Ideas are free, execution is priceless.

Response flexibility is the habit that enables us put a temporal and mental space between stimulus and response, and between impulse and action. Siegel’s research showed that widening our window of tolerance is what broadens the span of arousal within which we can function adaptively. Think of it as the clinical version of the best mindfulness advice our parents and teachers ever gave us. Sweetheart, take a breath. Now,…

Who has let you down in the past month? Maybe it was a friend who bailed on the concert at the last minute. Or a coworker who didn’t meet your project deadline. Perhaps a public figure who accidentally said something offensive during a press conference. Or maybe the barista at the coffee shop put the wrong kind of milk in your drink. The list goes on and on. There…

Whyte, the poet master general, explained that his work is only a career looking back. Looking forward, it’s a frontier, he says. He just tries to keep an integrity and groundedness, while keeping his eyes on his voice dedicated towards the horizon. This sounds eerily familiar to me. My professional life resembles that trajectory as well. It’s like, one day you look around and realize that your current mix…

The most rewarding thing we can do is update our definition of humility. We accept that it’s not a strategy, program, goal, posture or technique. It’s not something we try to be. Nobody wakes up in the morning and just resolves to be humbler. We can’t slip on humility like a pair of wool socks. We can’t whip or will ourselves into a state of modesty like an ascetic…

There’s a difference between getting out of your comfort zone and jumping off a cliff. One is a useful exercise that involves healthy risk, stretches you in new directions and stimulates growth. The other is an exhausting, frustrating, wasteful effort that doesn’t play to your strengths. Drucker, in his bestselling book on managing yourself, wrote: it takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than to improve…