Peter Vajda reminds us all that dreaming is not a strategy for success—nor is hope or willpower. If dreaming and visioning alone were sufficient, everyone who ‘dreams big’ would realize their dreams. Few ever do. Try looking instead at your life choices and how being unconscious has brought you to a ‘do-nothing’ place—then take the requisite actions and choices that alone will create positive change.

If, like many people, you focus mostly on what you haven’t got, what you haven’t done, and how your life doesn’t match your hopes and dreams, those negatives can easily come to dominate your thinking. Not only will this depress you, it will block your way towards all the things you do want to achieve. Don’t waste energy looking for gaps and deficiencies. Sure, you have some. Everyone does. Try using that energy to celebrate and build on what you do well. It’ll give you a far better payback.

How many times have you regretted an impulsive action — but realized the error too late? How often have you found that, after jumping in like that, you maybe didn’t get the whole story or see the complete picture? Are you obsessed with the feeling that you need to do something, so you shut down collecting information in favor of acting on the little you already know — or think you do. Peter Vajda has some important questions to ask anyone with a knee-jerk, reactive response to engage in some way, rather than take enough time to listen first.

Why do some people constantly put things off? Most often, something is operating “underneath” their procrastination — some conflicting commitment or fear that explains why they are resisting what they know needs to be done. Peter Vajda takes you through questions that can help you probe beneath the symptom of procrastination to get at the root causes. By staying with your responses and inquiring deeply into them, you can raise your level of awareness about the true nature of your resistance.

The first in a series of articles exploring how to manage your boss so everyone comes out ahead, you get to work the way you enjoy best and you look good too. We start with the art of Managing Upwards: a set of skills every subordinate needs to learn to be happy and successful. Forget about the dirty tricks. ‘Boss-ology’ is like horse-whispering: when you do it right, the boss-whisperer gets the boss to do things willingly and no one feels manipulated or tricked.

Today’s constant mantra of cutting costs, saving time, and avoiding the unknown and untested is making those who practice it less and less creative. Soon, they’ll be so stuck in their chosen rut that they won’t even by able to see anything outside it — only back where they’ve been and forward to where they’re going, whether they like it or not. Efficiency, systems, cost cutting, “management by numbers” — all of them are deadly to creative thinking. That’s true in your personal way of working as well.

Is there a difference between passion and purpose? How do the two connect?

Photo by ‘emmip’ (Morguefile.com)

There’s much discussion these days about passion and purpose in the workplace.
A Google search of “passion at work” resulted in 11,5000,000 hits. A search of “purpose and work” results in 21,300 hits. “Purpose in the workplace”, 61,400 hits. Even [...]

The assumptions that faster is better and “time is money” may turn out to be false — especially when it comes to benefits for anyone outside the executive suite.

photo © Darren Hester for openphoto.net (CC: Attribution-NonCommercial)

There are some assumptions in business nobody thinks to challenge. One of the commonest is that saving time means saving [...]

Exploring an unexpected side-effect of the fashion for constant goal setting

Reading Gretchen Rubin’s article yesterday on Huffington Post (Happiness: Should You Have Goals or Resolutions?), I experienced one of those “aha!” moments.
Ms. Rubin wrote about life in general, but what she said seems to me to be especially relevant to the world of work, [...]

There are many hidden gods in the workplace — none of them worth worshiping

I was struck recently by a thoughtful post in the management blog published by The Age newspaper in Australia. It began with a reference to Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece of a satire on the society of his day. Despite the [...]