Do you wish you were more motivated?
Do you ever wish you were more motivated? I hear this often from my clients, and I want to tell you how I coach them to get things done anyway.
The first question I’ll ask is: “If you were motivated, what would you be doing?”
I asked this last week to someone in a workshop I was leading for graduate students. “I’d be writing more consistently on my thesis,” they answered.
How to make hard things fun
Think about something meaningful you’ve accomplished in your life. It could be a professional success, an athletic win, or something in your personal life.
On a scale of 1–10, how much effort did that accomplishment require? Were there times when it wasn’t “fun”? Were there times when you wanted to give up?
I’m guessing your answer is “yes.”
How to Deal With ‘Coronabrain’
Your brain is like a dog. It can be trained. Most people just don’t know how.
Imagine a poorly trained dog. Whenever you take it for a walk, it pulls on its leash and barks at people. You haven’t established yourself as its leader, so it’s fearful and aggressive. You have no idea what it’s going to do next.
Now imagine a well-trained dog. It knows you’re in charge and follows your lead.
A definition of success we can all work with
Many people think, talk, and write about success all the time. But have you ever seen a precise definition?
It’s easy to say “success is relative,” and in a sense that’s true. We all want different things from life. But this isn’t a very useful insight. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a single way to define and measure success that we could each use in our personal and professional lives?
How to Think More Productively: A Cheat Sheet
When people learn that I’m a time management and productivity coach, they often grill me about the most effective tricks and tools. “What’s the best system? What apps or planner should I use? Got any hacks I can try?”
They’re asking the wrong questions.
Don’t get me wrong — systems like Bullet Journaling and Getting Things Done are excellent. But if you’re struggling to be productive, overhauling your process won’t help you much. To really achieve sustainable productivity, you must first learn to manage your thoughts.
Should you follow your passion when choosing a career?
“More than anything else, what I tell young people is that you’ve got to find that thing you’re passionate about. It might be literature, it might be medicine, it might be law, whatever it is that you want to take on. Find out what you’re passionate about and then really understand what your greatest aspirations are in achieving something that will be lasting in that area of your passion.”
This was the take-home message in a speech I attended my freshman year at Dartmouth College. The speaker was our incoming President, Jim Yong Kim, who would Dartmouth for three years before moving on to act as President of the World Bank for the next seven years.
I remember being inspired by the speech.
I challenge you to stop complaining
Last Tuesday I biked to my co-working space around 11:30am and realized, just as I sat down, that I had forgotten my lunch. Delicious leftovers sat uselessly in the fridge at home, and I had to be on a call in twenty minutes. (Cool story, right?)
When faced with this situation in the past, I would’ve spent at least a minute complaining to myself. The internal monologue might have sounded something like this:
The Advice That Changed How I Approach Every Job Interview
There’s nothing quite like being broke to put the pressure on you to nail an interview. I had just moved to California and had less than $500 in the bank — about half a month’s rent. My fledgling life-coaching business was beginning to take off, but income from my two clients definitely wasn’t enough to cover my bills. So I found myself looking for part-time jobs in a new city with few connections.
Eventually, I came across an opportunity to teach a first-year seminar at a university campus. I had never taught college students before, but I had my master’s degree and met the qualifications on paper. The position was everything I was looking for: It started immediately, was part-time, and paid well. As a bonus, it would be fun and interesting work.
How to get comfortable with being uncomfortable
A few weeks ago I climbed Freerider for the first time and I almost gave up. This is a 3,300' rock climb up the southwest face of Yosemite’s El Capitan. You may have heard of Alex Honnold climbing this route without ropes in a recent feature-length documentary called Free Solo.
Like everyone in history besides Alex, I climbed Freerider with the protection of ropes. The route is still a huge undertaking. The climbing is difficult (up to 5.13a), so many climbers aid this part of El Cap, standing in sling ladders to hoist themselves up the wall.