Have you ever lashed out in anger and thought, “Wow, that is SO not me. Where did that come from? How did that happen?” As one of my readers, I know that those incidents are low for you. Really low. And yet, we humans get angry sometimes. 

I’m a huge believer in the good in people.

Certainly (almost) everyone has the capacity to lean towards doing good or not doing good. Yes, there are outliers, so I’m not talking sociopaths here. I’m talking about any of us, living our best lives and then something, or a series of somethings, hijacks our amygdala. 

The amygdala is an almond shaped group of neurons located in the temporal lobe of the brain that’s responsible for encoding/filtering memories and for processing emotions, mostly… FEAR!

You know the old fight-flight-freeze phenomenon? That’s triggered by whatever your amygdala has processed for you. Isn’t that nice of it?

How does the...

Sorry I’m late, let’s get started.

Sorry I, uh, have a little cough here. I’ve just gotten over a cold.

Hey, yeah, the reports didn’t get sent out to you, but uh, we can go over the material anyway.

No.

Thanks for your patience, there’s a lot to cover, let’s get started.

Period.

The other two statements don’t belong.

If you’re running the show, and you are – whether at home or in your department or as a solopreneur – it’s YOU right now. Show up.

When was the last time you heard someone being truly apologetic and you said to yourself, “Yeah, that’s the person I’m going to follow!”

We want leaders who can show up unapologetically unless they’ve made an egregious misstep and then we want the apology and correction. “I was wrong, this is the new direction we’re heading.” 

We want to know that the person in front of us believes...

My client recently gave me this quote from one of our sessions and I thought it was priceless: 

I spent more time thinking about doing something than the time it would take me to do it.

Can you relate? 

It’s funny, one of the first times I had to take strong disciplinary action with someone who worked for me (decades ago) was someone who was working on a presentation for the organization. He had been preparing for two weeks, then four, then six. 

He was getting ready to get ready and it caught him by surprise when I told him that I was disappointed with his ability to produce what was expected.

He was surprised because no one had ever told him they were disappointed in him. And yet, don’t we disappoint ourselves when we put things off? We decide that we don’t know enough yet and we explore just one more thing and one more thing.

We think about what we’re going to do.

It shows up on our to-do list.

And we put...

“I don’t dance.” It was an old story I had told myself to keep from feeling awkward. It was a wound from my high-school days (probably earlier) when I was teased about how ridiculous I looked. 

I’ve been on an amazing journey of letting go.

It’s been tough, because I grew up with the idea that “people were watching and what would they think, for goodness’ sake!”

I think most of us learned to “be good” because someone might judge us badly. And if we were judged badly, we wouldn’t fit in. We’d be ostracized. We’d be out in the cold, lonely and alone.

It’s not something we think about consciously. That’s the work: to make conscious the unconscious rules and scripts we’ve been living.

They’re all lies.

The lies of judgement, of being left out… It’s hard to reconcile that a lot of my life, I was hiding from being the authentic me. I mean, my...

There’s been a lot of drama in my life lately. An extraordinary amount. That doesn’t show up in how I engage with others, nor does it become a factor in how I discern what gets done and what doesn’t.

But my life didn’t used to be that way.

I used to rely on the drama. Life was overwhelming and if a friend or family member had a problem, then I – the good superhero martyr – would be the one to fix it.

And then, when I didn’t hit my goals, I’d have a perfectly good reason/excuse. And I’d demand that you understand. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve been dealing with…”

There were times I’d hold all that in, as if it were a hidden trump card to play at some time. All the better if someone else let out what kind of drama I was dealing with. Oh woe is me, my life is so hard.

The truth is two-fold:

1. You never really know what someone else is going through, so show some...

Success isn’t ever either/or, it’s always a balance and the balance is always shifting. Work/Life balance is a myth. And so is attaining success.

What most people don’t get is that the journey changes you. So when you work really hard and achieve the goals you set out to hit, sometimes you feel flat. Like, “what, that’s all there is?” 

That’s all there is because you’re more accomplished. So doing that thing that looked so hard a year or two ago is just part of who you are now.

Remember that when you’re starting that climb, taking on that new project, or pushing to reach some new goal.

Success is a DYNAMIC balance. It’s not static. It’s ever moving and, because you’re the one to give meaning to the things in your lives, the attainment of success is ever changing.

That’s a good thing.

You can look at what you’re really good at. Whether that’s...

This is a bit of trivia. Some people will get it right away. Some people will wonder who the heck I’m talking about. Some people will say that they didn’t know that was his last name.

Who is Mickey Goldmill?

That, my friends, was Rocky Balboa’s trainer. Played by Burgess Meredith in the first Rocky film, he was gritty, and he gave Rocky the Truth, even when it wasn’t easy.

We all need someone in our lives to encourage us, to tell us to get up when we’ve been knocked down, even if they can’t get into the ring with us to pull us back up. They tell us to stay down so that we don’t have to take another beating and then they tell us to get back to work so that we never get in that position again.

They celebrate the wins with us because they’ve seen the tough journey.

We look at what looks like success after success of people out there on social media and we compare ourselves to them. We think that getting banged...

Working with a mentor and coach can be tough. I guess it’s supposed to be. Each of us lives our lives to the best of our abilities and no one really wakes up any morning going, “gosh, I wonder how I can get further mired down in my own blind spot muck today.”

It’s why high performers don’t stop improving. They seek an outside perspective. They know there’s more for their lives and they know they can’t see it all. Great athletes need great coaches. Great entrepreneurs and leaders all have great coaches.

And even as a great coach – yep, I’m known as The Exponential Success Coach – I have three advisors I work with for different parts of my life and business. I know what I know. I know what I don’t know. And, most important, I don’t know what I don’t know.

And neither do you. You don’t know what you don’t know.  That’s a blind spot. We all have them.

My a**...

I love this topic so much. It’s what reawakens the vital spirit in each of us. When we step back into Purpose and realize we not only can, we should be pursuing our passions. (For those of you who have been following my work, you know that I very rarely choose to use the word “should.” It very much belongs here! You should pursue your passions!)

But… but… but… what about the responsibilities?

No one said to stop being responsible. The key here is to reawaken to listening to the things that are actually calling you. 

You Need To Listen To The Whispers

Your Passion Is Reflecting Your Purpose

What Is Calling To You – “…over here!”

Over here…!

You’re in your Purpose as a human when you follow the calling, the whisper of “over here.” It’s not just the “want” or clicking “add to cart” because something is on sale. It could be pursuing...

I get to do this. 

Who gets to?

I get to.

Do I have to?

No, I GET TO!

We all have things we’ve stepped into doing that we’re not sure we are capable of. The project is too big. The prospect of failure looms large. And the judgment and self-doubt creep in. 

You wake up and the first thought you have is, what do I have to do today?

It’s almost like you’ll be “caught” by someone for not doing the things that you put onto your own calendar. I have to do this, and that, and then this, and then that…

If you’ve ever tried to manage a family and do your work, you’ll get this. Kids can’t do for themselves yet, so you have to help them.

The project you agreed to won’t get done on its own, so you have to attend to it.

That’s where fear and anxiety creep in.

Did you keep track of all of the details? 

Are you good enough?

Are you smart...