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...
Self Awareness
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...
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...
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!...
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...
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...
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,...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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?...
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?...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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....