What house will you choose?

Do you remember this scene in the first of the Harry Potter series?  It's Harry's first year at Hogwarts School of Magic and he has go through what's known as a sorting ceremony.

Putting on an old witches hat knows as the "Sorting Hat" is a long time rite of passage for Hogwarts students. The hat's job is to tell each new student which one of the school's 4 houses - Ravenclaw, Gryffindor, Slytherin or Hufflepuff -  they will become a member of, not just until they graduate, but for life. 

Harry sits nervously on a stool in front of the entire school and the sorting hat is placed on his head. It ruminates briefly and nearly decides to send him to his last choice of houses - Slytherin. Harry frantically thinks, "No! Please not there! anywhere but there!" Unexpectedly, the hat hears his thoughts, and tries to convince Harry, noting that Slytherin has produced many great Wizards. Harry remains firm in his resistance and finally, the hat says to Harry, "Alright, if that's your choice," and the gruff Sorting Hat calls out for all to hear: "Harry Potter....GRYFFINDOR!!!" and with that pronouncement, Harry is placed in the house of his choice.

Watching the scene for the first time, I made the assumption that young Harry had no choice.  I remember being surprised that the sorting hat took Harry's thoughts into consideration and ultimately let him choose. I'd made the erroneous assumption that Harry simply had to do what the hat said, that those were "the rules."  We do this a lot in life: assume and then act as if things have to be a certain way... when they don't.


Everyday, we tolerate relationships and circumstances that aren't right for us by stepping into the "I don't have a choice" trap.  We tolerate bad professors, crazy roommates, and all sorts of dysfunctional situations,  avoiding hard choices or acting as if we don't have one.

Sometimes it is hard to make choices, but the time you wait to make them you'll never get back, and the phrase, "I wish I'd done this sooner" has been said by many a person who finally summoned the courage to make a hard choice and move on.

This week, ask yourself: in what area of your life are you assuming that you have to take the orders of some version of a Sorting Hat?  What are your real choices? What are you afraid will happen if you make a choice?  Even if they are two (or more) unpleasant ones, you still owe it to yourself to weigh and explore options; doing that alone, will make you feel more empowered in your life, rather than trapped or paralyzed by some set of circumstances you assume are intractable. 

When you dare to choose, you take the wheel, the reins, the helm, you take over what's happening in your life and start going where YOU want to go. A habit of delaying or not making choices may result in you being in a house you don't want to be in, possibly for a very long time, even for life.

This week, talk back to the Sorting Hat and make your choice.

Courtney Kirschbaum

Founder, Her Next Move

Don't go it alone. Join a master mind group

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. This axiom suggests that leadership is fraught with hard decisions that weigh heavily on the conscious of the leader. Leadership often does present difficult choices, which is why Kings have their courts, presidents have a cabinet and arguably, why Jesus had 12 apostles.  

Great leaders surround themselves with experts, supporters, counselors, yet so often in our individual careers, we labor alone making our road unnecessarily harder and longer. 

Great leaders become our heroes.  From Nelson Mandela, MartinLuther King Jr. or Wayne Gretzky to Mother Theresa, whoever you classify as a hero, it’s likely that you view that person above and apart.  Our culture has an appetite for hero worship. But this solitary view of heroes is often misleading; yet, we carry this solitary perspective into the management of our careers and make one of the most time-consuming inefficient choices we can make, which is to work in isolation. 

Surrounding yourself with a team, cabinet or support group provides you with structure that underpins leadership and growth. It gives you access to insight and wisdom almost impossible to procure alone. It’s the reason pilots have co-pilots, golfers have caddies and the President has his advisors.  When the stakes are high, risk is mitigated by bringing more minds to bear. The best hospitals have weekly meetings where doctors share the details of their cases to glean the experience, perspective, and intelligence of others. In this scenario, people’s Iives depend on the doctor leveraging every resource they can access.  Your life and career (or at least the quality of it) depends on you finding a group who want your “patient” to make it and will contribute to that end.


This paradigm of isolation is outdated and costs inestimable time and money. The "suffer in silence" code and  “figure it out on your own” rule costs everyone knowledge, experience and progress. Another driver for “John Wayne-ing” it was that unlike in college where the entire class can get an “A”, in the office, the bonus pool is finite and the promotion slots are few and get fewer the higher you go, so in this environment, people are rarely keen to share their hard earned lessons, tips, trick, or shortcuts. The environment can be one of scarcity and intense competition for the things people value – status, money and power. While most of us are not positioned to single-handedly change the culture of the company or business we work in, we can change our own experience and surround ourselves with people who will support, counsel and believe in us.


American Philosopher and human development expert Jim Rohn posited that you are the composite of the 5 people you spend the most time with. And who you spend time with in your life is 100% your choice. You can make a tremendous impact on your life, experience and results by simply taking stock of the company you keep. 

So how does one get this support? How does one find people who will help them cure their virtual patient, review their  “great American novel” or give them the right phrasing to ask for raise? One of the best ways to get support toward your goals and dreams is to join a master mind group. One of the most successful businessmen of the 20^th century was W. Clement Stone. He was so poor growing up that he was selling newspapers on the south side of Chicago by age 6. By 1919, Stone built the Combined Insurance Company. By 1979, his company exceeded $1 billion in assets. He said the single biggest contributor to his success was participating in a master mind group. 

The term master mind was coined by Napoleon Hill in his book “Think and Grow Rich” in which he describes thirteen steps to wealth and happiness. He defined a Master Mind as “Coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people for the attainment of a definite purpose.” More practically, master mind groups offer a combination of support, brainstorming, education, and accountability in a group setting. A master mind group helps you and your group members achieve success through leveraging each other’s experience, knowledge, resources and contacts.

Members meet regularly and encourage and challenge each other to set important goals, and hold each other accountable for accomplishing them. To be effective the group requires commitment, confidentiality, willingness support each other with total honesty, respect and compassion. Mastermind group members act as expert counselors, devil’s advocates or even, occasionally a shoulder to cry on.

In master mind groups I’ve participated in, I’ve been given resources, access to training and learning that would have costs me thousands of dollars, support to break into new markets, help in scripting difficult conversations and most importantly, I’ve seen myself through the eyes of my peers, giving me the perspective and courage to break out of old ways of thinking and doing things that were holding me back. And I was able to do this in a safe environment where I knew I would not be judged and could share and ask for help on things that I could not have presented elsewhere.  I have observed members of the group experience the same breakthroughs and more.

You can find and join an established mastermind group - I've established my own and seen others on Meet Up or you can create your own. Some meet as often as once-weekly or once monthly, there are others that meet annually and spend several days working with and for each other. They are powerful, connected, quorums that have an incredible positive impact on the participants. Typically a group of  5-7 people meeting once every two weeks is best. The meeting lasts an hour and each person gets 8-10 minutes to present the issues, problem or challenge they want help with, they receive feedback, suggestions, resources, recommendations and agree to a challenging goal that they probably would not pursue if they weren't in the group. When the group reconvenes, each member is help accountable for the goal they set.

For more information on joining or starting a master mind group, contact me. 

Courtney Kirschbaum, 
Founder, Her Next Move
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What do you need to ask for?

Will you throw the ball for me?

Last year, my brother and his wife got a Black Labrador puppy - cutest thing you ever saw. They named him Jack and he grew up fast and found his purpose in life a lot easier than most people do. Jack's purpose in life is given away by the name of his breed Labrador Retriever. And that's what life is all about for Jack.

When I visit my brother and sister-in-law,  he walks up to me, grimy tennis ball in his mouth, asking to play and I can never resist him. He quickly drops it at my feet with a short bark as he jumps back to get a good view of which direction I'll be throwing, and I always throw for him, at least once and usually many more times.  I'll be in a dress and heels heading out for dinner and still I'll give him one good throw.  It would be against my principles not to acknowledge and respect Jack for his persistence.  We often don't ask for what we most want and if we do, we often aren't as persistent as we could be. Jack was born and bred to retrieve and he's not self-conscious at all; he's on a mission. So often, we don't persist in finding or pursuing what we were born to do. And it shows up most clearly in that we stop asking. We give up too soon.

Jack's persistence is what never fails. He returns over and over until I'm have to move on and when I do, Jack takes his ball and moves on too. He finds someone else. He never takes it personally. He doesn't sulk, he doesn't give up and stop asking people to throw the ball for him. To Jack, it's a data point without emotion, if he has cogent thoughts, I imagine they would amount to: "humph, Courtney's done throwing the ball, but I'll find someone else to throw it and I'll hit her up later ...Squirrel!"

Somewhere along the line, most of us learn to fear asking, we learn to fear rejection and we learn to tell ourselves all sorts of nonsense about what might happen if we asked:

"They'll say 'no'"
"They'll think I"m stupid, or greedy, or needy or _____ "fill in the blank.
"I'll look like a fool."

Or we simply just don't like the vulnerable, exposed feeling that sometimes comes with asking.

We let our pride get in the way and don't ask for more, time, money, help or love, whatever it is we need, and it costs us happiness, and comfort and often it costs us our dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, "you gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you stop and look fear in the face. You  are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'" Most of the things we need or want to ask for aren't "horrors", but we sometimes act as if they are.

The sooner you step out of your comfort zone and ask, the faster you'll get what you want. 

Take lesson from Jack and ask yourself these questions?

What do I want?
Who do I need to ask to get it?
Why aren't I asking?

What is is costing you not to ask?

Link to this great Get a Move On tool that will help you get to the heart of what you want to ask for and help you get into action asking for it.

Make your move .... ASK!

Courtney Kirschbaum
Founder, Her Next Move

If you think what you want in life is impossible, read this.

This week I was invited to speak at TEDx in Edmonton. Giving a TED talk has been a dream of mine since I saw Sir Ken Robinson's How Schools Kill Creativity over five years ago and I, like so many others, was hooked on TED.

Giving a TED talk was a fantasy I harbored from that point forward and it became bigger after seeing Elizabeth Gilbert's talk, "Your Elusive Creative Genius". Though this was something I really wanted, at the time, I didn't see how it could happen.

In February 2013, I was at a development seminar where we were told to get into groups of three and write and share our breakthrough goals.  I wrote down "Ted talk" but when it was my turn to share it, I copped out and said my goal was to "give a talk at Toastmasters." My triad consisted of two men, one of whom shocked me by saying  "Come on, that's not your real goal! What's your real goal?"  Somehow he saw through me and knew my lame offering was a shield for a much bigger dream.  I was busted, I knew it and I came clean and said, "My goal is to speak at TED in 2014." It seemed outrageous. I had not spoken in public in 20 years, but both men said almost in unison "Great, that's great!"  After saying it out loud, I felt lighter and somewhat  liberated.  I had not admitted it to myself, but when I said that goal out loud, I realized how important it was to me and how I had assumed it couldn't happen so, I'd fallen into this mindset of "Why put it out there?"  After it was "out there" it became possible for me. It became real. That may sound simple and unlikely, but it's the truth. I felt different and better. For me the universe shifted perceptively.

Once it's out there, the magic happens

After that exercise our group went on a break, Forrest was the name of the other man in our triad (and yes, he does a mean Forrest Gump impression). I had just met him that day. He came up to me smiling from ear to ear and said,  "Come with me 3 minutes, no questions asked." It was so funny and original, I couldn't say no. He walked fast out of the seminar room and I followed, curious and amused. We went to the lobby of the hotel and he said, "Wait here! I have to get my camera." At this point I'm really baffled at what this is all about. Within minutes he came back, nearly running now, and headed out the front door of the building.  I followed, by this time, nearly overwhelmed with curiosity.  We walked down the block in downtown Long Beach, CA and when we rounded the corner, I saw the Long Beach Convention Center, where TED flags were flying and TED banners and signs covered everything.  TED had arrived in town the night before for their annual convention. Forrest had known they were there when I confessed my goal. He looked at me and said "This is no coincidence, you are going to speak at TED!" He took several pictures of me in front of the TED signs. We were laughing and enjoying a really cool moment. 

The next day before the seminar started, Forrest found me and handed me an envelope, in it were the pictures he'd taken.  He'd had them printed out and on the top of one, he had added "Speaking Live June 19, 2014" - exactly a year away. This virtual stranger believed in me, believed I could do this and it transformed my belief about what was possible.  Part of me thought, "yikes! How will I do this in a year!?" Forest said, "Use these pictures to visualize it happening."  When I got home, I posted the picture where I could see it everyday. I put a small one in my car and carried one in my wallet. What did I have to lose?

All this happened because I put my dream and goal out there to two strangers. I told people what I wanted most and they supported me and helped.  I began telling this story in my talks, and people began coming up to me saying 'I know someone who is involved with a local TEDx. Let me introduce you." People began helping me get to my goal. After a keynote I gave earlier this year, someone who heard this story, sent me a TEDx application and the magic happened again. Two days ago, and almost a year to the date from when Forrest handed me that picture, I received my invitation to speak at TEDx Edmonton this June 7,  just over a week shy of the date my new friend Forrest put on the top of my picture.

What's your breakthrough goal? Share it with people and see what happens.

Download a free breakthrough goals worksheet here.

Courtney in Long Beach. 

Make your move.

Courtney Kirschbaum

Founder