"The Career Engineer," Randy Siegel helps clients electrify their careers and transform their lives by becoming high voltage communicators™. Through training, coaching, speaking, and writing, he encourages people to fearlessly stand in their power by becoming the full expression of all they are.

Randy has conducted hundreds of presentations, workshops, and coaching sessions for corporations, professional associations, nonprofit organizations, and marketing firms coast to coast. His areas of expertise include presentation and communications skills training, executive positioning, personal mission statement development, career transition, and interviewing techniques.

He also provides consulting services in marketing, internal communications, team building, and management.

Randy and his Dalmatian, Lucy, live in Asheville, North Carolina.

For more information, contact: Randy@PowerHouse Communications.com

18 Beaverbrook Road
Asheville, NC 28804
Phone: (828) 236-0045
Fax: (828) 350-9162

Postcard from Asheville, N.C.

February's e-Newsletter hit a cord with a lot of you. I was surprised-and delighted-with the response it generated. Thank you for writing.

We have another free PowerHouse TeleSalon coming up on Tuesday, April 25th, at noon, EST. As many of you requested, it will be on listening. Please mark your calendars, and I'll send more information in April.

There's lots of good news here at PowerHouse Communications, but the most exciting is that I secured my first international engagement. I will be teaching MBA students at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in May for a week. I can't wait.

Finally, I have noticed an increase in the number of people taking me up on my offer of a free twenty-minute consultation (http://www.powerhousecommunications.com). If you have been considering career coaching, please call me to schedule your free consult. There's nothing to lose but twenty minutes, and I promise that the time will be well spent.

This month we'll examine The Power of Sex.

The Power of Sex

"Are you out of your mind?" my inner critic taunts. "What has possessed you? Randy, really, an article on sex?".

"Close your trap," I reply. As a communications coach, trainer, writer, and speaker, I cannot fully address communications and self-development without addressing sex.

Sex is on my mind (to be honest, it's often on my mind). I recently read a fascinating article on sex and love in the January-February issue of Psychology Today. In it, writer Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn observes, "Sex, and more importantly, intimacy, are grown-up skills, and most of us, metaphorically speaking, are still in junior high".

Sex is not engineering -- or as one of my friends calls it "performance sex" -- it's a language, and its vocabulary is everything that is happening in the relationship. If the relationship is not strong, chances are the sex isn't strong either.

In the article, sex therapist David Schnarch says sex is inherently based upon intimacy, and most of us really don't have a clue what real intimacy is all about. We look to our partners to make us feel good and validate us - to make us whole - but few relationships can survive that. And according to Schnarch, few should.

"Ultimately, you get through gridlock and get to a place of more honest self-disclosure, where the focus is on being known, rather than being validated," he explains.

Schnarch's quote hits home. I believe that above all else, we all want to be seen, heard, and understood for all we are. Spiritual guide Osho offers this beautiful metaphor: sex is the seed, love is the flower, and compassion is the fragrance.

Schnarch's belief about the interdependence of sex and intimacy is a far cry from the traditional focus on anxiety as the primary cause of sexual difficulty. "Often sexual disconnect has a similar refrain: I can't show you who I really am," he explains.

Perhaps nothing is more revealing than looking in our partner's eyes while engaged in a sex act or in the midst of an orgasm. That's the height of intimacy, according to Schnarch. But he is equally quick to point out that eye-to-eye sex is not for the weak of heart.

When sexuality and intimacy are in partnership, they can become a centerpiece for personal development. "Sexual difficulties are a kind of emotional Rorschach test that offers a glimpse into not just the dynamics of the relationship, but the continuing agenda of growing into a fully autonomous human being," Devita-Raeburn writes.

I concur. I believe our partners function as mirrors, reflecting unseen aspects of ourselves while supporting us to become whole. Schnarch's new way of looking at sex and intimacy is built on personal growth and possibilities; these elements, in my opinion, make sex even better.

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Copyright Randy Siegel 2006. All rights reserved.