You can get stuck because what’s going on inside your head doesn’t match what’s actually happening in the real world. Let me show you what I mean. You believe you’re terrible at your job. The evidence? Your boss gave you some feedback that you didn’t really think was fair. Meanwhile, in reality, you’ve been promoted…
You’ve finished this course, which was designed to help you cope when you find yourself in a new situation. Well done, genuinely, for getting this far. I hope you’ve reflected after each article and made some small changes in your mindset, your approach, and your life. Most people don’t get this far. I told you…
Common sense is not so common at all. I see this every single day in my practice. People come in with problems that have obvious solutions, and they can’t see them. They’re overthinking, overcomplicating, and completely missing what’s staring them right in the face. Most of my job as a General Practitioner isn’t about diagnosing…
A few years ago, out of the blue, I received two written complaints about my practice. Generally, I have a complaint rate of about one in every four thousand consultations. It doesn’t seem like a large amount, and what’s important is that neither of these complaints were about misdiagnosis, medical error, or clinical mistakes. The…
I wrote an article way back in 2012 about the good habits you need to develop to build the inertia for change. All of these habits are common sense, you may think. We’ve already talked about common sense earlier in our courses, and the lack of it is not doing the obvious, even when it’s…
You know what you need to do. You’ve probably known for a while now. Maybe it’s the career change you keep talking about, the relationship you need to end, the health problem you’re ignoring, or the business you’ve been “planning” for three years. You’ve read the books, watched the videos, made the plans. You’ve got…
In the last lesson, we talked about habitual inertia and how we want to build good habits that trigger automatically, without thinking. This happens when our mind connects a trigger with a practised response or behaviour. If this habit or response is practised enough, it happens under the radar of our consciousness. You don’t think…
You’re looking to make the big move. The one decision that changes everything. The perfect plan that guarantees success. Here’s a fact: for most of us, it doesn’t exist. Here’s what does exist: chaos. Not the panic kind, not the mess kind. The mathematical kind. The kind that means small changes in what you do…
This lesson is about circles. Your Circle of Influence, your Circle of Concern, and your Circle of Competence. For those of you that recognise these concepts, you can probably see that I’ve cobbled them together from the work of Stephen Covey and from a term used by Warren Buffett. Despite being totally different concepts, I’m…
Moving away from chaos, we need to move on to its close friend: causality. Causality is simple in theory. It’s the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first. Press the button, the light turns on. Touch the fire,…