Good morning from Milano. Yesterday I was sitting in the back of the car driving home to …. Oh, I can’t believe it! I just said home. Driving home to Milano from St. Moritz. It’s true. Milan does feel like home to m. That feels good most of the time but it can be a double-edged sword, if I’m honest,

Anyway, as I was sitting in the back seat of the car listening to a podcast by my friend, Susie Moore. She does five-minute pods seven days a week called ‘Let It Be Easy’, and she’s excellent. I don’t listen to them all the time, but yesterday I was listening to a bunch of them and one of the subjects that she talked about was compliments. She was talking about the fact that she had received perhaps one of the best compliments ever. Someone in her group said when I am around you, you make me feel powerful. That was really cool. Susie turned it around on the listeners and was asking about how we want to make people feel and what would be a great compliment to receive. She said what would you want on your tombstone? It’s an interesting thing to think about.

One of the things that I would love people to say about me is that I gift my smile freely. I think it’s a very nice thing to smile at people and it’s something I’m very intentional about. As for compliments, one of the biggest compliments that I have received recently was from my dear friend Annalisa. She said to me, Constance, you’re my friend who always says yes. So many of my friends say no right away and you always say yes. And I just love that about you.  What a nice thing to say. Now that she knows that I kind of like it, she says it to me a lot. I don’t know but there’s something about it. It makes me happy that she thinks of me as someone who is game for anything. I like that.

Anyway, back to what Susie Moore asked about how do you want to make people feel? That’s a big question. When I think about it, two things come up for me. One of them is something that has always been a very powerful word for me and its choice. You’ve heard me say choose, choose again. I love the phrase and it’s mine. I think that choice is one of the most powerful and richest things that we have in our lives. Choose how you feel. Choose your words. Choose your reaction.

I think my love of that word choice comes from my father. He used to always say to me, you have a choice. Oftentimes it was when I didn’t want to get up to go to work on a Saturday morning when I was a kid. He’d admonish: You want to stay in bed, stay in bed. You have a choice.  He also used to say to me you can choose the way you feel. While he had good intentions around this idea of choosing how one feels, it led to some struggle in my life. When I’m not feeling great, giving myself permission to just be  – to allow that there are days when things feel like they’re going sideways.  This is something I struggle with. I was also very influenced by ‘Man’s Search For Meaning ‘by Viktor Frankl. I’ve read that book a couple of times and choice was a powerful theme in that book.

The other thing I was thinking about with regard to how I hope I make people feel in my life has to do with the word agency, because agency is about our feelings of power in our own lives. The ability we have to control our own thoughts and behavior. It makes me sad when I think of people who feel totally victimized by their circumstances. A total sense of powerlessness in their lives. I guess it’s fair to say that choice and agency are close kins.

I’m going to end here and put the question back on you. Think about it for a minute. What would be a beautiful compliment for you to receive? And when you think of your family or your friends and colleagues, how do you think you make them feel? Or how do you hope that you make them feel? I think that’s a beautiful thing to think about.

I’ll leave you with that for today. Until next time, from my heart to yours.