Through the eyes of a kid

Sometimes it’s just fun being a kid. And let’s face it, we could all use a little more kid in us. To celebrate my wife’s 40th and bring an incredible experience to the family, we ventured off to London and Paris over the kids’ spring break. One of the spots we eyed for our first…

The art of not having control

Every endeavor we face will typically have 2 buckets – one bucket of what we can control and one bucket of what’s uncontrollable. We’ve heard it plenty of times and I’ve mentioned this concept more times than I can count, focus on the controllable bucket, and make the most out of it. I remain a…

Different year – same result?

The calendar officially flipped to March and here we are already over 8 weeks into 2024. For many of our 2024 goals, reality has hit, and motivation has slowly crept away. Now, we’re simply left staring at 2024 goals with a key question, am I done with these goals or am I ready to build…

Carry it forward

We rounded out a 4+ month long season of 2nd grade basketball this past Sunday. I can tell some kids are ready for the next adventure while others will miss the opportunities we have had as a team. As the wind down process takes place – could be a team, season, project, event, etc. – there’s…

Connecting the puzzle pieces

Anyone else tend to fall in love with puzzles during wintertime? The recent puzzle my wife and I challenged ourselves to seemed to have similar shades of color all throughout the picture. The start of the puzzle was painful (at least for me) – trying to figure out what section to start with, separating colors…

Time under tension

One of the great benefits of working at Principal Financial Group is their workout facility. The workout facility has just about every option of exercise you can think of, including the opportunity to take bootcamp classes. For those unfamiliar with bootcamp classes, while each class is different, it typically is structured in the form of…

Where to shine your light

A pet peeve I’ve learned over the past couple years is it drives me crazy when my kids leave their lights on in their bedrooms. I get it, total 1st world problem, but I’m sure many parents can empathize. The other day I walked into one of my kids’ rooms in the middle of the day,…

It’s all relative

The past couple of weeks in Iowa have been a flurry of snow and sub-zero temps. Towards the middle of this fun weather came a random day where the temperature got to 20 degrees. It was amazing how good 20 degrees felt. Strange to say how exciting 20 degrees is but when our benchmark is…

The lessons keep coming from MLK Jr.

This weekend is a great moment of pause opportunity to reflect on a figure that transcends time. He represents leadership in his ability to make the greater vision come alive to connect millions of people to a common cause for progress. He displayed perseverance time and time again no matter what the challenges presented. He…