Intentional Tuesdays

Hey Life Designers, I hope this finds you well. A word of warning about this week’s Intentional Tuesday. It’s going to be a tad self-serving. I can’t help myself. I’m super stoked to announce the release of my first book.

Never Too Late: Get Unstuck, Escape Mediocrity, and Design a Life You Love

This has been two years in the making and I’m really happy to be bringing this into the world right now. I thought I’d spend just a couple of minutes telling you what the book is about and what, I think, makes it different from most books that you may have come across.

To start, let me ask you a question…

Is there a part of your life where you know you want to make a change but you have not done anything to make that change happen? Perhaps you’ve been living with this suboptimal condition for a long time. Instead of working on the thing, you spend your energy working around it. You tell yourself, “it’s not that...

Are you an artist? What would change about your work if you thought of yourself as one? A few things, I suspect.

For one, that word, “work,” would take on an entirely different meaning. Most of us live with a distinct boundary between work and, well, life. Not so for the artist. There’s nothing to balance. It’s all one harmonious flow. It’s all life. 

Of course, you’ll hear artists talk about their “work,” but they are talking about something different. The artist isn’t talking about some “obligation” they have to fill for 40+ hours a week to put food on the table. To the artist, “work” refers to the moments when the artist is engaged in deeply intentional expression.

Can you feel the difference?

What else would change if you were an artist? The reason for work would be different. Work would still be necessary, but for very different reasons. Most of us have to work because someone has to pay the...

The Navy Seals have a motivational mantra … One Percent Better. Every day you should strive to be one percent better than you were yesterday. Part of me loves this idea, but part of me feels like it comes up a little short of what I need to make change in my life.

Let's start with the things I like about one percent. It feels achievable. It’s only one percent, after all. That’s nothing, right? Surely I can be a tiny bit better than I was yesterday. Let’s do this.

Second, it’s deceptively significant. Although one percent each day feels miniscule, do that for a whole year and you’ll be a person who is 37 times better than when you began. That’s 3,700 percent increase! That’s yuuuuuge!

Now, for the downside of one percent. My problem is that it’s too abstract, at least within the context of my life. What would a “me” that is 37 times better actually look like? How do I ensure, each and every day, that I’m...

Are you struggling or are you stuck? What’s the difference? There is one and it’s a big one. It’s the dating equivalent of “call me tonight” and “yea, sure, call me sometime.” You definitely don’t want to get the signals mixed up.

Let’s get into it.

Last week’s Intentional Tuesday discussed the idea that “negative” emotions, such as sadness and fear, are something we should embrace, not something we should avoid. Since uncomfortable feelings are just the inevitable byproduct of being a human, if we could all get more skillful at working with these types of feelings, the world would be a better place.

This begs a question…

What about the feeling of being “stuck”, which I talk about quite a bit around here. Isn’t that just another feeling that we should embrace as part of the natural ebbs and flows of life? Yes, and no. 

There’s nothing wrong with the feeling of being...

The other day a friend and respected colleague posed an interesting question to me … isn’t feeling “stuck” part of the normal change process and therefore not something that we should try to escape? 

I believe her question points to a larger problem … our unwillingness to honor the full range of feelings, emotions, and experiences that we all have through the course of our lives. We love the good stuff, but when bad stuff happens, we try to get away as quickly as possible. There are some serious flaws in this approach.

On a personal level, if we are unwilling to experience certain emotions and feelings, we are dooming ourselves to experience them all the time. It’s like when someone tells you not to think of a pink elephant and suddenly the pink elephant appears. Pain, suffering, sadness, anger, and fear are inevitable parts of life. Trying to eliminate the darker experiences will cause you to notice them even more. On top of that,...

We’ve all made bad decisions and, whether we believe it or not, we’ve made many-fold more good decisions over the course of our life. Why is it so hard to learn from those experiences and apply them to make us more effective right now?

I think the problem is that most of us don’t have an explicit process for analyzing our past decisions. We just hope the lessons are already running on our brains like some kind of an automatic software update. Is this really the best strategy?

Most of us know the experience of making the same mistakes that we know we’ve made in the past. And, from time to time, most of us struggle with important decisions, second-guessing ourselves and holding our decision-making to an impossibly high standard. We know logically that we’re good decision-makers, but in the moment, it certainly doesn’t feel that way.  We need a new strategy. 

The US military has a formalized strategy for using past experiences to accelerate...

I’m an aspiring writer. To this end, I have 3 jobs. Writing. Reading. Learning about writing. It's fascinating to me there is so much overlap between being writing well and living well.  Of course, I’m not the first to discover that writing is a metaphor for life.  But when you find yourself at the center of some cosmic Venn diagram, you go with it. 

To that end, I’m going to introduce a new subcategory to Intentional Tuesdays. TheWriteLife will be all about the exploration and application of the craft of writing and the implications on Life Design.

This week I want to share one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned from fiction writing that also has massive implications on Life Design. I hope you enjoy it. 

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Ask any fiction writer what scares them most about writing and chances are you’ll get some version of this...

“I worry that I’ll write my characters into a situation they can’t get out of.”...

Personal development guru Zig Ziglar invented a technique that would change sales forever. It's called, the obligating question. Here's how it works...

Imagine you are working at a new car dealership and you’ve spent the past hour with a potential customer and he's about to make a decision.

You ask, “So, Mr. Jones, would you like to go with this vehicle right here?” 

Immediately, you see the apprehension on his face and you know what’s coming next. You’ve been doing this for a while.

“Don't get me wrong. I like it. The price is pretty good. But I just can’t see myself buying a red car.”

Hot dog. It just so happens that you have the exact same car in blue sitting around the corner. When you tell Mr. Jones about it, he immediately counters with another objection.

“Well, blue is definitely more my color. But I really had my mind set on a hatchback, not a sedan.” 

This could go on forever. You...