My eight year old daughter gets it. As she reads the posts of this blog, some of her comments not only surprise me but inspire new ways of communicating the principles of managing ourselves. The other evening she told me, “I like doing things before I get asked because I don’t like being asked to… Read More
Leveraging Our Future
As discussed the previous posts, Learning Our Leverage Points and Leveraging Our Interactions, we can make our lives easier if we know what force to apply when. We can also lighten our load so to speak as we can focus on applying effort where it’s needed instead of just working endlessly. The other leverage points… Read More
Leveraging Our Interactions
Our paradigms are the beliefs about how our world works and ultimately guides our actions. As Andrew Bernstein points out in The Myth of Stress, “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we believe them to be.” Thus, if we can change or alter our paradigm to better integrate into our… Read More
Learning Our Leverage Points
Growing ceaselessly until our death, we have to shed the old so we can grow anew. This idea gives credence to the zen story of emptying one’s cup. “A professor who focused on religious studies went to visit a Zen master. While the master quietly served tea, the professor talked about Zen and its relations… Read More
Why shouldn’t we grow continuously?
We are a set of interacting elements forming an integrated whole with relationships within ourselves and to other systems beyond ourselves. There is a structure and interconnectivity within our mental models that connect with our environment. The behavior we exhibit is unique to our personal system. We are open systems exchanging matter and energy with… Read More
Pinning is a fun distraction
Pinterest is one of the social media sites along with Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and Tumblr, I’m publicizing posts from this blog at. I’ve focused on Pinterest as it has all kinds of information and to say the least, I’ve been distracted away from my purpose of eventually publishing the manuscript of A Valued Life, Managing… Read More
Bullies are a Gift
“Junior high was actually sort of hard because I got dumped by this group of girls.” “They didn’t think I was cool or pretty enough, so they stopped talking to me.” A year into her career, Taylor Swift returned to perform int he place where earlier she’d been mocked (and bullied) -and saw the girls… Read More
We the System
A system is a set of connected things, parts or elements forming a complex whole. It can also be an organized theme or set of principles or processes according to which something is done. We are a system of mental, physiological, psychological and spiritual subsystems, elements and patterns. Likewise people around us are systems in… Read More
Our Inevitable Distractions
My daughter and I were discussing the blog the other evening and she asked, “Do you think it’s easy to get distracted from the things we really want to do?” “I don’t understand how it’s easy to get distracted when the things we get distracted with are things we want to do.” What an insightful… Read More
Unexpected Learning
I was cooking in the kitchen as I normally do on the weekends when I over heard my son saying to my wife, “fuss over me.” “Mom, fuss over me.” Being four years old his mind is pretty straight forward. I tend to be more of the disciplinarian in the family and my wife is… Read More
Business of You 