• Columnists

Laura Berger, Executive Coach, The Berdéo Group

COLUMN = EXECUTIVE COACHING

An executive advisor and founder of The Berdéo Group, Laura Berger has 15 years’ experience as a consultant advising leadership in the areas of global operations management and strategy, project and change management, solution development, and implementation. She is a confidant of CEOs and senior executives who consistently realize their potential as leaders to see their companies flourish.

Having worked with many Fortune 500 companies, her clients include leaders at JPMorgan Chase, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, General Motors, Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, McDonalds Corporation, American Hospital Association, Leo Burnett Worldwide, Starcom MediaVest, and Walt Disney World. She takes great pride in assisting captains of business to bring value and creativity to their organizations.

Laura is generous in spirit when sharing what and whom she knows. She helps clients to achieve clarity and weigh alternatives, while they see and own obstacles and opportunities from the outside looking inward. Her ease and zeal for building lasting relationships, acquaintances, and productive introductions between people is her personal trademark. She has stretched her own spirit and will to combine her passions with her professional pursuits, and she shows others how to live true to their core.

Laura exemplifies this commitment to the life path in a book she is co-writing with her husband, Glen Tibaldeo, to be released in the near future. The book chronicles the humorous side of the successes and challenges they experienced living in the remote jungles of Costa Rica.

For more information, visit www.berdeogroup.com.

Never never never never give up.”

– Winston Churchill

This is the age when magical technologies make more and more radically fun ideas plausible, even easy. You’re only limited by your creativity.”

– Martha Beck

There is little success where there is little laughter.”

– Andrew Carnegie

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.”

– Marcel Proust

To find what you seek in the road of life, leave no stone unturned.”

– Edward Bulwer Lytton

Many people prefer to play it safe when it comes to business matters. Are you willing to take risks in the pursuit of entrepreneurial success?”

– Steven Schussler

Treat the attainment of happiness in the same way an entrepreneur would approach building a business — with a vision, plan, goals, and a systematic approach.”

– Ted Leonsis

A diamond is a lump of coal that stuck with it.”

– Norwegian proverb

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

– Martin Luther King Jr.

If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.”

– Anna Quindlen

A man without a smiling face
 should not open a shop.”

– Chinese Proverb

If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.”

– Joseph Addison

You don’t love someone because of their looks or their clothes or their car. You love them because they sing a song only your heart can understand.”

– L.J. Smith

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

– Joseph Campbell

That which grows fast withers as rapidly; that which grows slowly endures.”

– J.G. Holland, novelist

Challenge is a dragon with a gift in its mouth. Tame the dragon and the gift is yours.”

– Noela Evans

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

– Charles Darwin

You may ask me for anything you like except time.”

– Napoleon

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

– Robert Frost

Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.”

– Benjamin Disraeli

Do one thing every day that scares you.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.”

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., U.S. Supreme Court justice

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.”

– Albert Einstein

By your stumbling the world is perfected.”

– Sri Aurobindo

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”

– JFK

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.”

– Henry David Thoreau

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

– Leonardo da Vinci

Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.”

– Leo Jozef Suenens

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.”

– Thomas Dunn

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.”

– President Calvin Coolidge

If you do not tell the truth about yourself
, you cannot tell it about other people.”

– Virginia Woolf

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.”

– Albert Einstein

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

– William Butler Yeats

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”

– Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

Women once had the goal of being Superwoman; I think most of us now simply strive to have a super day.”

– Author, Activist Lee Woodruff

Entrepreneurs willingly assume responsibility for the success or failure of a venture and are answerable for all its facets.”

– Victor Kiam

The world I believed in, back in my most innocent, uninformed, childish mind—is real.”

– Martha Beck

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

– Seneca

Your own words are the bricks and mortar
of the dreams you want to realize.
 The words you choose and their use establish the life you experience.”

– Sonia Croquette

I can’t go back to yesterday—because I was a different person then.”

– Lewis Carroll

The biggest flaw in our existing theory of capitalism lies in its misrepresentation of human nature.”

– Muhammad Yunus

The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of inkandescent terror.”

– T.S. Eliott

Traveling is one way of lengthening life, at least in appearance.”

– Benjamin Franklin

I was taught at a very young age that you can do whatever you want to, but you have to make it happen — not just talk about it.”

– Kathleen Jo Ryan

Our deepest wishes are whispers of our authentic selves. We must learn to respect them. We must learn to listen.”

– Sarah Ban Breathnach

I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.”

– Thomas Edison

Passion makes perfect.”

– Eugene Biro

A person who learns to juggle six balls will be more skilled than the person who never tries to juggle more than three.”

– Marilyn vos Savant

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.”

– Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

They who give have all things. They who withhold have nothing.”

– Hindu Proverb