It’s raining, gloomy and cold here in Indianapolis.  I don’t particularly feel snarky or sarcastic, so you know there must be something not quite right with me.

Business is good (but could always be better), the family is happy, and Josh (my older son) and I are ready to head to Quito, Ecuador and Lima, Peru where I’m giving a series of workshops and he is goin’ along for the ride.  It will be a wonderful trip, a repeat of nine years ago when he and I hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.

So, what has me in this “mood”?  As crazy as it sounds, a couple of books.

I think I have mentioned my love for reading science fiction, especially the “dean of sci-fi”, Robert Heinlein.  I read my first book of his, The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls before I was in first grade (I started to read very early) and have continued all of my life.  His views on family, parenting, schools, religion, and government have contributed  much to my thinking on those same subjects.

I’ve never been a “self-help” or a business book reader.  In fact other than Good To Great, which I was required to read at a company I once worked for, it’s a genre I stay away from.

Until now.

I’ve discovered an author, Matthew Kelly who has written a couple of books. The first one I read is all-the-buzz these days; The Dream Manager, which I would put in the “business-book” category, and one I am currently reading The Rhythm of Life which shows up in the “self-help” or the Christian Inspirational section of a bookstore.

Both books have me continuing a path I started on over three years ago after my mom passed away.  I ask questions about what I do and don’t do on a daily basis. I am, as Matthew Kelly would say, trying to do a better job of being a “better version of me”.  I wish I knew why his books are “speaking” to me right now, perhaps it is due to the last conversation I had with my dad a week before he died in September of last year. Perhaps because my younger son will be headed off to college in a year. Perhaps because I am forty-seven, relatively successful in business and life, and yet searching for something else.

I look at my business differently, especially in the area of employee engagement and retention.  The Dream Manager has me asking new questions of my clients and their associates.  I’ve taken some of the concepts and content in the Dream book and have incorporated them in some of my upcoming speeches (with approval, of course).  I am looking at incorporating many of the concepts into my new SCORE business (Student Coaching for Success), helping students in high school achieve their dreams.  It sounds like a lofty goal, but it is within reach of anyone, especially kids that don’t know that they can’t do anything they set their minds to.  That’s a learning for adults, and we learn it all too well.

So, I deal with the gloomy weather, I deal with the rain, I deal with the uncertainty.  I look forward to every day.

And that is a good thing.