This is my first blog post. I'm not quite sure where this blog will lead, but my hope is all the little notes I'm constantly sending my friends and colleagues about how people around the world are powered by feel can find a larger audience here. I look forward to also learning with you about how you feel. If you're curious about me, you can learn more on my website www.poweredbyfeel.com and bit by bit here over the coming months.

So why feel? Because what I learned from hundreds of interviews with world class performers was that feel impacted their performances. They viewed feel as a skill, a skill they could improve. Haven't we always talked about the best of the best as having a feel or a touch? Once I started doing these interviews, I began hearing "feel" everywhere.

People used the word all the time -- unless you asked them to. Then somehow it became taboo or touchie-feelie. But given the freedom and safety to talk about what mattered to them, the conversation almost always included feel. Most of all what I realized was people who performed well often described how they "felt" doing something as their reason for doing what they did in the first place. And they performed well because of how it felt. I heard tough, hardened, high performing people actually use the word feel along with words like magic and beauty and wonder. They talked about their work, not their jobs. They were going somewhere... powered by feel.

They seemed to define work differently than most people did. They sought wellth, a personal combination of everything that was good for them, not wealth or material success that cost them their health. They created the things that made them wellthy, instead of spending their lives having then consuming. Twenty years later, this discussion still fascinates me. I find and hear new ways people describe feel and its connection to work and life. For years I have documented these quotes and interactions and experiences and sent them via email to my friends.

This blog is my attempt to "expand myself into the world" as musician James Taylor so aptly described his own musical journey. This blog is also my attempt to make the case for feel, to help remove the stigma of feel as a four letter word. I have come to believe that without a developed sense of feel, we struggle to find our work or to do it well leaving us to simply do jobs that as Studs Terkel once said are "too small for our spirits. "The journey, it seems for many people, begins in wonder. Their inner energy, energy we feel, seeking information in the form of a question. How? Why?

So I will end this entry at the beginning with a quote from astronaut Neil Armstrong. Enjoy.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.