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Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Just because it’s on your calendar doesn’t mean it has to stay there.
Become even more rigorous with your boundaries in this holiday season.
So that you can stay resourceful and resilient.
So that you can feel the joy.

How Do You Want It To Be
Planning is important.
We encourage our coaching clients and authors to do it. Getting clear on goals and objectives makes a huge difference. And raises the likelihood that you’ll achieve those goals and objectives.
But life is not one thing.
It’s the whole thing: Yes, your work, of course. But also your health, wellness, finances, relationships, spiritual life, and fun. (Don’t forget the fun.)
In our hustle culture, though, it’s easy to get tunnel-visioned. Caught up in the siren call of more, bigger, better, different, more. 2x. 10x.
Before you know it, you’ve lost your way.
So here’s a question that I know will help:

Sucked Into The Vortex
It’s December, and you’re being pulled into the vortex of time. The maelstrom is all around you! Can you feel it?
After Halloween, the year just seems to accelerate. After Thanksgiving, the days move forward at warp speed. The commitments and the demands and the lists and the expectations and the projects that need to be done – have to get done – before the end of the year seem to mount logarithmically. And then there are the card lists and the gift lists and the shopping and the school concerts and the holiday parties….
In many professions, there are the added pressures of pulling in the receivables and closing the deals by year’s end.
What to do?
Wrong question.
The question is what not to do.
The way out of the vortex – the only way – is the simplest and the hardest thing of all. The only way out is to say “no.”
Saying “no” is not news and it’s not rocket science. All of the leadership and success books will tell you that it is fundamental to your sanity and, paradoxically, a key to your productivity and goal achievement.
Jack Canfield in his book The Success Principles recommends creating a “stop-doing” or “don’t do” list. (My favorite list!)
I invited a colleague to a program I was hosting. Her response: “Thank you. But I ‘don’t do’ evening commitments.” (Those are pretty clear boundaries, I thought!)
But, why is saying “no” so hard?
Well, most of us are conditioned from very early on that “no” is not the “right” answer. As time goes on, you also begin to layer on your own assumptions – whether true or not – about what others expect of you.
Sometimes, I suspect, saying “yes” is just a habit. (I said yes to a commitment recently without even stopping to realize I would be out of the country during the time I’d committed!)
And yes, isn’t there a healthy dose of narcissistic self-importance that loves to believe that somehow your presence is essential or that you are the only one who can do something?
So as the vortex swirls, I’m working on saying “no” more often.
I’ve started by asking myself whether a project or an invitation is one that I “should” do or accept rather than one I “want” to do or accept. I’m working at eliminating the “shoulds.”
(Note to self: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.)
Saying no to the non-essential allows you to be more fully present in what is most important. By doing less, you can pay closer attention to what is essential. And as The Little Prince reminds us, “what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It takes time to see.
The Carmelite monk William McNamara writes, “We are not really practical, and we shall get nowhere, we shall never find life, life will escape us, unless we learn not to always be bustling about – unless we learn to be still, to let things happen around us, to wait, listen, receive, contemplate.”

“One final word on the subject of time,” McNamara says:
“I suggest that we stop doing half the work that presently consumes us. Then let us attend to the remaining half wholeheartedly, with contemplative vision and creative love. I stake the authenticity of our lives and the effectiveness of our work on this radical shift.”
I described the vortex to a colleague as a giant flushing toilet bowl.
Not a great place to end up.

About That Attitude
What you focus on expands.
When you focus on what is working well in your life, more of what’s working shows up. When you focus on opportunities, you see more opportunities. (When you focus on what’s problematic… you’ll definitely find a lot more of that!)

Focus sets your frame.
You know this to be true: Think of the last time you shopped for a car. You had your eye on a particular make and model. Maybe you even took it for a test drive. And then… you saw that car EVERYWHERE! Almost as if everyone on the planet had decided to own the very car you’d been thinking about. But, of course, the only thing that had changed was your focus.
When you set your focus on something, you are much more likely to see it.
Gratitude has that power. When you focus on what you are grateful for… more wonderful things pour into your life… more to be grateful for shows up.
So, as we enter into this holiday season, even with all of its stresses and strains, experiment with keeping a “gratitude journal:” Every day, write down three things that you are grateful for… they can be ordinary or extraordinary; anything at all; they can be the same three things as yesterday; or new things: your health, your family, your friends, a new client, a new business opportunity.
You will be astounded by the power of an “attitude of gratitude.”
And I am grateful for you.

Never Too Late
Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
No quote has troubled me more over the years than this one from Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars. Its clear message is that the passage of time eclipses the deepest yearnings of our hearts.
I think Saint-Exupery is wrong. I think we always yearn. I think our dreams always burn within us. The problem is that we don’t act.
My mentor, Galen Rowell, once wrote, “One of the most shocking realizations of adult life is that most of us are not fulfilling the closest-held dreams of our youth. Instead of pursuing dreams that were once integral parts of our personalities, we end up in one way or another fulfilling someone else’s idea about who and what we should be, usually at the expense of our creative urges.”
It is this realization that discourages, that breeds bitterness. It is this realization that dulls the spirit, that frustrates the soul.
But this realization that we are off course need not harden; it can be harnessed; it can propel us to fulfill what we know to be our heart’s deepest desire. With Wisdom, we can use it to drive us forward.
Time is a thief. But it need not steal those hopes and aspirations that form the core of who we were always meant to be. Our dreams define us. It is our essential Purpose to achieve them.
One of the most common themes I hear after talks I give on holding fast to dreams is this: I’m too old; it’s too late.
That’s bullshit.
Too Old, Too Late is a story told to mask fear, to hide insecurity, to explain resistance, and to excuse inaction.
History is replete with geniuses and giants in business, industry, art, entertainment, and athletics who were not “young” when they started out, whose talents and passions were ignited and came to fruition over the long arc of their lives. Here are but a few examples: Beverly Sills who eked out a singing career until age 40 when she became an operatic star; Colonel Sanders who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s; Charles Darwin who toiled with his research and didn’t publish his first book on evolution until age 50; David Oreck who didn’t get started in his now world-famous business until he was 40; Grandma Moses who painted in her 70s; Julia Child who did not appear on television until she was 50; Rodney Dangerfield who only finally made it as a comic in his 40s; Bahadur Sherchan who holds the record as the oldest man to climb Mt. Everest at age 77; and Sister Madonna Budner who still competes in Ironman triathlons at age 81.
There will always be other priorities, other responsibilities, and other things that “require” our attention. We are endlessly capable of explaining to ourselves why now is not the “right” time to listen to the still small voice that calls to us in the night, that echoes in the recesses of our hearts.
But what do we tell ourselves at the end of our lives?
How old will you be if you don’t start now?
Our resolves may flag. Our spirits may falter. But the clay of our lives does not harden. It is always ours to form.
Always.
Dreams deferred are dreams denied. Do what you’ve always dreamed of doing.
Do it now.

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