As the wife of an entrepreneur and mother of two, themes of leadership are prevalent in my life. But what is the difference between a good leader, and a great one? A good leader is able to direct others to meet a targeted goal or deadline with satisfactory results. They are essentially in charge of the people who follow their lead, and take ultimate responsibility for the final results. A great leader, however, does more than simply get the job done: they inspire their company, students or children to achieve more, raise productivity levels, and, in the best case scenario, to acquire leadership skills of their own. Not all of us are born leaders, and even those who are can benefit from a leadership development program. This specialized training can help already seasoned leaders develop the skills and knowledge to provide effective, exceptional leadership in any situation or organization.

You may consider yourself a great leader and role model, but there is always improvement to be made.  At leadership development training you will focus on:

Mentoring - Mentoring allows you to directly communicate what you know about leadership to others. Mentoring improves teaching and communication skills, and teaching is a great way to strengthen the knowledge you already have. Some executives have been leaders for so long that they have become out of touch with their employees; mentoring is a way to encourage communication and a sharing of ideas from both parties. Coaching your peers is an invaluable way for you to enhance your leadership qualities while improving your faculties for listening, answering questions, and conversing with others in general.

Personal Coaching - Yes, you’re already a leader, but how well will you handle constructive criticism? When people in positions of leadership allow themselves to be coached by their peers at leadership development training, it can open up a whole new level of awareness into how they have been approaching leadership thus far. Awareness is the beginning point of change and improvement. At first, you might find yourself responding negatively to a peer’s suggestions for improvement, but the experience will leave you better equipped for a time when those roles are reversed, and you are about to offer criticism to an employee yourself.

Professional Networking – There really isn’t any textbook definition of leadership; new strategies are invented all the time and there are countless ways to approach managing and leading. Connecting with other like-minded professionals in leadership development training will give you the chance to share your stories of leadership with others, and to hear what has and hasn’t worked for them. A good leader gets people to listen, but a great leader listens to others, and learns from them.

My family and I usually cook at home as opposed to going out to eat, but that doesn’t mean the kids don’t ask about having dinner in a restaurant! Of course I remember what it was like to be their age–anything tastes better than Mum’s cooking, right?–but I try to provide a healthy, balanced and…edible diet as much as possible before taking the kids for the ultimate treat of dining out. I want to spoil my kids, trust me–I just love them too much to actually do it.!

Last night, Brian and I caved and took ourselves as well as Sam and April to an eatery very much their cup of tea: the Rainforest Cafe in the Yorkdale Mall. It’s certainly not the first place I want to blow my money on mediocre food (although I like their solar panels) but it’s set up for little ones and they’re able to burn a bunch of energy playing in the ‘rainforest’ before it’s time to sit down and get nourished. Before we’d arrived, I had Sam and April promise to be on their best behaviour, to play nicely together and to expect only one chocolate milk. Sam was a little too quick to acquiesce– I had a feeling he’d opened his mouth and spoken empty words–and that I’d have to have the ‘Pinocchio’ discussion with him a bit later.

It wasn’t long before my son was driving me batty. There was a small group of ‘big boys’ (and by ‘big boys’ I mean 8-year-olds as opposed to 6-year-old Sam) and he clearly didn’t think he looked very cool with his three-year-old sister trailing after him. So, he left her alone as soon as they were out of my vision. I heard her crying within minutes and ran off to rescue her, standing alone under some giant fake leaves with tears and snot dripping down her face and a score of concerned–no, smug–mothers watching her from their perches. I picked her up just as Sam was ripping by in full pursuit of one of the big boys; I grabbed him with my free arm.

“OK, playtime’s over, Sam,” I said. “You were supposed to keep your sister safe.”

“Can I have chocolate milk and pizza?” was his reply.

I should have said no, but by that point I was already feeling a little nutso and was willing to give him what he wanted until it was time to go–so we ordered the pizza, two chocolate milks and two much-needed pints. Sam gulped his milk down in one go, mischief in his eyes. “Can I have another chocolate milk?” he asked. “Sam, what did your mother tell you?” asked Brian. “Who cares what she said?” said my son. “She’s just old!”

That was it.

“That’s it, Sam,” I said, very calmly, I might add. “No more chocolate milk and no more playing. Green chair when we get home, ten minutes.”

Does it make me a bad person that it was kind of satisfying to watch his face go from cad to sad? I should hope not. A survivor of discipline-by-spanking myself, I’ve found that method savage and ultimately unproductive. This is what capital punishment looks like in our house: a small closet with nothing in it besides an old stove timer and an ugly little green chair. Naughty child must serve their sentence without getting up or sentence is doubled, no exceptions. For a child just getting in touch with their own reserves of daytime energy, no punishment is worse.

I like to think it serves a triple purpose psychologically: 1) it helps children realize that time is precious and 2) it helps children (well, my speed-of-light children at least) to experience a quiet moment of reflection and 3) will eliminate poor home furniture choices (ie. green chairs) in the future.

Oddly enough, our last restaurant experience has left me craving another (childless) one. Has anyone tried the Bier Markt in Toronto? I’m looking for a great Winterlicious experience, and a babysitter!

There are two food trends that I’ve never been able to get behind, and those are excessive plastic packaging and microwaves. I just don’t think that such unnatural means of storage and food preparation should be in place now that the world is grown up enough to start taking responsibility for its food mistakes. While it’s truly impossible (I’ve tried) to avoid purchasing products that come with a bit of plastic (even some of my favourite health food staples come packaged in the stuff) I try my best to keep those purchases to a minimum.

Does the modern world ever make you feel like abandoning your principles? Friends laughed at me for using glass bottles to feed my kids and for heating up their milk formulas on the stove top, but I held firm to my convictions that neither microwaves nor plastics (and especially the two together) have any right to be around infants. However, I remember clearly the time I had one year-old Sam and his glass bottle at the grocery store with me, and he saw fit to throw a tantrum near the checkout counter. Wanting out of his seat in the shopping cart, Sam struggled and squirmed, screaming at the top of his little lungs until I procured his bottle to pacify him.

What a mistake! Within seconds it was in a hundred tiny pieces on the floor; a puddle of milk was at my feet and dozens of eyes were on me as Sam continued to howl. I helplessly watched as a store employee brought a mop to the scene–she rolled her eyes when I asked if I could help. Sam didn’t stop screaming the entire time, a fact he now refuses to believe.

While I didn’t cave and start buying plastic bottles, I certainly became less thrilled with the glass option. I worried (perhaps I had more time than I thought) about the kids growing up and taking plastic-encased lunches to school. I watched a friend who had shared my own convictions on plastics and kids give in and start buying ziplocs and sandwich bags, saying “I just don’t have the time anymore to care“!

At a BBQ this summer at my friend Cindy’s something new, shiny and elegant caught my eye. These fun, yet super-classy popsicle molds were so perfect to me that the experience of seeing them for the first time had a dreamlike quality about it. I asked Cindy where she’d found the popsicle molds because I’d never seen anything like them and had been cringing using my own plastic ones for April and Sam for years.

“Oh yeah, aren’t they great?” she replied. “They’re made by my friend’s company in B.C. They don’t do anything plastic. They even make stainless steel ice cube trays!”

I immediately Googled the company, Onyx, when I got home. Onyx’s founders had children themselves, and had struggled–just like me–between the choice of glass or plastic as a food container for kids. Then–unlike me–they did something about it, they created a line of stainless steel kitchenware, including straws, lunch containers, and much more.

I just received my first order in the mail late last week, and Sam’s already brought his lunch to school in this two-layer sandwich box (only $11!). Please spread the word about this socially-conscious Canadian company that is doing its part to improve the health of people and the environment. Thank you Onyx!

I’m a little ashamed of my monthlong silence–I can’t believe the date on my last post! April and I were looking out the window this morning and talking about the rainy day ahead, and she asked if she could watch Cinderella. As soon as she asked I was really tempted to turn on the tube, leave her with some apple slices and slink into my living room with the laptop and blog… I had even started writing a blog in my head about ‘great movies for kids’ when… I suddenly felt guilty, like a bad parent.

One of the hardest things about parenting, I think, is knowing that a little one is watching the choices you make for them, and for yourself. April’s only three, but I think she’s aware that throwing a flick on first thing in the morning is the perfect start to a lazy day. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” wrote the brilliant Annie Dillard, and I completely agree. That’s not to say that I don’t waste an ounce of time–I think we all do–but having kids in your life either a) encourages you to make every minute count or b) makes you conscious of the unproductive minutes. I’m not always as perky as I appear online; there have been moments when I’ve resented my motherhood and wished I could just stuff earplugs in my ears and take a nap myself instead of trying to get April to go down.

This morning I was tempted to let the television entertain my daughter–it looked dreary outside, and rainy weather makes me want to curl up under a blanket and veg, not the most constructive way to spend time, I know.

Instead, I suggested reading a book together. I was half-expecting April to throw a tantrum, or at least whine a little bit, but to my surprise she enthusiastically agreed. We spent almost an hour reading The Cat in the Hat, Mortimer Be Quiet, and Nora and the Great Bear; all three books are entertaining and perfect for a rainy day. When she finally did go down for a nap, I felt a lot less guilty about entering some social media contests…

Here are some more of our favourite books instead of movies:

The Lorax by Dr. Suess

Dr. Suess’ story is about a greedy man (obsessed with production planning but not inventory management) sucking all the resources out of an area of land to make a versatile but ultimately useless product called a ‘Thneed’. It’s not the happiest story in the world, but it’s realistic. There’s no fairytale ending, instead the protagonist (and the reader!) get a very practical lesson: unless we work the hardest we can to ensure that what we hold dear is protected, things we take for granted (like the Truffula trees) will be lost.

I should confess that April actually wants a Thneed at the moment, but she’ll come around.

Corduroy by Don Freeman

One of my favourites as a child, Corduroy is an adorable story about a bear in a department store who worries that no one will ever want to take him home because he’s missing a button on his suspenders. I read a story on the Toronto Star website today that made me cry about a gay Ottawa teen committed suicide due to teasing from his peers. In my opinion, the parents of these bullies are to blame for the ignorant and hateful attacks borne by this boy. This book teaches that, even though the bear is missing something that would make him ‘perfect’ he has a beautiful spirit underneath and that is recognized by the girl who falls in love with him when she sees him on the shelf.

The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills

I haven’t read this one to April yet but I read it to Sam-anyway, this is a very profound book for children and adults! Again, issues of bullying are addressed along with poverty, independence and…the death of a parent. Main character Minna comes from a poor family (her father is an East Coast miner, not a Toronto mortgage broker) and, more than anything in the world, hopes for a coat for the coming winter. After her father dies of a mining sickness, Minna’s mother and ‘the quilting mothers’ band together to make a coat for Minna–using the old rags of many of her classmates at school.

Simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming, this is a wholesome yet realistic story that teaches empathy.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

A powerful story about a boy and his toy and the power of love, no less real at any age.

I’ll try to get posting at a more regular rate… and I have a feeling the next posts will be more about food for the stomach rather than food for the mind

Hello June!

I can’t believe how HOT the past few days have been, and we haven’t even opened the pool yet! That’s a job for Brian and me this weekend. Until then, my top priority is instilling in my kids the knowledge that we must ALL wear sunscreen!

I can remember my own mother slathering the stuff on me and how much I hated standing idle while she rubbed cold, greasy lotion on my face, neck, shoulders and arms. I absolutely refused to put it on my legs for some reason, probably because I was too restless to suffer application on one more body part!

Why Wear Sunscreen?

Aside from the obvious answer (to avoid a painful, unattractive and dangerous sunburn), protecting your most visible organ from the sun is the best way to maintain youthful, healthly-looking skin.

SPF stands for sun protection factor and the numerical value represents how long it’s safe to be exposed under the sun’s rays. For example, SPF 15 will give you 150 minutes in the sun before you start to burn. Just multiply the numerical value by 10, and that’s how long you’ve got, although in my opinion, it’s always best to be over-cautious when you’re dealing with hot summer sun. I always use SPF 30 or 45 for both myself and my kids, and reapply every two hours. Some of my friends pick SPF 15 because they want a summer tan, and there’s even one who doesn’t wear sunscreen! Tans do look pretty, but they’re kind of like junk food: tastes good at the time, but you pay for it later. Tanning is like that for our skin. You may have the healthiest glow summer after summer, even for years, but really, tan=sun damage. You will age faster than your friends who were smarter about taking care of their skin!

Maybe my junk food analogy wasn’t the greatest. I’ll try again. Once, when I was volunteering for the Toronto Humane Society, a co-volunteer said something to me that I’ll never forget. She said, “There’s happiness and there’s stimulation. Stimulation makes you happy, but it’s only temporary. Happiness takes longer, and is much harder to find, but once you do it sticks around.” Is that better? Tans are stimulation–they look great for a season–but years later you could look wrinkled, haggard or worst of all, develop skin cancer!

There was a death in my family, my aunt, from skin cancer. This was in the mid-eighties, which now, in retrospect, is classified as a decade of excess. I don’t remember my aunt very well, but my mother said the summer she contracted skin cancer she’d had a few nasty sunburns, among them one or two that confined her to her bed in excruciating pain. My poor aunt, back then people didn’t know how dangerous the sun could be. I grew up hearing this story–that’s how my mom managed to get sunscreen on me–and, although I’ve told Sam and April the worst-case sunburn scenario, I want their skincare regimes to come from a proactive place, rather than one of fear.

So, I tell them that they only get one skin that they have to live with the rest of their lives. “Every day we get older,” I say. “But when we treat our bodies carefully we make sure that our body is happy with us and that we will always be happy with our bodies.”

My favourite sunscreen these days is Burt’s Bees Chemical-Free Sunscreen SPF 30. It’s effective, smells great, and best of all, organic! It’s generally around $20 a tube at the drugstore.