Quit your job

We are all in love with the idea of walking in one day to our job and proclaiming “I quit”!  At last we will be free to finally pursue our real passion in life, our true hopes and dreams.  We won't have that nasty time consuming life sucking cubicle dwelling nightmare that you call your day job.  The reality is that Chase bank still wants your mortgage payment, the grocery store doesn’t take monopoly money yet, and your six-year-olds broken arm needs real x-rays and a real cast.  Quitter by Jon Acuff can help do just that, quit.

Addicted to insight

The concept of insight was fairly foreign to me a couple years ago.  It was not something I thought of at all.  I am not sure if I even really knew what it meant or if I would have even recognized it when I saw it.  That changed for me significantly about a year or so ago.  Without going into too much detail right now, in a nutshell, I realized I had a desire to take my life in a different direction professionally, however I had no idea where it was I wanted to go, and to some degree I still don’t.  Through a sometimes difficult and not even close to finished look at my life, I discovered the concept of insight and how important it can be. Really, what is insight?  Looking it up in a dictionary it says

Laws of Performance

How do we improve our performance in work and in life?  This question is at the backbone of a billion dollar industry.  We desperately want the answer to his question.  There are people in our lives that we think, "have it figured out", and we want what they have.  In Dave Logan's and Steve Zaffron's book, The Three Laws of Performance, I think they have found one of the keys to the treasure chest:

First Law of Performance:
How people perform correlates to how a situation occurs to them.

Second Law of Performance
How a situation occurs arises in language 

Third Law of Performance
Future-baed language transforms how a situation occurs to people 

Just reading those will not necessarily make sense to you, and there is enough there with just those three statements to teach a three day course.  I hope it sparks some interest in learning about these concepts and becoming aware to how we see things around us, the language we choose to use and the actions we take from that language can make a huge impact on our performance.  I highly suggest reading their book and see if it makes an impact on your performance at work and at home.

The cost of being right

Isn’t true that we always want to be “right” about everything?  I talked at length on the last post about the power fear has over us.  Well, the second part of the fear and what it furthers in our lives is our obsession with being right.  This mostly comes into our lives through our relationships, personally and professionally. You see we cannot turn off our minds. We have these things in her mind called automatic thoughts, which I will go into greater detail in another post but they're always there. Right when you wake up in the morning it starts, unfortunately that little voice is not typically telling you things like, “it's going to be a great day” or “you can accomplish anything you want today”. 

Fear

Why are we so afraid of things in our lives?  I don’t mean spiders or the dark, I mean fear of success, failure, looking bad in front of others, etc.  How many times have you said this to yourself, I can’t say anything, what will they think of me?  Or, they will think I am a joke. I know what you’re thinking right now, I’m not afraid of anything, I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, really?  Then why aren’t you dating a supermodel and flying around in your private jet?  Isn’t wealth and financial independence everyone's goal? I'm kind of making a joke about the supermodel girlfriend and the private jet, because happiness does not revolve around those kind of material things, but I think you get my point. The bottom line is a lot of us are not where we want to be in life and there is a gap or a huge canyon in between where we are and where we would like to be. The question still remains of how do we bridge that gap, how do we cross that Canyon? I think the main component that prevents us from getting where we want to be, true financial independence and deeply connected relationships, is fear.