Overthinking Keeps You Stuck—Action Sets You Free Many people feel paralyzed by fear. Fear is often connected to the future, about what can go wrong. By connecting to the present, we can free ourselves to take action, which melts the fear.
The Three Faces of Anger: Passion, Hate, and the Drive to Make a Difference (Part 2 of 2) Passion is a great emotion to follow in our careers--and passion is just transmuted anger. Connecting to that anger gives us an inexhaustible fuel source to become an agent of change in the world.
The Three Faces of Anger: Passion, Hate, and the Drive to Make a Difference (Part 1 of 2) Anger, like all emotions, is a source of information. This piece explores what anger is telling us about what is happening around us--violation of boundaries, injustice, or unmet expectations.
Looking Back to Move Forward: What Childhood Talents Say About You Today Many people struggle to identify what their unique gifts and strengths are, but our childhood provides a clue. Use this exercise to reflect on your childhood, and bring the unusual aptitudes you had as a kid into your adult life.
The Career Cube: Are You Ignoring Two-Thirds of What Matters? Being satisfied in one's career requires alignment between our knowledge, our functional skills, and our interpersonal skills. The latter--interpersonal skills, or how we relate to others--is often ignored, and we suffer because of it.
The Tension Between Creativity and Money Creative and artistic people often feel a tension between making what they want to make, and making money. We can resolve this tension by first asking ourselves, "who are we serving?"
The Opposite of Being in the Zone Many of us seek a flow state in our work. However, we often also encounter an emotional state I call the “panic state,” where nothing we do seems to work. By relaxing into the sense of overwhelm, and introducing small successes, we can gradually overcome the panic state.
The Importance of Feedback We all understand the importance of feedback but few of us stop to recognize our own emotional experience as we are in the process of receiving feedback. Moreover, the absence of feedback itself can be lonely and isolating.
Finding the Joy in Working (Part 3 of 3) Once we identify what makes us happy and what stresses us out, we can start to bridge the gap between the two. Mindsets are a powerful tool to help us focus on the right things and make the decisions that serve us in the long run.
Finding the Joy in Working (Part 2 of 3) Work is a source of stress for most people, but some find work to be a source of joy. This post dives into some of the sources of joy that people derive from their work. Which ones resonate for you?