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One of my mentors spent his second career building and moderating leadership forums with executives from hundreds of different organizations.  Arthur’s philosophy is, life’s journey happens one pebble at a time. Growth is continuous improvement in incremental moments.  One of the pebbles that always stuck out for me was about the opportunity cost of a career.  Meaning, what we give up to pursue our dreams of professional achievement.  During…

One time after a surgical procedure, the nurse handed me the standard set of patient discharge instructions.  It’s a packet of educational sheets that provide information to manage my own care.  Once the anesthesia finally wore off, I sat down and flipped through the folder. One passage in particular caught my attention: Being a good patient does not mean being a silent one. If you have questions about the pain…

The question is not whether we should receive credit, but rather: What is receiving credit going to give us that we do not already have?  The warm feeling of being safe? The proud sensation that we were right? The soothing relief that we didn’t fail?  Nonsense.  Turns out, once we actually tease out our own list of what we think our precious credit will buy us, we slowly discover…

When my grandmother turned eighty, we decided to move her into a senior living facility.  It was a tough transition. Edie naturally had a lot of sadness and apprehension about the move, as any person would.  Can you imagine assimilating into a new community at that stage of life? You’re out of practice making friends, feeling shy about being the new kid, and coming into a strange environment where…

Some people are like cats.  They make you work for their affection.  You don’t have the right to just walk up and interact with them, they allow you to interact with them.  Because they don’t trust anything but their own eyes. And if you don’t wait for them to set the pace for contact, then they will consider your actions a threat display, run away, show disdain and spray…

On most days, it barely even occurs to me that I’m wearing a nametag.  It’s such a fixture at this point. Something that’s been such a part of me for so long, it doesn’t even stand out anymore.  Unless, of course, I find myself surrounded by a new group of people on a regular basis.  Like starting a new job or joining a new club or moving to a…

Surrendering is not the same thing as deserting.  Accepting our lack of control doesn’t diminish our passion for practicing. Quite the opposite, in fact. Because once we are willing to accept how not in control we actually are, we’re free.  Once we learn to trust the process and engage with the world without forcing it to bend to our will, we’ve won.  When my tech startup announced they were…

You don’t have to be one thing in life.  The goal is not to be yourself, but to be your many selves.  Even if those selves are not clean and likable and moral.  Hell, there are facets of my personality that are outright repulsive.  Like when my apathy and cynicism are at their peak and my faith in humanity disappears like a fart in the wind. Or when my…

Ellis, the pioneer of rational emotive behavior therapy, wrote a compelling book on overcoming resistance from patients in therapy.  One of his observations was that all humans have a sense of agency, a desire for control, or a sense of independence. And this basic and universal human motivation results in people feeling rewarded for reacting against the will and instructions of others.  Think about, for example, the last person…

We live in a culture of cortisol.  Everything is a manufactured emergency.  When psychologists recently found that our stress level was at the highest it’s been in ten years, nobody should have been surprised.  But contrary to popular conditioning, stress is not an achievement. It’s not a badge of honor, and it’s not something worth bragging about.  Truth is, we need to get better at planning, not get better…