If someone told you that a piece you wrote is garbage and you’re a moron for writing it, could you object to their behavior?
When I work with people who are having trouble starting a project, this is often an area where they feel blocked.  They don’t trust their ability to protect themselves against mistreatment.  They [...]

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be holding a full-day workshop, which I’m calling the Inner Productivity Intensive, in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, June 12, 2010.
This will be an intimate, small-group affair, limited to ten people, where we’ll be deeply exploring the challenges each participant is facing in their work, and how mindfulness [...]

If you’re a blogger, or you do any other kind of writing, I’ll bet you’re familiar with the nagging worry that you “don’t have the right” to say what you’re saying.  Perhaps you’ve been writing a piece about happiness, for instance, and started wondering if it was okay for you to write it without a [...]

Recently, I told a distant relative about the career change I’d made, the book I just released, and a few other things I’ve been up to.  “I would have been too scared to do all that,” she said.  “You must be a pretty courageous person.”
This conversation got me thinking:  am I courageous?  If being courageous [...]

Most of the writing I do here is in service of my mission to help people find more peace and joy in their work.  If I do say so myself, I think I’ve written some valuable stuff over the two years this blog has been around, and I also get the sense that sometimes my relentless focus on my [...]

Do you think you need anxiety to get motivated at work?  Several people I talked to recently told me as much.  If they didn’t worry about finishing their project on time, what others might say about their work, and so on, they think they’d never get anything done.  They’d just kick back on the couch, grab [...]

As some of you know, I recently released a book called Inner Productivity: A Mindful Path to Efficiency and Enjoyment in Your Work.  While most productivity books are about techniques for rearranging your outer circumstances, like making to-do lists and organizing your inbox, Inner Productivity is about dealing with obstacles to getting work done that [...]

There’s a simple question I’ve found it useful to ask myself, whenever I find myself getting stressed or tense, which is:  “Am I really in danger right now?”  When I do this, most of the time, I quickly realize the answer is no, and my body relaxes again.
This exercise has helped me see how many situations in my [...]

 
One reason many of us are holding back from doing what we really want, in our work and elsewhere, is our desire to be “modest”—to avoid boasting, taking up too much space, and demanding too much attention.  Modesty is usually seen as a virtue—no one likes a bragger, and blessed are the meek, right?
But there’s [...]

When people talk about the benefits of being an entrepreneur, they usually speak in terms of getting to be their own boss and the financial rewards of owning a business.  I think these aspects of entrepreneurship are great, but my favorite thing about it is actually the opportunities it offers me to grow as a [...]