direction,” when a man’s voice off to my left said, “That’s not St. Patrick’s.”   The poor ladies looked panicked.  Clearly they had asked me for directions because I looked safe and trustworthy and now these two strangers were…

It wasn’t too long after becoming CEO when I realized that all of my friends in the industry were now clients and that posed a problem. How would I decompress? Who was there to talk with and occasionally whine to about the awfulness of my day? Oh sure, I had (and still do have) a wonderful, caring husband, but we had made the decision that he would stay home with the kids at a time when that decision was still a curiosity and he had his own stressful, awful days and didn’t need to be burdened with mine. The kindly founder always lent an ear and a reassuring word but I knew that he had hired me so that he did…

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone we worked with came into the office and left their troubles behind?  And by troubles, I don’t mean worry about a son’s report card or an aging mother.  Those troubles are the stuff of life and we all share them at some time or another.  Learning to look at and listen to another human being and see the world from their vantage point is the basis of empathy and is truly foundational in helping people connect to one another. I use trouble here more fundamentally.  I use it here to suggest those psychic wounds too many people carry that distort our vision and color the way we see the world and, more importantly, interact with…