I write a lot about leadership skills and how to improve your life through understanding how emotions work in general, how yours work in particular, and becoming aware of your emotions as well as everyone else’s. As a result of focusing on leadership, my community has become full of people with similar interests (you, perhaps?). They all tell me learning and practicing it improves their lives. We prefer having each[…] Keep reading →

How many times do we have to learn? Giving advice someone hasn’t asked for backfires. For that matter, giving advice to someone who asked for it tends to backfire. Why? Because when we give advice we imply we know the other person’s life better than they do. We appear to impose our values on them. We likely neglect that the other person is already doing something to improve their lives.[…] Keep reading →

Sometimes you recognize something you learned as a great life lesson. Sometimes what you thought was a great life lesson turns out not to be. How can you tell them apart? I’ve found that the more meaningful a life lesson, the more trivial it sounds when you explain it to someone else. For example, I went to North Korea and saw people living under different conditions than anyplace else, yet[…] Keep reading →

I learned something profoundly helpful watching a friend perform music on stage. You might find it obvious, but it helped me. The moment a musician makes a mistake while performing, it’s in the past. You can’t change it. The best thing you can do for a great performance is to keep playing regardless of what happened. That doesn’t mean you believe it never happened, but changing something now, like stopping[…] Keep reading →

This isn’t a diet or fitness blog, but your body is a major part of you. I don’t see how you can live the life you want without achieving the body you want. Conversely, if you don’t have the body you want, I suggest you aren’t living according to your values: your body tells you what to change to create the lifestyle you want. This post is about emotions like[…] Keep reading →

I remember learning a great life lesson in managing intense emotions from a time I felt some of the deepest anxiety of my life. I also finished the project on time and on budget in the process. Two weeks from the deadline on a two-year project, I was coming to realize I didn’t see how I could complete it. People I told I could deliver had put themselves out for[…] Keep reading →

You can’t visit the Great Wall of China without posting pictures from it! We went to the most crowded place and man, was it crowded. But it was amazing. Here are a few pictures to show the wall, the crowd, and my smiling face there.

Another perspective on truth and its subjectivity came from my musician friend. He described to me the concept of truth in music, which at first didn’t make sense to me. Since music doesn’t make verifiable or falsifiable statements it wasn’t obvious to me how it could be “true”? He described music being true by how it made you feel. He’s a composer and he described how when you write a[…] Keep reading →

Since writing about avoiding judgmental words like good, bad, right, wrong, evil, and so on, I’ve loosely kept track of times the words truth, reality, and their derivatives added meaning to a sentence. So far, not once. You might not consider “truth” and “reality” judgmental terms. I won’t try to convince you they are, but notice how people use them. They say things like “The truth is that we should[…] Keep reading →