Welcome Daisy’s New Associate Coach: Brooke Loesby, Esq.

Brooke Loesby, Esq. Growth occurs outside our comfort zone. Brooke serves as a trusted ally, a resource and a sounding board for your transition. She is skilled in helping clients navigate roadblocks and keeping them focused on their path. Brooke has a genuine passion and interest in their success. Guided by clients’ inner voices, Brooke lends her creativity, inquisitiveness, and enthusiasm to help them to manifest their calling. Brooke has assisted hundreds of clients in making important career and life transitions. Brooke’s approach is personalized and proactive; she works to help clarify their aspirations and assist them in achieving their goals. Brooke’s clients range from humanitarian activists to media and fashion professionals, to start up entrepreneurs and senior attorneys from Am Law 100 firms. Before coaching, Brooke experienced several career transitions of her own: for three years, she worked in legislation on Capital Hill, for Senator Larry E. Craig; as… Read More

January 9-11, 2015: New Year, New You ~ Cleanse and Visioning Retreat in Ojai

Mindful Awareness Practices (MAPs) II: Cultivating Positive Emotions (formerly Finding Happiness) (a UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center program led by Career Coach, Daisy Swan) This MAPs II class emphasizes heart-based qualities that complement mindfulness and can be cultivated through meditation practices. We will explore loving kindness, compassion, equanimity (even-mindedness), joy, generosity, and gratitude. We will learn new meditations to develop these qualities, tools to work with when we find them ourselves stuck and not feeling positive emotions, and practical exercises to incorporate them into our daily life. This is a helpful expansion to our basic mindfulness practice. Each class is a dynamic, interactive combination of lecture, practice, and group feedback and discussion. MAPs is taught in a context of a supportive community environment with classes no larger than 30-40 students. Daisy Swan will be leading this class series; she has years of personal… Read More

A Lesson from The Suns

Steve Nash has been an inspiration to me since the first time I saw him play, live, at the Staples Center years ago. I recently read a great article about him in Sports Illustrated. What struck me was Stoudemire’s statement here about how success on the court manifests — through creative vision and seeing. “When you have creative minds, you get involved in different sports, in different cultures, and it allows you to open up on the basketball court and just be yourself. Steve’s a heck of a soccer player. He’s one of those skateboard guys. For the most part, you want to be yourself. Being yourself allows you to play better, to have more fun. It opens up your spirit.” Take a moment to assess how open you are to what’s going on around you. What energy are you leaving on the table? How engaged are you in a… Read More

Connecting, Man Style…

How many times in the past year have you found yourself thinking ‘This isn’t the way it was supposed to go’? This unemployment thing has taken us by surprise. Not only the layoffs and cutbacks but also the length of time it’s taking to find that next job. And to make matters worse, the salaries out there have, in many, many cases been cut as well. So, no, this isn’t the way it was supposed to go. Especially if you’ve done everything you were supposed to do. Education, played well with others, learned the ins and outs of your industry.

For men this has been a particularly tough time. I work with a lot of men and for them it’s particularly difficult to talk with others about what they are looking for in this next go round. Forget about talking about the disappointment and resentment that this downturn has created, we know that’s rough to do. Reaching out to that network isn’t easy. Jeffrey Zaslow, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, wrote about the way men do friendship. They don’t sit around commiserating with their buds about their unemployment, issues at home, etc…they’ll quietly deal with their problems over sharing their pain.

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What's Fun Got to Do With It?

This past weekend I had the good fortune to attend an independently organized TED (Technology Entertainment Design) event in Manhattan Beach. TED is all about Ideas Worth Spreading; you can find more about this at TED.com. While I learned so much during this one day event, I’ve found myself talking about a particular presentation about play and fun and see how this ‘plays’ out in work – mine, my clients’, and my 13 year old son’s.

Michael Shore, VP of Worldwide Consumer Insights at Mattel Inc. presented valuable research about what fun means to a wide cross section of kids, summarizing this with 10 Expressions of Fun. I’ve been measuring my sense of fun against these. And, after presenting this list to my video playing obsessed son, understand more about what he gets from these games, and appreciate more what we’re all really after. In fact, fun is absolutely key to a satisfying career. Check yourself against these 10 Expressions of Fun. How much are these a part of your work and life?

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