Positivity’s brilliant. That is until it becomes a substitute for action. There’s an entire industry built on selling you the idea that if you just think positive thoughts, visualise your goals, manifest your desires, and believe hard enough, the universe will provide. You’ll get the job, the relationship, the money, the life you want. All…
Everyone fails at some time in their lives and failure hurts, it undoubtedly leaves scars, mentally and emotionally. Every day of my working life I see people sitting opposite me telling me about something that has failed in their lives, their relationships, their body, their treatment, their marriage, their business, or something else in their…
Some people believe luck is a mystical force, a kind of invisible favour that gets distributed to the chosen few and withheld from everyone else. An explanation for why some people seem to have everything handed to them while you’re left grinding away with nothing to show for it. I understand the appeal of that…
It’s the 1% that makes all the difference. For some thirteen to fifteen hundred years, Japanese swordsmiths have forged iron sand and charcoal into tamahagane steel, crafting it into katanas (the really sharp swords the Samurai used). Even today, coke and iron ore combine in blast furnaces to produce steel. This alloy is stronger, harder,…
You’ve got it backwards. You think you need motivation before you can take action. That’s why you’re stuck. That’s why the project stays on your hard drive and never makes it into the world. That’s why you join gyms in January and stop going by February. That’s why you tell yourself you’ll start when you…
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…
Average isn’t good enough anymore. The Average Trap is where you end up when you try just enough. It’s a place you can hide from your potential, an excuse never to really stretch yourself. And maybe, if you’re honest, it’s also part of why you’ve never quite got what you really want. In a world…
You’re not going to finish what you don’t start. Sounds obvious, but most people live their entire lives never starting the things that actually matter. Here’s something less obvious. Once you start something, you’re significantly more likely to finish it. Not because you suddenly develop willpower or motivation or discipline, but because your brain doesn’t…
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…
There’s a simple equation that’s been used for years when working with top athletes, helping them achieve peak performance. Tim Gallwey first framed this as Performance = Potential − Interference in The Inner Game of Tennis, and John Whitmore built modern coaching practice on it in Coaching for Performance. It’s one of the most useful…