Find Abundance Through Sharing
These days, scarcity is everywhere. As the media tell us daily, jobs are scarce, money is tight, credit is hard to get, and hope for speedy recovery is in short supply. On top of the financial pinch, many of us feel caught in a perpetual time crunch — there never seem to be enough hours in a day. Everywhere you look seems constrained, diminished. One great way to create a feeling of abundance is to share. Example: last weekend our family hosted our annual holiday party. Each year we invite friends and acquaintances from all aspects of our lives, I bake hundreds of cookies and other...
Read MoreThe Stop Doing List
If you’re like me, you have a To Do list — whether the high-tech version on your smart phone or the low-tech kind written on a Post-It, or perhaps just maintained in your head. But do you have a Stop Doing list? Maybe you should. I got this idea from Jim Collin’s illuminating book, Good to Great — Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Part of what makes good companies great is not being overly diversified. The great companies he studied pursued a single “Hedgehog Concept” (being the best at one thing rather than being an also-ran at a...
Read MoreThe Four Bs of Balance
When my pals and I were in our twenties, I don’t remember worrying much about finding balance in our lives. We worked hard, played hard, stayed up late and damn the consequences. But now as a mid-career professionals, many of us with children, I find we are all talking about it, and I also hear it from my clients. We know that imbalance is inherently unstable and unsustainable, but it can be hard to envision a different way. So what is balance, and how can we achieve it? Stand on one foot and you’ll see that balance is not static. You wobble and waver. Even if you manage to stand...
Read MoreHappiness vs. Pleasure
I have a confession to make: I didn’t actually feel very good at the gym on Saturday. My triathlon training session — especially my somewhat labored running — was not pleasant. It didn’t actually hurt, but it was hard work for me. I thought of the blog I had posted just the evening before and felt a fraud for having blithely promised that I would be happy at the gym the next day. Would a passer-by think I looked happy? Probably not. Red-faced, perhaps even grimly determined … yes. But happy? Really? The answer was yes. Because happiness and pleasure are not...
Read MoreThe Measure of a Mother
I’m about to do something very un-coach-like. I’m going to suggest that you lower your standards. As a coach, I always encourage my clients to dream big, to set ambitious goals and not be bounded by what seems reasonably achievable. Succeed or fail, you’re usually better off aiming high than shooting for the middle and not knowing what heights might have been possible. The risk – of failure or disappointment – is vastly outweighed by the benefit of stretching beyond our comfort zone. But what about when we set unachievable standards and then flog ourselves as unworthy?...
Read MoreGetting to 50/50
How many women and men in their 30s and 40s thought they were going to have an “equal partnership” marriage and then found that it was not as easy as they thought, especially once kids entered the picture? Finding balance in your marriage can be tricky, especially given the many subtle and not-so-subtle pressures on women to carry most of the burden on the home front and the concomitant pressure on their partners to provide. Getting to 50/50 How Working Couples Can Have It All by Sharing It All is a great resource for couples grappling with the daily reality of caring for...
Read More