Category: Uncategorized

In our theme of paying of our debts, I realized that we need to pay off the debt of learning how to deal with our kids at their most difficult.  Maybe they’re not more difficult kids than other people’s kids.  Maybe we’re just more difficult parents. And even if they’re the most difficult kids in…

“It’s too hard” – the common refrain of my son when asked to do almost anything that isn’t his preferred activity at the precise moment in time, even when those things are actual solutions to the problems he is whining about. It is difficult to remain patient in these times.  How can it be too…

I had the conversation I planned to have this week with my boss, in which I was pretty transparent about the uncertainty of my plans for the future. Telling your boss that you are not completely sure you plan to keep working at a place is a conversation I would not have had a year…

Life is hard and scary.  Bad things are going to happen.  Hard things are going to happen.  Something big, bad and scary is going to happen to you, guaranteed.  And once you start living your life in fear, it’s easy to find the next thing to be afraid of, and the next and the next,…

This was supposed to be a travel blog.  In fall of 2018, I got the urge to do something crazy.  I convinced husband that we should take our kids (then 4 and 1.5) to Europe.  We thought it might be our last chance for a long time, since European travel might be near impossible if…

Stephen Covey in the 7 Habits lists Habit 2 as “Begin with the end in mind”. This means keeping our end in mind when we set out to do something. It’s hard to do a particular thing if you don’t know what it is, but you will do something even if you don’t know what…

Last night 1 year old and 3 year old apparently conspired to keep us from sleeping.  To be fair, we helped the cause by staying up until 10:30 watching a movie.  I got maybe 3 hours of sleep last night, and I feel pretty exhausted.   But I took a shower!  And I cleaned my stove. …

If you are reading this blog, you likely do not know that its posts have been living in a Google Doc for almost a month. Why? Because rather than put up artificial barriers to the commitment of writing every day, we decided we would just start writing every day, and start putting the posts out…

I bought the thing I want to sell online, tried it out, and discovered that I hate using it.  So that’s an opportunity.  If I hate it, others probably do, and if I can make it just a tiny bit more pleasant to use, then that’s a problem solved, and an opportunity to market it…

So I realized yesterday that this blog probably feels like a lot of navel-gazing over the last week or so, as I haven’t been sharing anything I’ve been working on. And that’s because we’ve been blogging about our experience of what we’re doing. You might be tempted to think that all we’ve been doing is…

I’ve been working on a blog post, but 3 year old keeps jumping on me, and she just ran off with a basket of clean laundry.   I’m discouraged.  Writing is hard.  Writing while actively parently 4 children is…painful.  Literally.  3 year old just smacked me. Why does it matter if I take a shower?  Why…

“The gap is too big.  I can’t see the path.  I don’t see how it all fits together.  Maybe I am making a mistake.  I don’t really want it anyway.  It doesn’t matter if I do or I don’t.  The outcome isn’t important.  It’s fine if it doesn’t happen” These are some thoughts I pulled…

What does a good coach do? A lot of it is about noticing the subtext or the expression of the person they’re coaching.  Calling it out, shining a light. In an episode of “Beyond High Performance”, one of the coaches talks about their job of noticing, and shining a light on something their client is…

The last 24 hours have been illuminating.  I’ve been pausing throughout my day to reset and ask myself what is most important to me right now?  I’ve realized a few things. My days lack intention I run myself ragged bouncing from one thing to the next, racing to do the thing that appears most urgent,…

I had a conversation the other day with a friend about why we don’t do what we could do.   We are afraid to find out how much we can do. Why? A few things appear to me when I ask this question.   The first is similar to my lovely wife’s thoughts.  If you know what…

So what could I accomplish if I felt like 200%?  What could and therefore maybe should I expect from myself if I gave myself what I say I need? I think it’s time for an experiment.  For the next week, I’m going to be ruthlessly selfish (that’s what it feels like, anyway).  I’m going to…

If you asked me what is the most important thing to accomplish in a day, what makes me feel like a human, nay, like a superhuman, what one thing that, if checked off my list, makes me feel like countless other things are possible–I’d say, getting a shower in the morning.  And yet.  Most days…

This evening, I had some friends over, to sit around the fire and talk.  While in some sense, I don’t have this time if I’m going to be hustling and accomplishing all these huge goals, it was one of the major constraints of my vision.  To not neglect my friendships, or my wife, or my…

Since we committed to working on this goal, we’ve had to stop making excuses, and just face up to doing some very hard things.  And as we’ve done that, a lot of sludge has been coming out.  Insecurities, weaknesses, old wounds, lies we’ve told ourselves for so long that they have taken on the appearance…

So I don’t have any coaching for almost 3 weeks due to the holiday season.  What am I supposed to do with that? I’ll tell you what I’m doing.  I’m going through the same pre-coaching questions, looking at what seems good, making some commitments, and putting dates on them. I am recommitting to my vision,…