Self Awareness

Grateful

Grateful

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. A time to be grateful for the bounty of harvest. A time to be grateful for everything in our lives. A time to reflect and remember. A time to celebrate. My Perspective Looking back at my year, here are a few things I’m...

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What is Your 20%

What is Your 20%

We have all likely heard of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. This rule states that for many situations roughly 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. My Perspective Thinking about this through the lens of our work, I believe there are at least two...

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Love the Cracks

Love the Cracks

Have you heard of Kintsugi? This is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum powder.  Instead of disguising the cracks, Kintsugi highlights and enhances them. A new, more beautiful piece of pottery with a...

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What’s the Vibe

What’s the Vibe

The other day, a comment on TV caught my attention. Lil Jon, the rapper, was talking about feng shui. Seeming out of character, my ears perked up. His next comment was “every home has a vibe”. Apparently, I’ve been out of the loop as his HGTV show now has two seasons!...

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Personal Planning Day

Personal Planning Day

Work is full of planning and goal setting. Annual business plans. Monthly plans to meet sales goals. Weekly planning meetings. Daily to-do lists that tie to those goals and plans. Yet, we don’t typically have that same type of planning for our career and our life...

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Lilies and Leeches

Lilies and Leeches

I listened to a recent interview with author, psychiatrist, and ADHD expert Dr. Ned Hallowell.    In this interview, he talked about the concept of lilies and leeches. Leeches are the things in your life that waste your time and attention. In contrast, the...

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Wellbeing Journey

Wellbeing Journey

Gallup has a simple metric to measure an individual’s wellbeing. There are two questions to evaluate your present and future life. The scale classifies people as suffering, struggling, or thriving based on the response. Based on the 2023 State of the Global Workplace,...

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What School Doesn’t Teach Us

What School Doesn’t Teach Us

Many articles have been written about soft skills and life skills that schools don’t teach. The skills can loosely be grouped into the categories below: Home Management – Personal finance, cooking, and cleaning Career as a Business – Job Hunting, Negotiating,...

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Our Mind Shifts with More Space

Our Mind Shifts with More Space

The goal is to move from overwork and overwhelm to a sense of calm. To find the space in life to do the things we want to do. In theory, this sounds great. Yet the work to get there is difficult and setbacks are all along the route. My Perspective The evolution away...

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Burnout or Something Else?

Burnout or Something Else?

Before reading this post, please know I do not take work-related burnout lightly.  This is an important topic to be discussed and for those with severe burnout please seek professional support. With that said, I do think we are overusing the term burnout for many...

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Wishing and Working

Wishing and Working

We’ve likely all heard the quote: “You get what you work for, not what you wish for.” - Howard A. Tullman The concept is simple – achieving your dreams takes work. Wishing is the easy part. We can close our eyes and imagine a future filled with achievements and...

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The Procrastination-Accountability Cycle

The Procrastination-Accountability Cycle

Procrastination and accountability are intertwined concepts that impact our productivity. They influence each other. Once the cycle starts, it can be difficult to break. The causal relationship often begins when there isn’t a sense of accountability. Because we lack...

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Speed Humps

Speed Humps

Yesterday, the city of Detroit installed their 10,000th speed hump. This news story caught my attention for two reasons: What is the difference between a speed hump and a speed bump? Could we intentionally create speed humps/bumps in our lives? What’s the Difference?...

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Conditions for Calm

Conditions for Calm

When you think about a calm weekday, what comes to mind? This is a day when you aren’t on vacation. It’s not the weekend. Just a normal day. A day without overwhelm. You aren’t “crazy busy”. The day is calm. Productive. Full. Fun. Calm. What does this day look like?...

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Ikigai – A Path to Purpose

Ikigai – A Path to Purpose

There is a Japanese structure that can be very helpful in our self-awareness journey - the Ikigai. An Ikigai brings together your passions, beliefs, values, and skills to create our personal reason for being. Once created, we can use our Ikigai to set visions for the...

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Evaluating Our Days via Strengths

Evaluating Our Days via Strengths

The CliftonStrengths framework divides the 34 strengths into four categories – Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. While we may or may not have strengths surface in these four areas, we all need to do these four activities in our...

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Default to Learning or Doing

Default to Learning or Doing

Over the last couple weeks, the concept of research mode vs. focus mode keeps crossing my path. In a meeting, this quote came up. “Output before Input” Dawn Dawn’s perspective was that she needs to produce some output before taking in more information.  Resisting...

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Spend Time to Save Time

Spend Time to Save Time

The last few weeks, process and systems have been on my mind.  At work, departments often have processes so that the approach to the work is consistent.  These processes should also make the work quicker over time because the process to do the task becomes familiar....

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Navigating Rabbit Holes

Navigating Rabbit Holes

Sometimes in work or life we find ourselves “down a rabbit hole”.  What we mean when using this metaphor is that we started on one project or piece of research, got sidetracked with some additional information and then started to explore other connections and related...

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Impacts on Time Perception

Impacts on Time Perception

Sometimes our perception of time speeds up and other times it slows down. There has been a lot of research on why this happens. Our emotions, priorities, and age all factor into the equation.    Here are a few examples of speeding and slowing time. When we...

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Rethinking Reading

Rethinking Reading

Today is National Read a Book Day. Books are educational. Offered in an abundance of topics and formats. Relatively inexpensive. Can be enjoyed by anyone of any age. Reading books improves our memory and concentration. Enhances our imagination. Stimulates our brains....

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