In this second installment in my new “Be a Taker” series on navigating transition, I’m turning our attention to tools under the heading of “Take In.” It’s an invitation to pay attention to what you’re ‘ingesting’ as fuel for your forthcoming success.
It’s a good time to time to curate your focus, your crew, your creative energies and your expectations. Very practically, here’s what I’d suggest you try:
Continue reading “Take In”If Adam Grant were here, he’d tell us it’s better to be a giver than a taker, and I’d agree — except I’m going to spend the next five blog entries encouraging you to take. Stay tuned for five detailed prompts that will help you navigate transition and reimagine your next chapter, organizationally and/or personally.
The first is “take stock.” Be honest about where you find yourself.
Continue reading “Take Stock”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”
