Subba Iyer’s post It’s not what you think, but how you think that matters!
resonated with a few of my personal realisations and musing recently on business and personal success.

“Create a strategy for [my] life” – having a purpose enables purposeful work. Many of us strive towards mastery of a body of knowledge. But without Purpose this mastery is essentially a pointless act as an …

Every so often, I come across words that resonate deeply with me, with my particular circumstance at a particular time.

This post by Michael Tate is the most recent. Via Mia Jane.

My summary below – though I strongly urge you to read the entire original post:

It is extremely difficult to maintain courage ?under fire?, particularly in maintaining inner-strength, character, fortitude, and the clarity …

The following is a collection of somewhat related thoughts I found on my Blackberry:

Empathy requires active involvement and constant flow of information. So as to help us stay in character. Trying to stay in someone else’s shoes without this stream of input (the active and present engagement with someone) is hard!

Second-guessing is working from a position of minimal info. It is making assumptions about what someone …

In increasing order of effectiveness:

Our words – the stories we tell the world about who we are.
Our thoughts – the rational discussions we have with our selves. The rationalisations we have for our actions.
Our feelings – our emotions, internal dialogue and our bodily responses to thoughts and situations.

Deep down inside, I believe we always know what we truly want. Our feelings never lie. It is a simple …

“Why change the world when all you need to change people’s perception?” — Claudia Bing, a PR magnate character in Absolutely Fabulous.

The older I get, the less concerned I am about trying to “manage” other people’s perception. These days I am more concerned with telling it as I see it, saying what is true to me.

The reality is people will take things …

Beware the people your passion attracts!

When I first read what Hugh MacLeod wrote in his book Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, it struck a deep deep chord:

“…as soon as they get a foothold inside the inner circle, you soon realise they never really understood your idea in the first place… And the weirdest part is, they don’t seem to mind sabotaging your original idea …

If you have to work at inner peace and calm in order to overcome environmental factors, so as to accept a non-optimal situation, at what point does that become unrealistic hard work?

Suffering in a situation we feel we are trapped in is not good. So how do we tell the difference between a situation where we are suppose to learn acceptance from, and one where we must …

Just like we are personally subjected to the tugs of what I should do vs what I want to do, businesses are similar affected – what the world, “common wisdom”, “experts”, trends, and the media tell them they should do, versus what their leaders and people truly want to do.

In the race for authenticity and differentiation, doing what everyone says you should is probably not a good idea. …

I have been pondering this for a while now: Why is it that the older I get the less I get to do what I “want”, and the more I seem have to do what I “should”?

Just when I have finally assembled a somewhat decent carpet bag of knowledge, experience, skills, nous and resources – ready with the stuff to engage more broadly and deeply with the …

Interesting post by the Comfort Queen Jennifer Louden – “about learning how to declare what will satisfy you.”

I see so many clients and friends who aren’t enjoying their lives or having the success they want because they don’t have way to measure their progress.

Clients who are so incredibly talented it boggles my heart. But because they are so damn smart, and interested in so many …