When I feel like I am living right at the centre of a paradox or a pull in multiple directions, I’m usually in the right place.
For example, I noticed myself giving this apparently contradictory advice to clients recently:
“Keep your eye on the prize and be clear what game you’re playing. It’s easy to get distracted by relatively unimportant activities and outcomes at the expense of the most important things that deserve our attention…”
Continue reading “Big and Small Wins Matter”It’s Book Club week (join us here if you’re curious—no reading required, and this week’s theme is True Riches) and in preparation I was reading The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom.
One of his core ideas is this: “Everything comes from what you put first.” He recommends developing a “life razor”, explaining a razor as a principle that allows you to quickly remove unlikely explanations or avoid unnecessary steps to simplify decision making. (He provides a few examples, such as Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”)
Continue reading “Sharpening your Razor”One of the things that can make a transition difficult is when it wasn’t chosen—even more so when it follows a disappointment or perceived failure. It’s not hard to imagine that adjusting to the death of a loved one or an unexpected job loss is deeply challenging.
Which is why it can be surprising to people when a change that is voluntary, or at least comes as the result of a healthy evolution, is often very jarring too. When I was navigating the ‘emptying nest’ stage of our family (which lasted almost a decade for us—who knew??!), I remember saying to a friend, “I feel ridiculous struggling with this. It’s all good news! My kids are launching exactly as we all hoped they would—this is a happy story, not a tragic one. So why am I such a mess?”
Continue reading “Hard Good News”Last week I had a quick turnaround between arriving home from Costa Rica and departing again to deliver a keynote and two workshops on adaptability in Calgary, Alberta. I won’t bore you with the details, but I can assure you that a series of travel glitches put my own adaptability skills to the test. I arrived to deliver the keynote with 15 minutes to spare (rather than 24 hours ahead as originally scheduled), wearing an airline-issued men’s XL white T-shirt and working on two hours of sleep. I told the group that it’s reassuring to know the speaker has experience in that of which she speaks!
Continue reading “Adapt or Adopt?”I am just back from hosting my first international retreat in Costa Rica. It went [mostly] great until a snowstorm in Toronto wreaked havoc on our trip home and we spent a lot of time waiting. A two-hour departure delay, extra time in the air while they plowed the runway, two hours on the tarmac while they found us a gate, two hours awaiting our luggage…resulting in some of us crawling into bed at 4:30 a.m. and others resting on the airport carpet for a couple of hours before their next flight!
Continue reading “What are you waiting for?”
