Boundaries are a necessary and healthy part of managing your life. They set the terms of engagement and help people understand how to treat you with respect, they allow you to shape your life to be more enjoyable, and they help keep disrespectful and hurtful people out of your life. Somewhere along the road a […]
Dealing with setbacks is an inevitability when you are working towards goals in your life. Progress is determined more by how you handle setbacks than how you go about things when they are easy. All change and growth requires you to overcome challenges. In order to be effective at growing and developing as a person […]
One of the things I have always struggled with is self-confidence. Now that I’m getting a handle on that I think it would be useful to write about the model I am using to develop it. Mental models are one of my favorite things to try to create. They take all the information you know […]
Neuroplasticity is a physical function of your brain that engages when you begin repeating a behavior. As the behavior is repeated the brain is programmed to physically grow the neural connections responsible for making that behavior occur. Have you ever picked up a guitar and been baffled by the people who seem to effortlessly hit […]
No one disputes that goals are an important part of succeeding at anything. It’s well-documented that setting goals helps people stay on track and succeed more often. However, I believe that goals can be dangerous to our long term growth and success if not used in an effective way. Happy New Year! I love using […]
For most of us, self-limiting beliefs are something we both consciously and unconsciously engage in. We have all doubted ourselves, assumed we would not be good enough, or decided that we would not get the opportunity we were hoping for. It’s part of being human to doubt yourself and manage your capability. But rarely do […]
Given enough time, there is literally no mammal on Earth that can outrun a human. Sure, most four-legged animals are faster than humans from a top speed perspective. But without competition, humans are THE best endurance runners on the planet. A human, with proper training, can out-distance any other animal. Horses, dogs, bears, kangaroos, none […]
I love mental models. They help explain how your brain processes information and makes choices. Recently I have been thinking a lot about how to explain change to people, and came up with a fairly simple model for why radical change is difficult and unreliable. It goes something like this: Your brain is a cost-reward […]
Fear drives a significant portion of our choices and actions in life. We avoid, we compensate, we hurt others because we are scared. Scared to face our insecurities, scared to take risks, scared to push ourselves. I lived a significant portion of my life through a lens of fear. I never took risks, I avoided […]
I’ve recently been reading “Grit” by Angela Duckworth. I’m just shy of a third of the way through the book now and so far it’s been great. Duckworth discusses her journey in researching what causes people to push themselves to succeed in various life arenas and walks the reader through her discoveries. What has stood […]
I’ve never done a book review outside of school before. I’m 100% winging this and hoping that some structure will rise from the chaos of my ramblings. For some background I typically read some sort of self development book for 30 minutes to an hour each night before bed. These range from philosophy to business/entrepreneurship […]
I recently wrote about my ideas surrounding the “Survival vs Comfort” Paradigm. As a quick refresher; most of the resistance to change we feel is the result of our brain’s believing we are putting ourselves in danger. This is an evolutionary system deep in our unconscious mind, and therefore it triggers automatically. By understanding that […]