Have you ever set a goal for yourself, worked incredibly hard to achieve it, but still came up short? It can be an unpleasant experience for some of us. Not achieving the target you set for yourself can be a tough pill to swallow. However, failing to achieve a goal can be the launching pad for future success for some individuals.

In this blog post, I’ll explore the power of Positive Intelligence and how it can help hyper-achievers deal with unachieved goals.

I hope you can learn from my recent experience, where I trained hard and aimed to win the World No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu Championships in my division but came up short. [Read more…]

Margaret and David recently discussed the topic of graceful (or not) endings. You know the ones: a project ends, a marriage dissolves, or a loved one passes. In this post I share my thoughts on the ending we all face – our death.  We can approach that with grace or with dread.  The choice is ours. [Read more…]

The pandemic highlighted the importance of discussing mental health at work.

By Britt Frank (reprinted from Psychology Today with permission of the author)

In a world where workplace mental health information is sourced from TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, it can be helpful to pause and sort fact from fiction (though to be fair, social media often provides more accurate information than other sources). Here are my top five workplace mental health myths—and what you can do about them.

Myth 1: Be vulnerable and bring all your feelings to work

Like many things in the zeitgeist, the mental health pendulum seems to have overcorrected. “Leave your feelings at the door” used to be the law of the land when it came to work. The idea that people could (and should) simply shrug off their humanity and grind robotically for 60 hours a week was largely an unquestioned expectation. Now, instead of “leave all of your feelings at the door,” the new ethos in the workplace seems to be “bring all your feelings to work.” While it is a beautiful ideal to imagine a workspace where everyone is skillful at both sharing and receiving difficult information, the trend of “trauma-dumping” at work is contraindicated.

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Some time ago, I met with a group of leaders from across North America to discuss the possibility of creating a series of weekend retreats that will travel from city to city across North America over the course of 2018.
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An excerpt from Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World By Christian Madsbjerg 

The year was 1959 and a young French anthropologist named Pierre Bourdieu was visiting his home in the foothills of the Pyrenees while on leave from the miliary. He had been focusing his research on far-flung locations in Algeria but he realized during this visit that his own childhood village was just as deserving of an anthropologist’s eye. Although he had known the small town of Bearn his entire life, he had never really seen it. Could he make the familiar feel strange and look at it with the eyes of an outsider?

An opportunity presented itself one day when he went out to visit one of his classmates from primary school who was then a low-ranking clerk in a neighboring town. His friend pulled out a photograph taken of their entire class when Bourdieu and he were children. There were dozens of sepia-toned faces of young boys all the same age and from the same small peasant community. The boys stood in lines wearing the same drab peasant shirts and slacks. The group looked remarkably homogenous, yet Bourdieu’s school friend cast his hand across the photo in dismissive scorn and pronounced half of these young boys “unmarriageable.” The children he was referring to, now grown men, were all the oldest sons in their families. In the agricultural world of Bearn—one that at the time revered primogeniture, the tradition of passing land down through the first-born son—the idea that eldest sons would be unmarriageable didn’t make any sense. More striking was the cruelty with which his friend tossed off the remark. Unmarriageable. He might just as easily have said: Worthless.

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Contrary to popular belief, the Middle Ages were not dark and ignorant. This period saw remarkable advancements, including the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. During this time, Thomas à Kempis, a German-Dutch monk, wrote and published a renowned collection of essays called The Imitation of Christ.

Below is an excerpt from my new book: Wisdom from the Middle Ages for Living and Leading in Modern Times.

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Being Sensitive Is Seen as a Weakness. Is It Actually Our Greatest Human Strength?

This excerpt was adapted from the bestselling book SENSITIVE: The Hidden Power of the Highly Sensitive Person in a Loud, Fast, Too-Much World by Jenn Granneman and Andre Sólo, the creators of Sensitive Refuge. 

The year was 1903. Picasso danced at the Moulin Rouge, electric lights burned at all-­night clubs, and Europe’s cities thundered into a new era. Streetcars rushed commuters down buggy-­packed streets, telegraphs connected faraway places, and breaking news crossed continents in minutes. Technology charmed its way into people’s homes, too, with phonographs squawking out music on demand for parties. The songs may have been a prelude to an evening at the picture house—­or they may have covered up the sound of streets being ripped up to install modern sewers. Even the countryside was abuzz, with farmers using mechanized equipment for the first time. Life was changing, and progress, it was believed, was good. [Read more…]

An excerpt from Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World

A few years ago, an ordinary event shook up my life.

I made a trip to the eye doctor.

One wintery Thursday morning, my eyes felt gummy and sandy when I got out of bed, but I paid no attention to them until I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. I was startled to see that the whites of my eyes had turned an angry pink, and my lashes were clumped together: the distinctive signs of pink eye. I ignored my condition for as long as I could, but eventually I found myself in my eye doctor’s exam room, trying not to touch my face. [Read more…]