From My Heart To Yours

Mike Stevenson: “It's time to rebalance our understanding of what money is about. When it comes to greed, we can pin it down to three things these days: business, money, and politics. We've allowed business to kind of morph into unfettered greed and we’ve allowed greed to grow. Business is a force for good and business should be a force for good. The market can solve problems and yet we've allowed it to get out of control.

We now have a situation where the sixty-four richest people in the world, multi-billionaires, own more than the entire bottom half of the global population.

They see themselves as successful. Yes. Okay. They've had great business ideas and implemented them. At this point they are people who are making money simply by having money and investing it. I don't think they're earning it. I think it's spurious to claim that people are earning it and it’s so much money, they can't even spend it within their lifetime. The worst part is that they keep charging the rest of us higher and higher prices. That's what I mean by greed.

Politicians are elected with money and are mainly made by money. That means that power and control are held by the people who have exercised the greatest greed.

We get to separate money from politics.

We are living in really difficult times. The voices that will be heard come from people asking audacious questions and we need answers to those questions.

The best leaders are people who live in some of our most impoverished communities, because leadership becomes a necessity to survive. People seem to think there is some kind of leadership gene. There isn’t. We've allowed bad leadership in politics. Now we get to reroute politics to communities where we live. That's where the power should be, because the people are sovereign. It's the whole foundation of democracy. We've gone beyond that.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Mike Stevenson.

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Mike Stevenson: “I was born to a Scottish-Irish father, and a Lebanese mother who had grown up in Egypt. So it was quite a mix to be born into as a cultural being. I spent three years in Pakistan between the ages of three and six-and-a-half. On the way back to Scotland, we got caught in Egypt. It was at the time of the Suez Crisis with the British government. I remember the troops on the shore of Port Said; we got out just before the Suez Canal was closed.

I came back to Scotland, which I barely knew because I had traveled to Pakistan at age three. I found it cold and gray.

Settling into school was extraordinarily difficult for me because I had started kindergarten in Lahore, Pakistan. Evidently I spoke pretty decent Urdu. I can only remember a few words of it now. It's so incredible how children just absorb information in extraordinary ways because they are so adaptable.

I ended up attending a total of three different primary schools and I hated it. I hated the whole school experience.

When I went to high school, it wasn't any better. I just could not settle myself. I was fidgety, distracted, disinterested, and bored. I was constantly thinking of the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and being a rock star. I wanted to stand on stage, and at the age of thirteen that's exactly what I did. I started a band. At school, none of that counted for anything, because you are judged entirely on academic grounds. So it was no surprise that by the age of fifteen, I was asked to leave school on no uncertain terms.

My parents were going through a divorce and it was horrible. It was nasty. I escaped to London to get away from it all. I got a job in a shop selling furniture and it was all going well until it wasn't. Apparently, none of the customers could understand a word I said because of my Scottish accent.

So I was sacked three days into my first job.

I ended up sleeping out for about a year, which was quite formative in negative as well as positive ways. It was a challenging and threatening experience where I learned that I could survive and found out who I was as an individual. After that, I went through an extraordinary journey.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Mike Stevenson.

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Lisa Gable: “Managing relationships is twofold. One of the first things is ‘do what's right for you’. Determine how you want to interact with the world. Make sure you are willing to interact from a positive point of engagement, take the time to understand someone, and let them understand you. At the same time you are learning how to set boundaries, especially at the beginning of your career, and of course throughout your entire life.

When it comes to mentorship, I see the mentee and mentor as a process where they are investing in each other's success. This includes friendships, special relationships with relatives, and in the business world as well.

It's important to take time to invest in our relationships. There's a benefit to the giver and the receiver of anything. In our professional careers, we can't just focus on climbing the ladder. It's important to make sure others are climbing with us. By doing so we become so much stronger.

I’ve always wanted to be Jimmy Stewart in the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”. That’s what I aspire to! Hearing people talking about what you did for them and how it built an opportunity that they might not have had, feels really good.

There’s great satisfaction in helping other people and not just focusing on yourself.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Former US Ambassador, Lisa Gable.

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Lisa Gable: “We see people on their good days and we see them on their bad days. We make assumptions about who they are as a result of how they exhibit their personality at a moment in time. The reality is–we don't know what's going on in that person's life, we really don't.

So if you start with the assumption that the person with whom you are dealing is a good person and perhaps the way in which they are reacting to a situation isn't what you would want, there is hope that you could come to know them better.

This gives us the opportunity to appreciate who they truly are as a whole person.

We have a tendency to be very judgmental, especially today in social media and politics when we’ve only seen a tiny aspect of someone's life.

In managing people for over forty years, I am always stunned at how someone would immediately assume their colleague was out to get them. It's been even more noticeable in the last five years.

My father was so amazing at finding something uniquely special about everyone he met. Even if they were the most annoying person on the face of the earth, he could find a specialness in them.

So look for that unique special kernel of an individual and help bring it out of them, so together you can explore it.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Former US Ambassador, Lisa Gable.

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Lisa Gable: “Sometimes we doubt ourselves and sometimes we doubt our ability to analyze what's going on around us. It may be how we are working with another individual or it might be how we're perceiving shifts that are going on in our communities.

The reality is we actually know the answers to our questions, we can trust our instincts, and our decisions.

I use decision trees. There is a starting point and a path to follow. As long as you have a clear vision, then you will have clarity in making decisions. Each decision leads to another question. If the answer is ‘Yes’ then you follow that path. If the answer is ‘No’, then that leads to another set of questions.

Your gut will tell you the right direction to go.

Type A people have a plan for their lives. That doesn’t mean we have to follow someone else's plan for how they see us fitting into their lives.

The world is changing so rapidly today. It helps to have a vision as to what you want your life to be, the impact that you want to have, and where you see your greatest opportunity. At the same time you get to zig and zag, which means to pivot. We saw that over and over again through COVID. As leaders, we would make decisions and yet something would happen within the supply chain or employees would get sick or money would be short. We were constantly having to pivot, while keeping our eye on what we ultimately wanted to achieve. I believe that applies to life as well.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Former US Ambassador, Lisa Gable.

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Lisa Gable: “I've had an incredible opportunity to do turnarounds in business, government, and philanthropy. I started my career during the Reagan administration at the age of nineteen. I was at the Pentagon during the Cold War at the age of twenty-one. And then moved over to the White House. So you can’t have a greater inflection point than the end of the Cold War.

When I moved out of Washington, DC I went to Arizona, Taiwan, and then California. I stayed in Silicon Valley for fifteen years and I met my husband there. Jim worked for Apple. I had left Intel Corporation and started my own company. We married two years later. We’ve been married for twenty-seven years, during which time we adopted our daughter and she is now working on her profession in Texas.

Jim and I have similar work histories, we understand the world of politics and philanthropy because that has been a core area where our families have invested. So, we come to life with a desire to value differences.

Even though we may have certain opinions, we focus a great deal on finding the good in people. We identify a place where we agree with another person in order to build a relationship. The reality and quality of life comes down to people in our personal relationships.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest, Former US Ambassador, Lisa Gable.

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Eva Vennari: “When we honor ourselves, that's our true power. And when others honor themselves, that's when co-creation can happen. This is when two healthy beings come together to create and teach others. We teach people by example. When you know who you are you teach others how to interact with you. That's honoring yourself and it's sometimes holding people's feet to the fire. And I'm okay with doing that.

Discomfort leads to growth.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Eva Vennari!

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Eva Vennari: “Be you is about not concerning yourself with what other people think about you, because their opinion of you doesn't matter. Integrity is the agreement that you have with yourself to be only you and not allow others to compromise it. When you are you and blending your personality with your higher self you have a greater power that you might not have been aware of before. It's an unshakable wisdom.

You are physically the magic, you're the reason why things can manifest. You're the reason why things can change.

When somebody says to you, and they said it to me many times, Eva, we're not here to change the world.

I argue.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Eva Vennari!

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Eva Vennari: “With the tunnel vision we get when we are in pain, we tend not to notice what is outside of us. I can remember a particular moment, when I was chronically ill and laying on the couch. My girls were very little and I was so fatigued that I could not get up and tuck them into bed. I said, "Come here. Give me a hug. You have to tuck yourselves in tonight. I can't do it. I can't move from here”.

Being chronically ill, we lose perspective. We lose connection with ourselves and others.

As I got stronger and my body was able to fight, my focus shifted away from the pain to, "Oh, my gosh, I have children that I need to raise! What do you guys need?"

There are red flags that we ignore and it's important to pay attention.

Learning how to listen in a way that is not a knee jerk reaction is important. Being emotionally intelligent is one thing, you can know what you're feeling. But unless you know what to do with it, you're not being wise about it. In other words, EQ (Emotional Intelligence) has nothing to do with wisdom.

When we're in that place of tunnel vision, we forget that there are others around us who need us, want us, can help us, and are a part of us.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Eva Vennari!

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Eva Vennari: “I was a hot mess as a previously sick corporate ladder climber, attempting to climb my way through the corporations of America. I was not making good progress, and it was beating me down. I became chronically ill, which included chronic fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, depression, fibromyalgia, itchy skin, heart palpitations, short term memory loss, hypothyroidism, and more than I care to remember.

There are many doorways to becoming a whole person.

It's not just one modality, it's a journey back to wellness. I knew I didn't want to be on medication. I knew I needed to start somewhere, and because I'm a stubborn Italian, my Sicilian served me well. So, one night, blessed with insomnia, and up at three o'clock in the morning, I Googled the list of ailments my doctors had found. I began digging through one weird article after another and I came across mineral balancing. What I was reading made sense to me, ‘give your body what it needs, it can heal itself’. Well, how do you know what it needs? Hair analysis and mineral balancing solves that problem. I sometimes forget how far I've come.

We have to get over the idea that we are in charge of what our body is going to heal. This is why I couldn't just create an app or a course. I tried to create a curriculum that everyone could just follow. It didn't work out because each person needs what they need the moment their body goes to the next level of healing.

Chronic fatigue is invisible in a way because you're not in a wheelchair, and yet it's not invisible energetically. People can pick up on it and they are less likely to engage with you and therefore your relationships suffer.”

Have a listen as I interview my special guest Eva Vennari!

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