There are three ways to change your behavior. You can have an epiphany. If you know the story of Byron Katie’s remarkable turn-around, you have an example of an epiphany. These are hard to engineer, so looking for one to show up can be a long and frustrating wait. You can change your context. When…
Category Archives: Brain science
The Planning Fallacy: Why You Don’t Know How Much You Can Do This Year
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. – Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid As you make your plans for 2011, do you feel that you didn’t do much, or enough, last year? Do you feel that you really want this year…
Worth Repeating – October posts from New Leaf News
I’ve dipped into the New Leaf News archives to share a few posts that still seem as fresh and relevant today as they did in Octobers past. In case you missed them the first time around, here they come again! I’m still using mind-mapping as a technique to organize and view more information than…
Want Greater Productivity? Walk This Way.
I’ve written before about ways to exercise when it seems hard to include exercise in your schedule. There’s another tool that I recently suggested to a client who wants to do a lot of exercise with no down-time. It’s a Steelcase desk called the Walkstation. The Walkstation’s basic structure is a treadmill that operates at…
Humans are natural procrastinators
A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times. – Sir John Dalberg-Acton Hold on, Sir John! Is it possible that delay serves a good purpose? And if, like our appendix, delay has outlived its usefulness, how can we work around it with…
Strengthen your success with a gratitude journal
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but also the parent of all the others. — Cicero For years I had kept a gratitude journal — a notebook in which I recorded things large and small in my business for which I felt grateful. I knew that great thinkers from all ages and traditions…
Kaizen: solve small problems
There are many instances when we must solve large problems because we failed to notice them when they were small. Tiny changes can add up for good and for ill. Consider these examples: The uncomfortable chair that causes a small back problem that flares into a major disability. The daily 100-calorie indulgence that adds an…
Announcing February's SF coaching book
by Margaret Lukens, New Leaf + Company LLC In October I requested recommendations for a book to share with the San Francisco coaches-and-friends book group. Several people, including authors, offered wonderful suggestions (see below for more good reads), making it excruciating to choose just one book. But choose we must, so here it is: If…
The power of gratitude
by Margaret Lukens, New Leaf + Company LLC Feeling dissatisfied is an entrepreneur’s occupational hazard. We make a lot of progress by noticing what’s wrong — what need is going unmet for our prospective clients, what opportunity is going begging, what improvement is possible? While noticing what’s not right leads us to opportunities, chronic dissatisfaction…
Following Through: What’s Wrong With Me?
by Margaret Lukens, New Leaf + Company LLC Tra dire al fare, c’e in mezzo il mare. (Between saying and doing lies the sea.) — Italian proverb You have set a goal, and it’s a good one. You know what steps you need to take, at least initially. Maybe you’ve taken one or two of…