I have always participated beyond expectation in all of my roles and responsibilities (what some may call a “leader”) and, in my career, have created an alchemy of program and project management, instructor roles, curriculum design, coaching, business development, and self-expression strategizing.

I have a family story like many other Jews whose forebears emigrated to the US shores from ”the old country.”

We are more than just matzoh balls and guilt jokes. Our grandparents and great-grandparents escaped persecution and came looking for freedom.

But freedom is not only in need externally, when one people is oppressing another.

There is also internal freedom.

Every day our world and its inhabitants grows more and more anxious and terrified. We have lost the art or nurturing and going beyond what is expected of us,

When my grandfather left his grocery store in Brooklyn each day, to walk across the street and bring a buttered bagel to an elderly woman in need, that was a type of coaching. He was reinforcing each day that she was worthy, that the world wasn’t necessarily against her, that she was loved.

When my mother would talk to strangers on the city buses in Queens about their highest dreams for themselves, encouraging them to remember that they could be anything they wanted to be, she was being the original coach.

And when her mother, my grandmother, held a secret book exchange for Jews in the late hours of the night, because they weren’t allowed to read, and then came to the US to work as journalist and a revolutionary thinker, she was a leader ahead of her time.

I am proud to come from roots such as these and to carry on the tradition of leadership and validation of self-expression and the human spirit…