If you’ve read this blog for more than a hot second, you know my involvement with the New York Junior League is incredibly important to me and has been for a long time.

What we do through the NYJL is several-pronged: we train our volunteers so that they may then go out and be effective with the many organizations within the community that we serve. Throughout the year, we have volunteer trainings to teach our members skills to help them be more effective — whether that’s leadership trainings to hone our interpersonal skills or trainings that teach us about the struggles facing some of the populations we serve.

We’ve always trained our leaders through chair trainings and trainings for our management council and board, but there’s a renewed focus on really giving us the skills we need to excel. Yesterday, I was invited to our Chair Training Retreat, as I’m chairing our Transfers Committee for the next two years. (I also did a Snapchat takeover for them, which was really fun.)

Yesterday, as part of the training, Rachel Rider, an exec/career coach came in to talk to us. Over the course of a nearly two-hour training, we learned a lot of valuable lessons about delegation and management, but one exercise in particular stuck out to me.

We did this exercise in the context of learning how to better engage with the women we are working with at the League, but it’s universal — I think it works both in professional settings as well as in relationships, both romantic and with friends.

In order to best understand others, said Rider, you need to know their context — both what makes them tick and what turns them off.

The Two Questions to Ask

1. What gives you energy in your day?

2. What depletes your energy in your day?

(Relationship/job, etc. can be substituted for day here.)

From that, she said — be curious. Ask open-ended questions.

For example, my answers to the questions:

1. Working out (pretend to be surprised), connecting with others, having alone time

2. People who seem unwilling to meet in the middle, inefficiency, large crowds

While even the top level of these questions felt a bit like therapy to me (I totally looked away from my questioner the way I do in any hard therapy session), you’re supposed to ask follow-up questions. A follow up question for my answers for #1 might be: Why does having alone time give you energy? My response would be because it gives me a chance to unwind/recharge my batteries.

Your turn: what GIVES you energy / what DEPLETES your energy?

My parents have been married for 38 years, yet, on every anniversary, my mom asks my dad for a “newlywed extension.”

Well, last Friday, my mom certainly got an extension on her lease on life.

She’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer back in November, and the past few months have been difficult for our family, as she fought tooth and nail for her own life. (Never doubt the will of an Italian woman from New Jersey.)

They’d declared her “free of disease” several months back when her surgery and chemo got everything, but she had one last CT scan last Friday, and by some miracle, the doctor called her back that same afternoon to tell her what we’ve all been waiting to hear — she’s officially in remission!!!! I cried happy tears into my beach blanket, and I felt bad that I wasn’t home to give my mom a big hug. (So I tried to do the next rational thing, send her a bottle of bubbly, and it’s apparently very very difficult to have bubbles same-day delivered in Bergen County.)

I’m not sure how I got so lucky — having such an awesome mom AND having her come out the other side of this major health scare. She’s not entirely out of the woods yet — she’s still having some chemo side effects — but she’s starting to return to her regular ways and has requested a “party in the city with all my New York friends.”

I don’t know what I did in life to earn me the amazing support I received through this either — from my boss being so understanding about time I took to see my mom, to you lovely readers who reached out with kind words (shouts to Shane, who even met up with me to tell me her mom’s story) to the lovely lady I pay to help me work through the tough stuff. But one friend has continually gone above and beyond — from throwing a surprise cookie swap, to talking to my mom about what she’d seen working at Sloan Kettering, to helping my mom out of bed after her surgery (she’s a PT) to just being there when I needed to laugh or cry — and I am a very lucky lady to count her as a friend.

My mom was treated at NewYork-Presbyterian, and we’re also incredibly lucky that my parents live so close to some of the best hospitals in the country, with doctors who are super up to date on all the latest studies. Cancer is such a scary word, and I hope we can find a cure for it. I’ve decided to raise money for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund for my next marathon to help women like my mom.

Because I love her so much, and I’m so happy to have her back. I told her that this whole process was like running a marathon (most life analogies can be compared to running, no?), and this badass little lady just crossed the finish line.