Video: Turn Your -But- into -And-
A quick message from an executive coach on shifting one frequently-used word can shift your entire life.
TRANSCRIPT: (more…)
VIDEO: Language Makes Us Human
A quick message on, “Why the words we choose matter so much to our success and satisfaction.”
TRANSCRIPT:
(more…)
022 But Reduction • DeskVideo • PODCAST
Free Subscription: RSS
A quick message from an executive coach on shifting one frequently used word can shift your entire life.
Just click here to listen now or subscribe on your device using Apple’s Tunes, Android, and other podcatchers to have this and all new episodes placed on your device as they become available.
Thanks to MusicOpen for providing public domain recordings of Beethoven.
TRANSCRIPT: (more…)
VIDEO: Owning Anger
A quick message from an executive coach on how to use your anger productively.
TRANSCRIPT: (more…)
What would you give up to truly give?
It is rare indeed that people give.
Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is the system of reality in what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself – that is to say, risking oneself.
If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.
–The Price of the Ticket:
Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985
by James Baldwin
Page 370
Shakespeare knew something about ambition, stress, & insomnia
HAMLET
Let me question more in particular: what have you,
my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune,
that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN
Prison, my lord!
HAMLET
Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ
Then is the world one.
HAMLET
A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ
We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET
Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ
Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too
narrow for your mind.
HAMLET
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.
GUILDENSTERN
Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
HAMLET
A dream itself is but a shadow.
ROSENCRANTZ
Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a
quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Act 2, Scene 1
by William Shakespeare
Embrace the Pain
To live is to suffer.
–The Buddha
But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, there must be a in meaning in suffering. … Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
— Viktor Emil Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning
One always finds one’s burden again. … The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
–Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus
Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness
People who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives have the same [inflammatory response] as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. …
Meaning was defined as an orientation to something bigger than the self.
Happiness was defined by feeling good. …
“Empty positive emotions are about as good for you for as adversity,” says Dr. Fredrickson. …
From the evidence of this study, it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” Jung’s wisdom certainly seems to apply to our bodies, if not also to our hearts and our minds.
—Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness
by Emily Esfahani Smith
The Atlantic Magazine
Why Ordinary People Do Evil Things
[Philosopher Hannah] Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners.
That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning [Adolf] Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.
–Professor Roger Berkowitz
Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’
New York Times
See also my blog post on the MCI Worldcom fraud, Integrity Ebbs by Inches
Gallwey: Coach Their World View
I have great respect for Dan Gallwey; he is a pioneer of coaching and really gets it. Heard him just yesterday on a video from the 70s or 80s, paraphrasing.
When an employee or competitor fails to deliver what you require, start by inquiring into what he sees as the requirement, what he saw in the performance. Growth comes from seeing the world differently, not from being criticized or corrected.
—Tim Gallwey in a conversation with
John Wooden, Red Auerbach,
George Allen, & Werner Erhard
Recent Comments