Skills

It was a few months ago and I was speaking at a healthy workforce conference. The goal was to improve the conditions for employees in healthcare. I was listening to another speaker on the topic of emotional intelligence, and she strongly recommended Conversational ...

There have been many references to Emotional Intelligence 2.0  in my world over the past several years, but they hadn’t managed to break through and cause me to read it. I had read Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence  some years ago and it had ...

I used to modify the serenity prayer to swap the word strength for courage because I rarely found myself lacking the courage to change the things that I can. (The serenity prayer starts: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,...

I’ve been a fan of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work since first seeing his work. I feel like I spend much of my days in “flow” and the description of it helps me to explain to others something that has been difficult to explain. His book Finding Flow: Th...

There are plenty of reasons to study Martin Seligman’s work. The foremost authority on positive psychology, former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), and longtime researcher provides plenty of reasons to pay attention. However, t...

It was back in October of 2011 when I wrote my book review of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Finding Flow . That was very early on in my process of knowledge building. In fact, I didn’t write my post “Research in the age of electrons ” until February...

You can’t make it very long in business without a bit of grit. The statistics are daunting. Within 5 years, 80% of the businesses that were started won’t be around any longer. You can’t raise a family without a bit of grit. There are many times when ...

Angela Duckworth’s work on grit has come up in my research more than a few times. Her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance  was most recently mentioned in The Gift of Failure , and it was then that I realized that I couldn’t delay readin...

Is happiness a skill? Most folks are looking for happiness – like searching for the lost city of Atlantis or the fountain of youth. However, few people look at happiness as a skill that can be cultivated. However, that’s the central idea behind Happiness: A Gu...

I’ve never considered myself particularly gifted at mixing audio for live performances. I’ve been a servant who has done them. There’s been more than a few worship services that I’ve supported over the years where I’ve been doing the mixing. However, ...

Life.  Liberty.  And the pursuit of happiness.  Our founding fathers placed it third, but Aristotle and most others would have placed it first.  Happiness is a central consideration in life, yet we’re notoriously bad at finding it.  The How of Happin...

It seems like nary a week goes by that I don’t think “When will that person grow up?” This happens to me both in my personal – and my professional life. It’s hard to see how the book How to Be an Adult in a Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving  c...

It’s years now since I started my work on humor, jokes, and comedy. My introduction to standup comedy and my introduction to improvisation courses helped propel me forward in my speaking and my thinking. My post I am a Comedian  summarizes the work at ...

What does being “a person of integrity” mean? Though most people would immediately think of moral, ethical, or right, there is a deeper meaning to integrity. It’s about wholeness. It’s about being one person and not different people in the same body de...

Criticism. Everyone hates it. Or do they? People talk about constructive criticism and somehow that doesn’t make any sense. How can criticism ever be constructive? Isn’t criticism by definition critical? Isn’t it rejecting someone or what they can do? M...

The New Comedy Writing Step by Step  by Gene Perret  is a great book that helped moved me from beginner to intermediate. I loved Greg Dean’s book , it got things started. However, there were some great exercises to help kick start the writing process in t...

All roads lead to Rome. Sometimes the books that I read are like that. There are so many other books that refer to another that it becomes imperative to read one simply because it's referred to in so many other places. Nonviolent Communication: A Language...

We’ve all seen the video. It’s a dog that has a toy he won’t let go of. He’s flinging his head back and forth trying to wring the life out of the lifeless toy in his mouth. At some level, we’ve all felt like the toy. We’re being tossed around with no con...

Resilience is a common term these days.  Everyone wants to build resilience.  Everyone wants to know how to make people recover rather than crumble from challenges.  I picked up The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Li...

Our human lives are filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. We face a variety of threats that we can see and those we cannot. Living in this world can make you aware of your need to become resilient. Resilient: How to Grow an ...

Imagine your best day. Imagine the day that you were so in the moment and so ignited, so alive, and then try to make it every day. That’s what Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal are trying to teach people how to do in Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, th...

What makes a joke? Well according to Greg Dean, it’s surprise. In Step by Step to Stand-up Comed y  Dean lays out how jokes are fundamentally about causing the audience expect one thing while delivering another. Of course,what you surprise them with mus...

One of the benefits of learning software development early is that I got a chance to learn how to pay attention.  Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again , argues that our ability to pay attention has be...

What makes you happy?  Are you happy?  I’ve personally spent my life time trying to find “happy” much to my dismay it’s illusive like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  (Hint: The rainbow moves.)  I certainly have a lot to be happy about – and...

If you were to ask people about their biggest failings, the one thing that if they could get a handle on their lives would be better, what would it be? It might be that solving a lack of willpower might top the list of failings – as it does in research o...