How To Keep On Keeping On When You’re Doing Everything You Can And Nothing’s Happening
Know the feeling? You’re doing all the right things – being consistent, following up with prospects, knocking 72 tasks off your to-do list every day. The pedal’s to the metal, and yet you don’t seem to be getting anywhere. To add insult to injury, it seems as if everyone — everyone! — you talk to is on fire, signing big deals, making partner or being featured in Fast Company. If you asked him, martial artist Bruce Lee would say: “There ...
Think Big, Start Small
You know how to eat an elephant, right? One bite at a time. When it comes to elephants, we get it – there’s no way we can eat one all at once. When it comes to our own goals however, we tend toward an all-or-nothing approach. (Which explains Blue Monday, a theory by psychologist Dr. Cliff Arnall, who came up with a mathematical formula determining that the third Monday of the year is statistically the saddest day of the year. Makes ...
WHAT COACHING DID FOR ONE UBER-ACHIEVER AND HOW IT INEVITABLY ACCELERATES RESULTS
I have a surgeon crush. His name is Atul Gawande and he’s pretty much the patron saint for high-achievers everywhere. In addition to being a practicing general and endocrine surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School, he’s a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur (a.k.a. “Genius”) award, and author of three New York Times best-selling books, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Complications and The Checklist Manifesto. Personal Best And yet, in his latest article, Coaching A Surgeon: What Makes Top Performers ...
How Do You Measure Up?
“What gets measured, gets managed.” Are you familiar with management guru Peter Drucker‘s famous quote? Here’s my version: measurement motivates. That is, the simple act of paying attention to something inevitably leads to improvement in those areas – and often without noticeable effort. I love this story that Tim Ferriss, author of The Four-Hour Workweek and himself a tracking fiend, tells about Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote. “Phil had tried diets and exercise but it was inconvenient, it took ...
[Flow Tip #13] Transport Yourself
In my ebook, Focused and In the Flow, I came up with 21 tips for getting into the flow. Here’s tip #13 and a Nike ad that shows you how it works: Not inspired or excited by your immediate environment? Why not imagine a different one. Children do it all the time, transforming the living room into a haunted castle, one minute, or a jungle filled with spies, in the next. Why tether yourself, in spirit, to the same old ...
What Is Flow Anyway?
You know that feeling when you’re so fully immersed in an activity — an engrossing conversation, say, or a riveting mystery novel, a challenging game of tennis — that you lose track of time, your self-consciousness falls away and life seems effortless? That’s being in the flow. It’s a phenomenon that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor and former chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology, has spent over 20 years researching and views as the key to enhancing the ...
No Excuses
Too old, too young, too stressed, not enough time, not enough space, not enough energy, too cold, too hot, too early, too late…we are incredibly resourceful in coming up with reasons why it’s never quite the right time to change the status quo. The fact is, there will always be some condition that is less than ideal. Watch this Nike ad with Matt Scott (one of the guest speakers in my recent Mental Toughness Telesummit), and then let me ask ...
Raising The Bar In 2010: Your Five-Point Checklist
Here we stand, on the threshold of a new decade: it’s a fresh start, a new beginning. This is it, your chance to really make a change, once and for all – it’s now or never. Yikes, talk about pressure. Sure, the beginning of a new year provides fresh inspiration and impetus for your goals. The question is, how do you sustain your motivation and stay on the continuous improvement track when daily life and familiar temptations rear their head ...
