When I started Something Wicked Evansville on Facebook, I did it in response to another group rejecting my work. They didn't reject the pieces based upon anything other than subject matter, and only because it was a subject that made them uncomfortable. I was banned from yet another group for telling the truth, so I started my own. In the beginning, my hope was that twenty or thirty people would join and would check in every now and then to see if I had written anything new. I never dreamed Something Wicked would become what we are today, but it is my prayer that we continue to grow.

I wanted to share some of the experiences I've had as a game show host for the show "Fast Lane" at Ferrari World, Abu Dhabi.

If you cruise YouTube, you will come across a similarly named YouTube channel called LordShadrach. Before anyone says anything, yes that is me. However, one will begin to ask, "LordShadrach, why are you now writing as opposed to making new videos? You have like what, over 900 subscribers?!"

Like many millennials, I have, over the years, found myself underpaid, underemployed, and looking for ways to supplement my income. But because of my work schedule, it's hard to take on another part time job. So, naturally, I've turned to the internet. And on the internet? I found beermoney. Beermoney is a reddit thread where people who look for micro jobs, gigs, and passive income come together to discuss ways to supplement income, with little-to-no effort or time commitment. It includes market survey sites, academic research participation, ad income from watching videos, beta testing, secret shopping, and online and receipt cash back programs, among other things. Users post referral links, advice, and their earnings for the month to indicate which sites are useful, and which are scams.

I'm trying to mix it up with my blog posts. While I like talking about dating and such, I don't always want to talk about it. The good news is that there is going to be lots to talk about with dating, I'm sure of it. So let's talk about money and splurging.

Confrontation. Tough talks. Crucial conversations (Grenny, Switzler, McMillan). The idea of having a tough conversation in any interpersonal context is enough to send someone in a stress sweat. But why? Well, as humans we resist what we don’t know. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. In fact, if your brain is doing that for you then kudos, your brain is doing a great job at keeping you alive. The point is, the idea of having these tough conversations can be so stressful because we feel ill-equipped to handle them well. Now, of course, even the most gifted of communicators can go into a tough meeting and speak with all the tips and tricks they have gathered, and the person receiving the message can still respond out of anger. The real kicker is that people are unpredictable. We do not know how someone will react to bad news, criticism and the like. But what if you could be given some tools to help prepare you for these conversations? What about conversations that didn’t start out heated, but you blinked and realized you have a coworker/employee that is furious and so are you? No worries, with the help of our author friends Joseph Grenny, Al Switzler and Ron McMillan (authors of Crucial Conversations), we can provide some tips and tricks for you to best navigate these situations.

My father suffered a severe spinal injury when I was only five years old. It would be almost three years before he would walk without the aid of special made shoes with big steel braces that came up to just below the knee and strapped to his leg. Even then, it wasn’t that he didn’t need them, he just refused to wear them any longer. He walked with a cane to steady himself and learned to get along very well. My father knew his limitations but never looked at himself as a cripple.

The moment you decide you are a writer, it's inevitable that you will find yourself paralyzed with fear and doubt, and unable to write. A friend of mine—who will stay anonymous—told me one day, and I'm sure I'm paraphrasing, "I wish the world wasn't like this, but sometimes to make it in this world, a girl has to have 'Big D Energy.'" Of course, she said something other than the letter "D." I will keep that slang terminology rated PG... for now. Confident in my belief in the afterlife, and in the existence of a power greater than myself, I made a decision about a year ago that whatever mystery was to come after death—whether we get one life and one chance, or, like some believe, 1,000 trips back to make it right—I was going to live like a cat in its ninth life. I didn't know the term "Big D Energy" at the time.

A week ago, I had an interesting encounter with a young and nervous girl who was headed for University. Her dilemma: “I don’t know what I want to do with my life.”

What are the actual costs and effects of stress in the workplace? How does stress really affect absences in the Canadian workforce, and what does that mean for the government?

Is it really fair to say, “I don’t trust that person”? Is it the total person that we choose to deny our trust? Or is it that we don’t trust certain behaviors the person displays? Said differently, “we have learned to actually TRUST that person to consistently behave in certain specific ways. Learning to TRUST people to “show up being themselves” requires much more of us as leaders than a blatant choice of “not trusting.” It requires that we assess all that we see, hear, and experience, and harvest the garden of others for behaviors that are useful for the whole of our teams, or those behaviors that will infect our team’s productivity and attitudes. In other words, THE TRUST FACTOR allows us to TRUST everyone to be exactly who they are!

Pull the thread, they said.