Looking Back to Move Forward: What Childhood Talents Say About You Today

Many people struggle to identify what their unique gifts and strengths are, but our childhood provides a clue. Use this exercise to reflect on your childhood, and bring the unusual aptitudes you had as a kid into your adult life.

The Career Cube: Are You Ignoring Two-Thirds of What Matters?

Being satisfied in one's career requires alignment between our knowledge, our functional skills, and our interpersonal skills. The latter--interpersonal skills, or how we relate to others--is often ignored, and we suffer because of it.

The Tension Between Creativity and Money

Creative and artistic people often feel a tension between making what they want to make, and making money. We can resolve this tension by first asking ourselves, "who are we serving?"

The Opposite of Being in the Zone

Many of us seek a flow state in our work. However, we often also encounter an emotional state I call the “panic state,” where nothing we do seems to work. By relaxing into the sense of overwhelm, and introducing small successes, we can gradually overcome the panic state.

The Importance of Feedback

We all understand the importance of feedback but few of us stop to recognize our own emotional experience as we are in the process of receiving feedback. Moreover, the absence of feedback itself can be lonely and isolating.

Finding the Joy in Working (Part 3 of 3)

Once we identify what makes us happy and what stresses us out, we can start to bridge the gap between the two. Mindsets are a powerful tool to help us focus on the right things and make the decisions that serve us in the long run.

Finding the Joy in Working (Part 2 of 3)

Work is a source of stress for most people, but some find work to be a source of joy. This post dives into some of the sources of joy that people derive from their work. Which ones resonate for you?

Finding the Joy in Working (Part 1 of 3)

Work is stressful for most people, but it doesn't have to be. We can move from associating work with stress to associating it with joy by understanding the sources of both, and adopting a mindset that reinforces the work attitude we want to have.

A Mindset that Doesn’t Serve You: Luck is Something that Happens to Me

Even though bad things happen to everyone, we harm ourselves when we default to seeing ourselves as victims of circumstance. The victim mindset robs us of agency. When we recognize that we never can lose total agency, we transform ourselves from victims to powerful agents of change.

Discipline and Working for Yourself

A salaried job provides fear of punishment as a powerful motivator to work. A self-employed person lacks this top-down, fear-based motivator. In the absence of fear, a person can tap into pride, excitement and anger as alternative fuel sources for action.