I was talking to a friend about how to change our view of the world, and found myself coming up with a theory of how mystical woo woo advice like “be the change you want to see” or “manifest what you desire” actually might be scientifically explainable. Disclaimer: I am not a neuroscientist, and have […]
Category: selfdesign
100 Hours
Show me your calendar, and I’ll show you what you value. Our most precious and irreplaceable resource is time. We have approximately 100 hours each week to spend after sleep and basic self-care. How we spend those 100 hours is an observable expression of our values and priorities that can often be at odds with […]
2021 Year in Review
2021 was quite a year. Let’s start this review post by listing off a few significant events in my priority areas of family and coaching: Our second child was born in the spring. She exhibits intense curiosity, with a desire to be where the action is – she has serious FOMO! Meanwhile, our first child […]
Spiritual debt
If we have a short-term cost to cover, we sometimes take on a loan to spread that cost over a longer period, and then make regular payments to pay off the monetary debt we owe. Engineering organizations have the concept of technical debt, where a feature is coded in a slipshod way to get it […]
Alignment to Reality
“Are you able to be with this exactly the way it is with no agenda to change it?” I learned this powerful question in Steve March’s Aletheia Coaching training, and it continues to knock my socks off as a tool to help me discover when I am not fully present and accepting of reality as […]
Alignment with Aspiration
Find out who you are, and do it on purpose. — Dolly Parton In my ongoing series on alignment, I’ve described how I think alignment can be more powerful than hierarchical power, and why it can be challenging to find alignment within oneself. In this post, I want to expand on finding a purpose for […]
Alignment to Self
Following up on my last post introducing the alignment model, I want to share how this model applies to personal development. When I first met Jerry Weinberg in person in 2009 at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference, he talked a lot about congruence, and I had no idea what he was talking about. Admittedly, that’s […]
2020 Year in Review
My priorities for 2020, as they have been for the last couple years, were to focus on my family, and to grow my coaching business. Having those priorities clear for myself made it easier to navigate the volatile year of 2020. Family came first, then my clients and coaching business, and everything else got dropped […]
Clarity and Focus
People occasionally ask me what I’ve learned in my first couple years as a leadership coach. The unspoken question is “What is the secret to being a better leader?” And while there is no secret per se, there is a formula I see consistently among people who have more impact: Clarity plus Focus. As context, […]
What You Do is Who You Are, by Ben Horowitz
Amazon link Ben Horowitz is best known at this point for being half of Andreessen Horowitz, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He wrote this book to answer the question: How do you as an organizational leader create and sustain the culture you want? As his book site summarizes, “To Horowitz, culture is how […]
