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I created some agitation and franticness for myself this week. When I sat down to reflect on it, I realized I didn’t trust myself to keep up an effort without a massive motivating force, a massive scary terrorizing thing that you have to run from. In my earlier years, it was poverty – I didn’t…

So in an attempt to learn some skills I could use in service of my consulting venture (i.e. transforming organizational performance) I decided I would try coaching someone I knew. First session – great. Second session – not great. In fact, the feedback during the second session was that we spent a ton of time…

I realized this morning, as I was having a sort of frantic feeling about some of the endeavors that I’m doing, that I believed that I had to struggle against failure. Or struggle against my dreams not becoming real. But what you resist persists, psychologically speaking. If I am fighting against thinking about snacking, I…

What business are you in? What’s the thing that actually creates the value and captures the value? What’s your sales funnel? How do you get things moving through your system? Without knowing that, you might be doing a lot of work that’s besides the point.

You drop them on the ground as you struggle with your take out containers. Then you are sad, because your lemons are ruined. Sometimes you can’t fix something. That thing is over. It is not coming back. It cannot be salvaged. Obviously I’m not talking about lemons. But you can take comfort in the fact…

If you are having a bad time with something, you are probably doing it to yourself. I spent a week or two angsting about whether or not to drop a commitment I had made. And it was just a commitment to myself. So there I was, thinking “It has to mean something” if I quit…

After weeks and weeks of just “powering through” and/or “making the best of things”, my brain finally broke on Sunday. I just got to the point where I just didn’t want to “look on the bright side” or “choose better thoughts”. I just wanted it to not be my problem and I wanted to be…

I’ve been sick and tired. First, I got the flu about 4 weeks ago. That led to bronchitis, which has lingered and lingered. Then the stomach flu at Christmas. Then the bronchitis flared back up and I injured my rib cartilage coughing. And then yesterday morning my back muscles freaked out and I was stuck…

There are those times in between moments of great insight and transformation where you still have a lot of work to do. And that’s where I am. I’m moving forward, and I’m keeping everything going, but there’s no great struggle. It’s just… moving. And because there’s no big moments of victory, just a lot in…

One of the best things about Getting Things Done (David Allen’s book), is that you can manage just about any number of projects without worrying too much about how everything is going to get done. You just review weekly, figure out what project you want to prioritize, and then schedule your next actions. I’ve got…

Doing the reps of keeping commitments is giving me a platform to do more things. There is still some real hesitation in turning certain action items into commitments, however, because I know I will have to do them. In this way, I’m like the guy going to the gym who only does the easy exercises,…

In Straight Line Leadership, Dusan Djukich says a way to increase your effectiveness is to just stop stopping. As we go through this difficult time, of stomach flus, bronchitis, etc, and now the wife seems to have a mild case of pneumonia (she’s heading to urgent care this morning to find out, b/c it’s New…

We arrived at the party, and within 20 minutes, our eldest, who we thought already cleared the stomach virus 2 weeks ago, suddenly became very very nauseous. What was going to be the end of our exciting Christmas sick time turned into alternating between hanging out with her in the bathroom (amazingly, no puke –…

While I have at certain points felt like the commitments I’ve been making were burdensome, I am starting to notice something else. I am trusting myself more and more to do what I say I will do in the future. Which means when I make a plan to do something, I can see that I…

My 6-year old son just threw up again, after 2 days clear. Perhaps it’s the tail end? Or he got too stoked about food before his body was ready? Other again… So all this second-guessing and doubt keeps coming up with the coaching and the process. I finally found a big source of it. It…

So first, we had to cancel plans to host family for Christmas dinner, because 3 year old was throwing up 3 days before Christmas, and my extended family is not keen on getting sick. Which is understandable. So I made all of our fancy Christmas meal for Christmas Eve dinner, and we ate it on…

Okay, so all this stuff I’ve been reading and working on about thoughts and choosing how you want to be in any given situation. I still threw up about 2 liters on Christmas Eve. As it turns out (as I mentioned in a previous post about what it means to choose your identity), reality is…

I finally decided it was time to get my sleep balanced, and try to be more healthy with my bedtime habits. Toddler created phenomenal amounts of vomit at about 12:30pm, necessitating us both being up, cleaning up puke. The solids I had to get off the blanket clogged the tub drain (why was I using…

Missed yesterday. Oops. I bought The Three Laws of Performance because the synopsis of the book itself was so good. There is so much more in it than I expected. What’s especially interesting is how central a role language has in everything humans do (or don’t do), even the things in our subconscious. As a…

I thought I had pretty high integrity because I never committed to things I wasn’t 100% sure I could do. All of my commitments came with little disclaimers, which were basically to say “I can’t predict the future”. That’s fine, except it also means my commitments don’t count for much. I am not telling anyone…