I used to worry about “overstaying my welcome” with people in my life — talking to them too much, or hanging out with them too often, and causing them to get bored or irritated with me.  Or maybe, if I spent too much time with them, they’d start wondering whether I had anyone else to [...]

Here’s something that doesn’t make much logical sense.
I imagine that, at some point in your life, you worked on a task that felt really “make or break” to you.  Maybe it was a project for an important client at work, or perhaps you were a student and preparing to take a test worth a big [...]

I usually don’t feel drawn to doing “list posts.”  Some of this is because of my unease about doing something “everyone else” seems to be doing.
So, as a personal growth exercise, I’m going to jump right in and do a list post!  I also think this is a pretty cool and valuable list of questions [...]

I’ve published a post over at The Change Blog, “Why Craving ‘Results’ Gets Us No Results,” about how the fear of “not getting results” in our work can limit how much we accomplish, and how we can let go of that fear.  I hope you enjoy it, and I’m looking forward to your feedback!

I’ve written before about how it’s helpful, when you’re facing writer’s block, to just sit with that sense of creative emptiness, and allow it to pass away on its own — rather than beating yourself up for being uncreative, or distracting yourself from the emptiness by playing Minesweeper.  When we learn to just let the [...]

Ready to get off the “time management treadmill”?
You’ve tried all the usual productivity advice:  make to-do lists, reorganize your e-mail, color-code your folders, and so on.  You’ve probably bought more than enough books, CDs, planners, special notebooks, and “apps” as well.
So why do you still find yourself procrastinating, getting distracted, feeling anxious, and not [...]

We hear a lot in personal development circles about how it’s important to “play to our strengths,” instead of wasting time trying to improve our “weak” areas.  I want to rethink that notion a bit in this post.
It’s probably true that we all have our natural aptitudes.  It’s hard to dispute, for example, that some [...]

“The strife is o’er,” as the hymn goes — I’m all done recording the Work Consciously Audio Course.  I’m writing up the “liner notes” right now — that’s what I like to call them, anyway, because it has me feel like I’m releasing a rock and roll album.
In the meantime, I’d like to share with you [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of speaking recently to groups of job-seeking professionals (one reason I’ve been MIA on the internet for two weeks), and predictably I tend to get questions about dealing with job interview anxiety.
But if I get the chance to explore the issue more deeply with people, I often find that they’re [...]

In the last post in this series, we talked about how developing the ability to say “no,” and protect our time, is important for making the kind of progress we want in our creative work.
In this post, I’ll discuss how it can help our creativity to set another kind of boundary — to stop blaming ourselves [...]