Hiya!

JENN WHITMER

creating positive culture with complex people

Jul 8, 2019

Can we get rid of the phrase “We had a fight?” when we’re talking about relationship disagreements and conflicts? Fight indicates severity and violence. Words like survival and self-defense come up when we’re talking fight. Black eyes and wounds result. Seriously, nobody wants it.🙅🏽‍♀️ Disagreement or conflict changes the view. Then words like negotiate, win-win, […]

Jul 5, 2019

Death arrested our family last week. As the reality of mortality does so well, the extraneous falls away. The distilled essence of what matters becomes clear. This dear one, who would lie in the road for me even before I married her nephew, was a spitfire of a woman. She fought hard and loved harder. […]

Jun 19, 2019

Here’s a little nugget for you, friends—we cannot live life without conflict. And each of you reading that sentence just reacted to the statement.  Some of you just looked for the exit to this article. (Stay with me, please! I promise, I’ll walk with you!) Others of you were ready for the action. Bring. It. […]

Jun 12, 2019

The tale as old as time: as long as there have been competing interests, there has been conflict. When the desires—neutral, evil, righteous, imperfect, or just—of a person or a group challenge those of another person or group, the result of that competition is a conflict.  Part one of this series connected our lack of […]

Jun 7, 2019

Plenty of ink has been spilled bemoaning the lack of civility in public discourse. Partisan fighting, discord, dehumanization, and just plain ugliness. The rancor is exhausting us culturally and damaging us relationally. And it’s just not fun. I’ve wondered and pondered and puzzled over the why-is-this and the how-did-we-get-here quite a bit over the last […]

May 23, 2019

Your slant is your perspective. Everyone has a perspective. Perspective is shaped by personality, motivations, experiences, physicality, attention, and more. We all have implicit bias which influences perspective. I experience the world as a short, white woman from the Midwest, as an enneagram 7 and ENxP who has a lot of travel and education, as […]

May 20, 2019

Why am I doing this? Do I want to this? What is the purpose? What do I want to achieve? What story am I telling myself? A reason always exists. If I acknowledge it or not, my motivation is a sail on my ship. Often, life throws my tiny vessel into a squall. In those […]

May 19, 2019

We all have crappy first drafts. Ideas are messy and unkempt. Getting them onto paper, formed into words is what Donald Miller calls “vision” and Peter Drucker calls the “zero draft.” Often the first finished draft is how writers discover what we actually think. The first draft captures the fleeting, vaporous thoughts that vanish without […]

May 19, 2019

I was afraid to say out loud, “I am a speaker and a writer.” What did that mean? Who was I to claim these titles? Once I said it out loud, now what did I do? All the doubts began crowding my bravery. There were plenty of negative voices in my head and some outside […]

May 17, 2019

I collect people. (Not like bobbleheads, but wouldn’t that be fun? A bobblehead collection of all my people!) From babies to grandparents, I love connecting with people. Unafraid to ask questions, people share their thoughts with me, and I share myself with others. I am forever amazed at the variety bubbling out of people, and […]

Check Out How We Can Work Together

Book me for your next event. A sparkling speaker your audience will remember and thank you for! Maybe you are looking to dig in for yourself, exploring coaching or online education.
Curious for more info?

Take me to the opTions!