I work with a lot of founders and entrepreneurs, and almost all of them claim to have a problem with being overwhelmed. But the problem behind the problem is that they don’t understand what overwhelm really is, which is why it spirals out of control. The trap is confusing two separate things: overwhelm and overload. Overwhelm is a feeling. It’s the internal experience of the mind spinning, of trying to juggle and solve many thoughts all at once and all of it feels incredibly urgent and...
21 days ago • 2 min read
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.” — attributed to W. Edwards Deming What if failure isn’t a moral, motivational, or psychological problems? What if you’re stuck and acting like a broken record on your way towards a goal not because there’s something wrong with you, but because something else is off? What if the problem isn’t you–it’s your system? And if you’re stuck, it’s probably because you’re not even aware of having a system, or you don’t fully see the...
3 months ago • 4 min read
One of my clients just manifested a house. And by ‘manifest’, I don’t mean that she came into coaching wanting a house, put a picture on her vision board, and prayed to it every day until someone magically gifted her a house. It wasn't even on the menu for her to own a house. She didn’t think she could — it would be too much work, she couldn’t afford it, it was too big of a commitment and too complex. Not the kind of thing someone like her would do. As a part of our Wisdom Immersion, we...
3 months ago • 2 min read
As a coach I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur of Listening. Over the years I keep finding new depths of listening, new directions of listening, and new possibilities and views of reality through shifting and expanding my view of what listening really is and what it can be. So, I found myself surprised once again by hearing something profound in a recent mastermind call with Ankush Jain and several coaches in the AJC school. It’s still working its way into me. If you’ve been to my...
6 months ago • 3 min read
How do we create our lives, in a way that feels authentic, powerful, and in harmony with the world? I have many answers to that question, none of them true, but all of them potential useful so here’s a brief exploration: In the paradigm of Personal Empowerment we discover that we are creators, that we are responsible for our own fate and that instead of bemoaning what has been we can step forward and create what we want to be. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable...
8 months ago • 3 min read
When a client is struggling with something and they have no idea why, one way I like to play is to zoom out and approach it from two divergent perspectives: One perspective is Action:Are they actually doing the thing ?Are they putting in the necessary time and attention?Do they know what system they currently have in place, which is creating the results they’re getting?Are they getting into the medium and experimenting, to learn from experience not concept?Are they focusing on taking action,...
9 months ago • 1 min read
In a recent coaching session a client was blessing their ambitious goals with ‘inshallah’ (if Allah wills it). And ‘Deo volente’ (God willing) has been woven into my thinking through Stoicism. I love the power of being all in and going for something amazing, while simultaneously embracing whatever happens.Sometimes it works.Sometimes it falls apart.Sometimes it takes an unexpected turn, maybe just after you start or maybe just before you thought it would end. A doubtless and powerful focus,...
9 months ago • 1 min read
I was working with a client recently on creating time blocks for creating more focus in his work. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking idea, and we had talked Cal Newport’s Deep Work before, but he admitted that he hadn’t actually tried it yet. He was worried about being too rigid – i.e. too consistent, too structured — the scary story of self-discipline becoming a prison. Here’s the metaphor that I gave him: when you consciously create your routines (vs trying to mimic what someone else does or...
10 months ago • 2 min read
“Growth lies just outside your comfort zone.” There’s a lot of value in this maxim:It helps kick us out of stagnation and into action.It helps us question our habits, our playing small.It helps us pry our attention off of our past and realize that we can keep learning and growing. But… it also smuggles in an assumption that keeps you from truly flourishing. It gets you halfway there, while eroding your sense of aliveness along the way… Because the ‘comfort zone’ isn’t really about comfort!...
about 1 year ago • 2 min read