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Each of us aspires make ourselves proud.  And one of the central ways we accomplish that is by manifesting our values. By creating and living in a universe where our beliefs are successfully achieved.  The hard part is scaling this concept organizationally. Because when you have hundreds or even thousands of employees, possibly scattered across multiple offices, cities and even countries, your values can’t simply be words on a…

It’s true that each of us must figure out how we’d like to enforce our limits.  But the irony is, even boundaries need boundaries. Because if we get carried away building walls around ourselves, we end up in a janitor’s closet of our own making.  If we stubbornly draw too many lines around our lives, before we know it, the rising tides of alienation will carry us straight out…

Seligman, the pioneer of positive psychology, writes that our way of explaining events to ourselves determines how helpless we can become, or how energized we can become, when we encounter life’s everyday setbacks as well as its momentous defeats.  It’s certainly the smart mindset to have. Believing that the narrative isn’t done to us, rather, it’s something we choose, this is an essential part of being resilient.  The challenge,…

Here’s the arc of my social experiment.  It’s been nineteen years. Over six thousand days. And in the beginning of my adventure, wearing a nametag twenty four seven was just this quirky thing that I did.  It was pure. There was nothing behind it. No reason or motivation or strategy or objective.  But then, about two years into it, the nametag morphed into my business. And my brand. And my…

One way to work through our boundary issues is to invert the interaction.  To consider our internal experience, both physiologically and emotionally, when other people set limits with us.  For example, do we immediately become defensive or embarrassed when people tell us their boundaries? Or can we calmly let others draw lines in the sand without begrudging their integrity?  Does something inside our stomach get put on alert when…

Prechtel’s poetic book about grief and praise says that beauty is anything seen, felt, or realized that charms or delights the better part of us into wanting to live on, in order to see, feel and understand more without the scared part of us being in charge of what it wants the world to be.  Attesting, that beauty is more than simple aesthetic pleasure. True beauty binds us to…

In order to leap forward into new artistic possibilities, every creator must be willing to destroy what they’ve created.  And not physically, of course. Hendrix setting fire to his guitar was legendary and rebellious and punk rock and everything, but for most of us, it’s not exactly a scalable growth strategy.  That’s why we expand our definition of the word destroy.  To destroy is to lay waste. Meaning, stripping away all…

There’s nothing more powerful than saying no to people. For us and for them.  But if you struggle to believe that, perhaps a little reframing is in order to snap you out of your codependent tendencies.  Think of this way.  When we say no, we are not rejecting another person, we are simply refusing a request. When we say not, we are not criticizing another person, we are simply asking for…

Most of our automatic reactions to things are dead wrong.  Our first thoughts are usually childish reactions. Ancient habitual responses that take us on ride along the superhighway of emotional reactivity. And if we don’t pause and deepen our attention and intention, we’ll continue to the live out the same patterns.  Becker’s book on the birth and death of meaning once made the case that what we call the…

Once you finally come to terms with your workaholism, several things start to happen.  You liberate yourself from the crippling guilt of people pleasing and approval seeking. Instead of convincing yourself that you will take care of your own needs tomorrow, you can actually take time for yourself. Because you’re not too scared to stop. You slow down and let people back into your life.  Instead of forcing family and…