Monthly Archives: September 2009

You Can Do Anything You Want

Did you catch the Myers-Briggs Facebook quiz going around? I’m a sucker for these sorts of personality tests. I think I’ve done every personality and aptitude test available to mankind… and all the silly cosmo quizes too. Not that I’m any wiser for it!
What do I want to be when I grow up?

Like many other new graduates, after finishing high school, I was confused about what I wanted to do with my life and I didn’t want to take on a whopping student loan doing something just for the sake of it (I shared a bit about this when Alex interviewed me on his blog, Someday Syndrome). So I took a year off, to explore and decide. I say “took a year off” because that’s how it’s referred to in my family (mostly because my dad didn’t know how to explain what I was doing to his mates at work!). Here’s what I did on my “year off:”

2 Simple Questions to Review and Redirect Your Life

Tomorrow we head back to Cape Town… for a few months. We’ve come to think of our lives in 6 to 9 month “phases” that correlate with a move to another continent. For years Andy and I have had very different change cycles (He’s definitely a Revolutionary and I’ve always been an Evolutionary), but these days we’re finding that we both feel comfortable making significant changes in our lives every 6 to 9 months or so. One of the things that makes it easier for us to regularly make big changes as well as the little tweaks that have kept us aligned with what we love, is the regular “review and redirect” process we use. So if you’d like to align your life more with what you love, or get better at making big changes, here’s how we do it, along with a bit of an insight into the big and small changes Andy and I are making right now.

How To Deal With Intimidating People With Grace And Style

I’m sure you’ve all had an experience, where you’re chatting with someone and they surprise you with a totally inappropriate question or comment designed to cut you down and make you feel small. Or the sort of experience where you’re in a room full of people and you realize that there are certain social rules that you’re being judged on, and people are looking down on you because you’re not meeting their social standards or following their social rules. And we’ve all encountered those dreaded power games and political manoeuvres going on in the workplace. Either these sorts of experiences are basically universal, or I attract people struggling with these dynamics, because just about everyone I’ve ever coached (including myself!) has felt frustrated and conflicted about how to deal with other people’s judgments, negativity, power games, aggression or blocking behavior at some point.

Call with Michael Watson: How to Be Resourceful in Difficult Times

Michael Watson covered a lot of ground in our call on “How to Be Resourceful in Difficult Times” last night. You’ll find some powerful, yet simple ideas, like, “You have all the resources you need,” the idea of “core questions” and how those frame your experience of life, and a few quick and easy NLP techniques that you can use to change the way you’re feeling.
Download the call recording

(Right click and select “save as” if you’d like to download it, or just click on the link to listen right now.)

Agile Living Lessons From a Sand Artist

I found this video of a sand art performance the other day. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time – the artwork that the artist creates, the vivid story she tells so silently and the way in which she creates it. Take a moment to watch it, and as you watch, imagine what it might be like to be this artist and to experience the act of creating in the way that she does it: