We often speak of releasing physical weight, and are we as diligent about releasing our wait? I was on a coaching call with a group of Champion’s out of New Hampshire, and said I was releasing weight. A beautiful friend of mine said that what she heard is that she gets to release her wait. I thought this was such a profound conversation. How many times do we sit in indecision, and use it as a great excuse to not get what it is we say we want. We turn our unknowingness into a

Imagine two men in a village. Both have to walk a mile each way every day to a river to get water for their families. After a month, one man starts working on building a pipe underground to connect the river to his house. For an entire year he expends extra energy working on his pipeline. When he finishes, he has the resource of the water directly to his house, while the second man continues to walk to the river. Are there places in your life where you are living day to day?

Aetna Healthcare hired Klemmer because they were interested in hosting fewer meetings with their teams and the meetings they did conduct needed to be more effective. We delivered training with a primary focus on communication, trust, risk taking and honoring agreements. This training yielded an overall increase in open communication by 51% and a 39% increase in collaboration among team members which was credited with reducing meeting costs by $2 million dollars over 12 months

Hewlett Packard hired Klemmer because they were five weeks behind in developing the ink-jet printer (losing $10 million a week). They were having a teamwork problem between design departments in Barcelona, Spain and San Diego, California. For HP, we completed workshops in San Diego and Barcelona and they credit our workshops with making up all five weeks of their manufacturing delay. Since 1995, Klemmer Leadership Training is committed to creating bold, ethical leaders who wi

All of us have a choice in how we look at our circumstances. One choice is the victim viewpoint, the viewpoint that the events in my life are the result of something being done to me. The second is the responsible viewpoint: I am the cause for my experience because of choices I have made. A key distinction when discussing these two viewpoints is that neither victim nor responsible have anything to do with the truth. One way to understand the difference between victim and resp

Sometimes the key piece that we can forget is that resistance in most cases is not external. Most of the time our resistance is within ourselves, battling our own sunglasses. Have you ever thought that the worst things being said to you are the things you say to yourself? How do you overcome internal resistance? Quit resisting it! First, recognize that you are in resistance. Difficulties are part of the process. Keep your eyes open to the fact that resistance to any goal is n

There is a set of sunglasses we wear that colors our experiences in the context of right and wrong. When considering this, I am not speaking in terms of morality, but about a person's experience. More specifically, within this context one person is right and the other person is wrong. Over the years I have come to see that everyone wears this pair of sunglasses to some degree or another. I have also observed that this way of looking at the world is one of the most difficult p

The saying goes like this: the only way you can fail is to quit. In fact, I heard someone say just last week regarding his business that he was not giving up. I am now going to challenge this belief from the perspective that there is much more than merely not giving up and not quitting. You can apply this to your business, your health, your finances, your relationships – any and all of the important areas of your life where you have so much to gain by giving it all you've got

Do you yearn to live a life without fear and hesitation? In our last blog we introduced the secret to playing full out with a discussion about operating out of our beingness. Living from the place of knowing that we are whole, unique individuals — rather than from our egos and the perspective of having to fill up our lives with externals in order to be something — frees us to take risks and opens up our creativity. That shift in thinking allows us to play full out. What other

Think back. Why did you originally choose to attend Klemmer & Associates workshops in the first place? Were you looking for something more in your life, perhaps in the form of relationships, achieving goals, blasting past personal barriers that were hindering you? In a previous blog we talked about a graduate, who had achieved a lot of his goals, yet still felt unfulfilled. Maybe you can relate to him, having also tried to remedy that feeling by reaching for higher and higher

Do you know your purpose? If not, you're in the company of a lot of other people. Like those other people, you might share a feeling of aimlessness and dissatisfaction with life. Something seems to be missing, and you know there's got to be more. But how does someone go about finding their purpose? Is there a course you can take? A book you can read? Someone you can talk to who can tell you what it is? There is no magic bullet, no step-by-step formula which you can follow to

In Brian Klemmer's book, The Compassionate Samurai, he addresses ways that you can become the person you want to be. If you visualized the ideal you, how would you look, feel, and behave? It can be helpful to write the details on paper. For instance, how much do you weigh, what is your waist size, what color clothes do you wear? Do you feel confident, joyful, energetic? As a parent, are you patient? As a spouse or partner are you loving and compassionate? Are you a thoughtful

We are all constantly faced with decisions. In many cases, these decisions are divided into two areas: Things that will make us happy now versus things that will make us happy later. If life were a three-day weekend, it would be easy to make the right choices, but we have to balance getting the most we can out of today while planting seeds that will make us happy tomorrow. Recently, I read about an incident involving my late friend and mentor, the legendary basketball coac

Right now we are nearing the full swing of summer. Trees are lush, flowers are in full bloom, and stores and farmer's markets are starting to burst with fresh produce. The tendency may be to focus on the product of summer, the fruit. But summer is a time of growth. If you garden, then you know that there's a lot that goes into growing vegetables and fruits such as tomatoes and raspberries. First comes the soil prep, then the planting of seeds or root stock, and then the conti

Commitment is freedom. Most people see commitment as the opposite. Thus the reason many people are afraid of marriage, a steady relationship, or even giving the company they work for all they have to offer. People with this mindset are always looking for something better and searching for more while they settle forwhat they have. They see commitment as giving up what might be or could have been. They view commitment as a thing to avoid because it is best to "keep their option

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln What an incredible quote from Abraham Lincoln, so much wisdom in one line. I don't know about you, but when I read this for the first time, I completely agreed. Proper preparation sets you up to win in life. After I read this, I began to think, "How often do I actually execute this level of diligent preparation?" In our society today, we are running at such a fast pac

How do you take sixty to seventy high school guys with widely differing degrees of athletic ability and mold them into a winning football team? That's what Coach Doug Wilkins of Denville, New Jersey did for forty-four years, winning twenty-five consecutive seasons from 1985 through 2009, along with eight state championships. Coach Wilkins didn't start out that way, though. With a losing first season, he knew something needed to change. This is the first of three newsletters t

Picture a mason jar. If I fill it to the brim with rocks would you say it was full? Most people would say yes. Then I pour pebbles that slide in between the rocks. Is the jar full? Then I pour in sand and the sand fills in even more of the supposedly used space. Imagine your big dreams; the things that are attached to your purpose. Those things are your rocks. Your pebbles are the things in your life that are also significantly important but not the end all of everything like

Who is truly comfortable with receiving feedback? Do only things that make you comfortable move you forward? Get used to receiving feedback, and embrace it, so that you can use it as a tool in your life. Feedback helps us in making course corrections. Someone else's vantage point can enable us to see blind spots in our lives. Feedback can also foster relationships. Opening up lines of communication, through feedback, can allow those around you to feel more connected with you