Nothing good comes from whining and complaining
I have a Facebook friend who once posted some insights into a challenging year she was coping with. She talked about how much time she had wasted focusing on events that happened outside her physical control. At the end of a fairly long note, she concluded that being a person who refused to complain about…
Change isn't difficult. What is difficult is doing things when you don't really want to
So it's a new year. The pressure to look optimistically and confidently ahead, resolve to change old ways, and embrace the new is palpable. Forget it. Most people really don't want to change, and some shouldn't even try. While I hate to be the Scrooge of New Year Present, I guarantee that human nature won't…
What you focus on increases your chance of success
Most of us have a new year resolution in mind, even if we won’t say it out loud. The trick is to make it stick. We want to accomplish something or make some improvement. Perhaps we want to lose weight, change jobs, stop consuming alcohol – or even find a life mate. One of the main…
Your skill as a decision-maker depends on your willingness to make a mistake
Decisions, decisions. We face them every day. Big ones, small ones and ones we’re all terrified of getting wrong. Can someone just give us the blueprint guiding us to the right decision every time? Sadly, there’s no fail-safe way to ensure that the decision you make will be the right one every time. So we should just…
Stop fixating on the most devastating critiques; focus instead on the ones that offer honest, objective and useful feedback
Is it just me, or do others find themselves overly fixating on criticism about their performance? I wasn't sure I had a thick enough skin after the first reviews came in when I began speaking professionally (and I was in law enforcement at the time). I prepared, practised delivery and made every effort to ensure…
Find your zone, connect to the world, tune into your purpose and then get specific
I once had the fabulous opportunity to chat with a group of executive administrative assistants on their final day of a national conference. They had spent a few days exploring what it takes to create positive energy for themselves and their organizations. When I met with them, they were elated, excited and maybe even a…
When we’re running from moment to moment, task to task, we lose perspective
Are we so afraid of spending time alone with our own thoughts that we find tasks to occupy every moment of our waking day? We must stop consuming our days in this unmitigated busyness. When we’re running from moment to moment, task to task, we lose perspective. Events and circumstances start to feel all-consuming. We…
And gain significant advantages on how you deal with people
Humans are genetically programmed to look for facial and behavioural cues and to quickly understand their meaning. We see someone gesture and automatically make a judgment about the intention of that gesture. And we've been doing this for a long time. As a species, we knew how to win friends and influence people – or…
Get what you want by stressing less about outcomes
Some of the biggest conflicts we face are about the frustration we feel when we don’t follow through and achieve what we’ve set our minds on. This causes us to become prickly in our relationships and take our irritation out on others. When I first started working in law enforcement, there were all kinds of…
Get rid of the negative thoughts and distractions and focus on what's important to you
The news is filled with folks complaining. From politics to economics and everything in between, people are focused on what we don’t have rather than what we do. It’s such a deeply-rooted problem that it makes me wonder if our focus is the primary culprit for all the unhappiness we perceive. When we imagine ourselves…