Tag: habit
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Comfort Is Overrated
The warning signs at the edges of our comfort zone tell us to stop, go back, stay safe. Our comfort zone will even make up seemingly valid justifications for staying in the zone. Of course, to do something we’ve never done, we have to leave our comfort zone. But first we must catch our justifications. […]
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The Art of Telling Things as You Want Them To Be
We can spend our time telling (ourselves and others) stories how and why things are the way they are. Or we can spend our time telling ourselves (others will find out soon enough) stories about things working out as desired even though we’re not sure how they will. Which will get us closer to our…
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A New Year’s Dialogue
Stuff happens because we act. (Easy.) Different actions cause different stuff to happen. (Also easy.) Our thoughts (which we may notice variously as our ideas, beliefs, values, moods, emotions, perspectives, or attitudes) determine which actions we choose. (Makes sense.) Other people react to our thoughts and affect our results, too, even if we haven’t verbalized those thoughts.…
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It’s a Protection Scheme
Most of what we need, want, or desire can be accomplished by building a new habit. But our old habits come with a protection scheme. Any attempt to interrupt an old habit triggers its protection scheme and makes us feel bad or even unsafe. These schemes make replacing an old habit so uncomfortable that we…
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What To Do When You’re In The Quick-Fix Trap
We can get trapped thinking we need a quick fix. Maybe we want a long-standing problem (e.g. not enough sales) to go away (e.g. by hiring someone to take over sales). Or perhaps we hope our problems will go away when someone discovers, picks, or rescues us. But quick fixes rarely work. They miss what’s…
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What Got You Here Can’t Get You There
Each phase of a company’s growth demands a leadership approach that is significantly different from the prior phase. When we see a company struggle, we can bet that its leadership approach hasn’t shifted to what’s currently needed. Yet we, as leaders, resist changing our approach for the very fact that it has been successful so far! Deep within…
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Habits That No Longer Work
Many of our habits come from decisions we made as children. These decisions might include being shy or outgoing or being passive or forceful. They may also include notions of who we are and how the world is. These decisions made sense and made our young lives better, easier. But we often outgrow these habits.…
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Vigilant Buzz Raising
Wherever we continue to struggle with something, we will find a long history of our bad-feeling thinking about that something. This thinking will often be habitual; we would hardly notice we are thinking it. And we may even think it’s normal to have these bad-feeling thoughts about this issue. Bad feelings tell us we are…
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The Holy Grail of Getting It Done
The holy grail of getting it done–no matter what tools or approaches we use–is knowing that whatever we are working on now is the best possible, most compelling thing for us to be working on at the moment. C’est ça. Without this knowing, our work is much slower, distracted, and ineffective. With this knowing, we engage confidently…
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The Real Hard Work
I feel good. – James Brown Learning to feel good–to raise our buzz–is vitally important to becoming more successful. Many complain that feeling good is such hard work. But so is feeling bad. Both take energy, time, and attention. It’s just that, for most of us, feeling bad seems easier. That’s because we’ve learned to habitually choose…