Good morning, Team! It’s Friday!

I’m going to depart from my leadership tone for this week. It’s Thanksgiving and most of you are not at work today. If you have a vacation policy that allows the day after Thanksgiving as a personal holiday, a regular holiday for those robust places to work or you just took the Friday after a Thursday holiday, it doesn’t matter. You’re not at work…

So what are you doing with this gifted day?

You likely stuffed yourself with the Butterball dressed up next to the cornucopia, accompanied by candied yams, French cut green bean and mushroom soup casserole with the dried onions on top, stuffing with or without the giblets, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, or some variation of that. You probably took a tryptophan-induced nap, watched some TV, played some games…

• So maybe your waist grew 1” closer to blowing out your waistband but that isn’t what I was referring to in the blog title.

• In college, I recall a Gold Star band trumpet player who grew his scruffy beard for deer hunting season around this time of year. He was convinced that good food and family time made his beard grow fuller and faster, like it was 1” closer to a real beard by the time he returned from the holiday.

• Actually, life affects us in funny ways. Things that sneak up on us (or at least me) where we find the person we want to spend our life with, we raise a family, we prepare our children for the “real world” and we usher them off to get smart, get a job and create a life for themselves. Holidays roll around and we hope like crazy that they desire to come back and share some time and stories. They move miles and/or states away and we hope they feel “the emotional tug” to get 1” closer…at least once or twice a year.

I recently saw an interesting Harvard Business Review article from a couple of decades ago highlighting the book by Daniel Goleman that explained how a leader’s high Emotional Intelligence (EI or EQ) is what makes them exceptional. (So maybe I can’t help but slip a lesson about leadership into my story.)  The five areas that describe EQ are;

• Self-awareness
• Self-regulation
• Empathy
• Motivation
• Social Skill

Moving 1″ closer to adulthood or 1″ closer to becoming an effective leader, you need to open up your heart.

Open up your hearts this holiday season, not just your pie hole. 🙂

Have a blessed remainder of this extended Thanksgiving weekend.