Category: Work/Life Balance
How to Successfully Navigate a Transition
Your life is one continuous series of transitions. Some of the transitions are more obvious than others: getting married, becoming a parent, changing employers, changing careers, selling a business, loss of a loved one, becoming an empty-nester, entering retirement from your career, just to name a few. How you have, and how you will, handle these transitions, and whether you merely cope or embrace them, will determine your level of happiness during the transition and afterward. Expecting, welcoming, and engaging with change is empowering. Successfully riding the waves of change goes best if you start with a vision. What do you want the transition and the subsequent period to look, sound, and feel like? No doubt reality will be a […]
How Much is Enough?
In the face of a rude person or a loud kid or a disruptive employee, have you ever turned with intensity and said, “Enough!” When you have become excessively clingy, competitive, busy or accumulating, have you ever barked that word to yourself? What will it take for you to tell yourself, “Enough, already”? How much is enough: of success, money, excitement, stuff? What drives your work and consumption goals? Do you know? What’s really important? What’s the cost of your pursuit of more? These are important questions. Asking the questions help you determine your values and help you course-correct on the path to getting what really matters to you. Setting aside limiting beliefs to find balance The answers to these […]
Why You Fear Change
Unhappiness if a great motivator for change. Yet change can be risky, frightening and difficult, ‘else more people would do it more often. The first step to successfully making change is noticing your fear and resistance. The second step is understanding your fear. Managing your fear of change What we deem “acceptable” behavior is what we have seen modeled by the role models who raised us when we were young. These behaviors lead to deeply ingrained beliefs that are acquired throughout childhood. The beliefs and behaviors you learned as a child are the foundation upon which you built your life as an adult. The thought of changing the very foundation upon which you live, regardless of how shaky this foundation […]
What You Believe Defines You
Your experiences shape your world view, how you perceive yourself and others. And, paradoxically, your perceptions and beliefs are the basis for your experiences, leading you to take action that you hope will benefit you in some way. To make things even more interesting, there are times when positive beliefs, and the actions you take because of them, can be limiting, leading to negative consequences and creating or reinforcing further limiting beliefs. While limiting beliefs can be about the ways in which you perceive others and the world around you, the most powerful ones are about how you perceive yourself. These might include: The thought of not being enough The thought you don’t have enough The belief that you have […]
The Four Ingredients of Personal Fulfillment
Having achieved a certain level of success, however you may define it, the path to real fulfillment can be a challenge – a sometimes frightening challenge. You may fear that there’s a risk that if you pursue fulfillment, you will have to give up success. At some level, you may be wondering if the move toward your true, authentic, heart-centered self will make you vulnerable or exposed. In my free eBook, The Business of Wanting More: The Secret to Fulfillment, I explore what it means to be fulfilled and how fulfillment can actually lead to success, but how focusing on success often leads us away from what is most important to us. You can download the book here: Get Your […]
Do You Need an Executive Coach?
If you possess the skills, knowledge, capacity, and experience to make it to a senior executive level, why would you need an executive coach? Most executives may need coaching because their elevation to the upper tier of the work force is based on their past, while staying there will be based on what they accomplish in the future. With an ever-changing workforce and increasingly diverse and challenging marketplace before them, how well does an executive’s past serve them? Just as a sports coach helps even the most talented athletes adapt and excel despite changing conditions on the field or court, a leadership coach can help executives make adjustments, continue to learn about themselves, add new skills, and remain productive over […]
Why You Don’t Want to be Fulfilled
Feeling fulfilled, achieving peace of mind and satisfaction with life, stems from the achievement of four universal needs that are at the core of what it means to be human: acceptance, connection, purpose, and service. Behind everything you think, every emotion you feel, and every action you take is your desire to meet one or more of these deep-seated needs. For example, the drive to succeed in your career may be fueled by the need to be accepted, or to have value. When this need is driving you, you unconsciously pursue career success at the expense of your health, your marriage, or even your moral convictions, because your latent belief system is at work; trying in vain to meet a […]
How to Change – And Make It Last
We’re well into the New Year and, by now, 4 out of 5 New Year’s resolutions are already starting to go by the wayside. That’s right, the research is clear that some 80% of people fail to follow through on their resolutions every year – within the first 30 days. While fully half of the population use the changing calendar to set new goals each year, they consistently fail to reach them. The #1 reason for this, according to PsychologyToday.com, is that the goals and expectations for changing tend to be unrealistic. Of course, fear of failure and simple procrastination also contribute to this cycle of defeat; and yet, if you approach the challenge of making lasting changes seriously, it […]