A common idea in personal development circles is that “what you focus on expands.”  For instance, if you’re feeling sad, focusing your attention on your sadness will only make you sadder.  Instead, you need to distract yourself from your sadness by visualizing rainbows, playing with your cat, or doing something else to take your mind [...]

My focus used to be on helping people find fulfilling careers.  Like many of us, I assumed that, as soon as we find the “right” career — something we’re passionate about, that pays the bills, that gives us a flexible schedule, or has whatever else we’re looking for in a “dream job” — we’ll get [...]

I’ve just published a guest post at The Change Blog, “Getting Productive By ‘Getting Real,’” which is about how letting go of our need to create an image for the people we work with — whether we’re trying to look tough, likable, or something else — can actually help us get more done and find [...]

(This piece was inspired by one of the many heart-opening conversations I had with Robin in the comments to an earlier post.)
There’s a lot of advice out there about “how to be creative.”  On the surface, this sounds great — everybody wants to come up with useful and profitable ideas, right?  But when I look [...]

I used to believe that I shouldn’t sit down to write unless I had a compelling vision of what I’d say.  Unfortunately, this attitude was the reason why, for many years, I didn’t do any creative writing.  Sure, I wrote a lot, but only when somebody else (1) gave me a subject to write about [...]

I’ve published a post at The Change Blog called “How To Build a Longer Attention Span.”  It’s about how practicing holding your attention on an object, or on your breathing, as meditators often do, isn’t just helpful for getting centered as you meditate — it can also help you stay focused on a project at [...]

We hear a lot in business literature about how it’s important to have an “elevator pitch” — a prepared speech about our business that’s so concise we could deliver it to someone on a brief elevator ride.  We’re often told to memorize our elevator pitch and practice it in the mirror, making sure we look [...]

You may have heard the old story of Sisyphus — the man condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down and be forced to start over, for all eternity.
I think this story is a wonderful illustration of how human beings often suffer.  We’re convinced that, [...]

To help us find a compelling direction in life, self-development writers often tell us to ask ourselves “what we’d do if we couldn’t fail.”  For example, we might ask, what kind of book would we write if we knew that whatever we produced was destined to be a #1 bestseller?
I’ve taken to asking myself basically [...]

I’ve just published a guest post at The Change Blog called “Productivity and Owning Our Shadow.”  It’s about how we’ll often put off working on a project when making progress requires us to tap into part of ourselves we aren’t fully okay with — maybe the part that’s ambitious, sentimental, childlike, or something else.
I sometimes [...]