Archive | Personal Development

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If not me, who?

I regularly ask myself the question, “If not me, who?” It is my mantra when faced with any difficult decision or activity where the easy solution is to simply do nothing. We become adults at the age of eighteen, but “adulting” is an ongoing journey for many of us, well into our fifties (as in […]

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Trust and empowerment

In our fast-paced, demanding lives, being great at managing relationships is a skill that few people have truly mastered. So, what sets these relationship experts apart from the rest of us? I think that it all comes down to trust and empowerment.  So let’s explore the ins and outs of trust and empowerment in our […]

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Good people can be bad parents.

As an entrepreneur and lifelong learner, my curiosity often leads me to explore various aspects of human behavior and the patterns that shape our lives. In this piece, I’d like to share a personal story that touches on an often-overlooked issue of childhood emotional neglect (CEN) and the lasting impact it can have on our […]

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Meditation without all the nonsense

“What colour do you see?  I see blue” This was a question someone asked me once when I was introduced at a party as someone who meditates. And this is part of the problem with meditation and with encouraging more people to try it. Meditation should not be synonymous with spirituality. It is a technique […]

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Response flexibility

I am trying to improve my response flexibility. I came across this phrase last year and it has really stuck in my mind. Response flexibility is about creating a gap between a trigger and the response to that trigger – allowing you to make a conscious decision about who you respond. “Between stimulus and response […]

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mindfulness and meditation

On mindfulness and meditation

Despite existing for 2500 years or so, mindfulness has been gaining popularity in recent years. One of the reasons for this is the large body of evidence – both anecdotally and scientifically – of the benefits that practicing mindfulness can bring (the key word here is “practicing” by the way). I only discovered mindfulness about […]

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Status quo bias

I am fascinated by cognitive biases and heuristics which are part of the growing field of behavioral econonomics. I’ve written about a cognitive bias known as “The Dunning-Krueger effect” before, but today I’d like to discuss one that I see quite often at work – the “status quo bias”. The status quo bias occurs when […]

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Find progress in practice

We live in an instant gratification world. Many of the millennials that I know expect to have all the same “trappings of life” that their parents spent several decades to acquire.. now. We are bombarded with images of success, talent, and athleticism. We see musicians with no more natural ability than ourselves playing in front […]

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Mastery is Progress

A couple of my employees were invited to speak at the local university recently to discuss their jobs and their career choices with students. They asked me if I had any advice for them that they could share; they may have regretted that question after 45 minutes of my response. You see, there seems to […]

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