It’s hard not to think little or disparagingly of “leaders” who ruled and gained position not through merit but by accident of birth or through having little confidence (I read Russia installed Kim Il Sung over others more competent). Through no malevolence, you wish they could have known or even experienced some of the suffering they contributed to, even if they didn’t intentionally create it, let alone if they intentionally[…] Keep reading →

Devoting yourself to something means emotions can get attached. This happens as much in professional leadership as in personal lives. In professional environments you can choose to care deeply about your work or not. Entrepreneurs can devote themselves so much as to lose everything in a project. Athletes and teams that come in second often seem more crushed, despite being the second best in the world, than those who merely[…] Keep reading →

A client asked how to find your passion (in the context of relationships, as you’ll see). I wrote the following (slightly edited). ——————————– You don’t find some single latent passion within you, if only you can find it. You create it. What is passion? It’s powerful emotion. Emotion doesn’t come from out there. It comes from in here. How do you create something in here? Not by looking out there.[…] Keep reading →

If you like improving your life enough to read my stuff, you probably know about a study (probably one of many) that found that people who won the lottery and people who had accidents that left them in wheelchairs both returned to the same emotional levels a year later. What do you conclude from such results? How much can we misunderstand ourselves if winning the lottery doesn’t help out lives?[…] Keep reading →

Between my talks and seminars and the university courses I’ve taught, I get to speak in public a fair amount. We all know one of the main challenges of public speaking is keeping the audience engaged — a bigger one being how to recapture an audience’s attention if you lose it. Here’s a trick that works every time. Although doing it can challenge you more than you think you can[…] Keep reading →

Since posting on lessons leaders can learn from method acting, I’ve been thinking about parallels between acting and leadership — in particular how acting changed when Constantine Stanislovski led changing the art to expressive and internal from impressive and external. “Impressive and external” means the actor tried to impress the audience with outward showiness. “Expressive and internal” means the actor tries to find emotions inside and express them. You know[…] Keep reading →

Preface: I started writing this blog about how cutting personal costs (of any resource, including time, money, energy, attention, etc) improves your personal life. Rereading it I realized it overlapped so much with what leaders can do in business, I’ll tag it leadership too. Translating the post into business-speak I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader. You can probably do it on the fly. People who know me in[…] Keep reading →