The Certainty of Misery
Often called the "mother of family therapy," Virginia Satir (1916-1988) started her professional life as an educator after graduating from what is now the University of Wisconsin in 1936. While working as a public school teacher, Virginia developed an interest in...
Paths, Confidence, Conviction & Certainty
The topic of confidence comes up whenever I chat with a budding, prospective or even long-standing entrepreneur or a business owner. It’s unsurprising, but that in no way demeans its importance and impact on people. Or, more correctly, the importance and impact of the...
How to Predict the Wrong Future
Your Personal 'Star Chart' In the year of my birth, Robert McNamara became the US Secretary of Defense, and he remained in the post for several years until 1968. McNamara was obsessed with the idea of making decisions based ONLY on quantitative analysis, purely...
Finding Kansas
In the classic film, The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland’s character, Dorothy, finds herself and Toto, her pet dog, in a mysterious and often dangerous land, having been whipped away by a cyclone from her home in Kansas, USA. She discovers that the land is called ‘Oz’ and...
Feeling Trapped By Your Own Business?
There’s an old fable about an eagle that thought he was a chicken. When the eagle was very small, he fell from the safety of his nest. A chicken farmer found the eagle, brought him to the farm and raised him in a chicken coop among his many chickens. Sure enough, the...
Feeling a Little Lost? Start at the Very Beginning
In the October issue of Create Evolve Overcome Magazine, we opened up the discussion around Asking Better Questions and saw how this singular skill helped Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A's baseball team, effectively save his team and make the business of baseball...
How to Rig an Unfair Game
Life isn't fair. Get used to it! ~ Bill Gates Whatever you think about Gates, the Billionaire's statement about Life might, at first blush, sound a bit fatalistic, like you're a hostage to Fortune. But that's not really what the man meant. The focus of the statement,...
Do You Really Need A Bigger Boat?
In the gripping 1975 film Jaws (well, it was gripping if you were a teen in 1975 ), there’s a scene where Chief Brody, played by Roy Scheider, is rocked by the sheer size of the eponymous great white shark which is chasing the Orca, the boat he’s in, together with...
Do You Have A Plan
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll tells of a situation where Alice encounters the Cheshire Cat. It's a piece I use a lot to talk about ‘Strategic Direction’, or simply having a Plan to execute and a Place that it'll take you to, if you will. It also...
What Matters Most
Last month, we started working through our super-simple 3-Step process to help you Build a Joyful, Dependable Business around Being Brilliant at What You Do, so that you can get closer to What Matters Most. If you haven’t read the article, go back and do that now, as...