Personal Development Blog For Living Your Full Potential

You’ve worked hard and achieved a lot. But success brings a new problem: What to do next. That brings a whole new pressure from your team, your customers, and yourself. You may feel like you’ve used all your best ideas. From here on out, you’re faking it. That can be super stressful.

Few things are as unpleasant as anxiety. With the explosion of interest in mindfulness meditation and books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck , I’m hardly alone in wanting to worry less. Recently, I read Anxious by NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux . LeDoux is an expert on a lot of the neural processes behind fear and anxiety, and this book offers fascinating insights into the underlying mechanisms that make miserable. At the same time, however, Anxious isn’t an easy read. Many sections involved deciphering neural circuit diagrams, trying to keep track of countless acronyms for minuscule brain regions. This essay is my attempt to summarize some of the main insights of the book to help my own understanding of anxiety and for anyone else who wants to worry less. Fear and Consciousness A huge chunk of the opening of the book is devoted to what, at first glance, seems to be a rather abstract problem: do the parts of the brain that are active when we observe fearful behavior rea...

5 Simple Tricks to Tame Your Mood and Tackle Your Day Do you ever find yourself in a funk? I sure do. Once I was on the road, preparing to deliver a speech. I love speaking, but I was experiencing an unusual amount of distraction and self-doubt. I had about four hours before I went on stage. So, I decided to call my wife, Gail. A Call for Help She instantly knew I wasn’t in a good place. (This is one of the many benefits of long-term marriage. My wife can read me like a book.) “Okay,” she said after listening to me whine for a few minutes. “I want you to hang up and go for a run. Call me when you are done.” I was tempted to blow her off, but I knew in my heart that she was right. I needed a big shift in my emotional state. And it wasn’t going to just happen. I needed to do something . So I laced up and headed outside. When I called her an hour later, everything had changed. My emotional state had shifted—dramatically. I was focused, alert, and upbeat. I had a can-do attitude. ...

By Leo Babauta There is a part of us that resists things that are hard, uncomfortable, overwhelming, or a big change. Even if we really want to do it. What is this resistance, and how do we work with it? The resistance is simply our mind not wanting to do something that feels uncomfortable : anything uncertain, difficult, overwhelming, different than our normal way of doing things, awkward, painful, sad, lonely, stressful. It makes sense that we would avoid these kinds of discomfort. Resistance shows up in so many places in our lives: Procrastinating on our meaningful work Getting addicted to distractions, social media, checking messages, shopping (as a way to avoid what we don’t want to face) Resisting changing our diet to something healthier Sitting too much, which is resisting moving more and getting away from the comfort of devices Resisting relaxing and not doing anything productive Resisting doing things productive when you just want to relax into distraction Resistin...

Good leaders can handle a lot of responsibility. In fact, they thrive on it. But that can lead to the most under-diagnosed condition in our culture: workaholism. Often, this goes undetected until it results in a personal or relational crisis.

Top Performer is the course Cal Newport and I teach for helping you deeply understand what drives success in your career, and then gives you the strategy for getting really good at those skills. We hold sessions quite infrequently, and right now we’re opening registration for another one. If you’d like to learn more about the course, how it works and whether it’s right for you, see the registration page here . Everything you need to know about the course is in that link above, but here’s a quick summary of what we teach: Research — We give you the tools to figure out how any career works and what skills you need to develop to reach the next level. This works for people early in their careers, still trying to figure out what they want to do. It also works for people who have already advanced in their careers and need to know what it will take to reach the next level. Practice — We break down methods for translating the important research in mastery of deliberate practice to kn...

​How to Turn Attempts into Accomplishments There’s an instructive scene in the Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. Yoda is instructing Luke Skywalker in how to use the Force. He asks Luke to retrieve his disabled spaceship out of a bog where it has sunk, using only his mind. Luke, of course, thinks this is impossible. Sure, he has been able to move stones around this way. But a spaceship? That’s completely different. Or is it? Yoda patiently explains that it is only different in his mind. Luke reluctantly agrees to “give it a try.” Yoda famously says, “No. Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.” If you can’t see this video in your RSS reader or email, then click here . Why Trying Doesn’t Work Tony Robbins gave similar advice to a woman who was struggling in her marriage. She stood up in one of his seminars to ask a question. She complained that she had “tried everything” to improve her relationship with her husband but nothing had changed. Tony went on to make a di...

In early Top Performer pilots (before we even called it Top Performer) Cal and I made a fairly subtle mistake about the process of acquiring career skills. It’s one I’ve seen many people make when thinking about improving their career, so I think it’s worth exploring here in case you might be making it too. A big part of our course is creating a skill-building project. The goal is to cultivate rare and valuable skills which form the foundation for a successful career. What I hadn’t recognized in early iterations of our course is that there are actually two subtly different ways to go about it, one of which tends to be more effective. The Difficulty with Drilling Down The first way you can design a project to upgrade your career skills is to drill down on some aspect of your work that ought to be important. One of our students was an academic philosopher, and so he decided to get better at logic. Another student was an architect and decided to deepen his understanding of design...

By Leo Babauta I’ve found that there are two profound changes that almost any of of us can make: Become kinder to ourselves Build trust in ourselves Unfortunately, because we don’t really trust ourselves, we’re very rarely kind to ourselves. When I ask people to start being kind to themselves, they usually come back at some point with this dilemma: “But if I’m too kind to myself, I won’t get anything done!” This is the fear, when people start being kind to themselves — that they’ll be too soft, they won’t get stuff done, they’ll let themselves off the hook too easily, they’ll just lie around doing nothing. It’s an understandable fear — if you have had times when you procrastinated, you probably worry about this. Let’s talk about why kindness to self is so important, how to do it, and how to still get stuff done even when you’re kind to yourself. Why Kindness to Self is So Damned Important Most of us are not very kind to ourselves. We often do things like: Come down hard ...

Leaders love to see progress. But growth brings a whole new set of problems. You may find yourself stuck in reaction mode, feeling more like a fireman than a leader. Dealing with problems all day can drain your mental energy. After awhile, you may have no bandwidth left for vision and strategy.

Sometimes the obvious advice you need to hear isn’t obvious to you. Here’s an example of this that happened just last week. A guy on Twitter asked me if I did coaching. He felt stuck in his career and wanted to pay me to give him advice. I don’t do individual coaching (at least for money) but, I was curious so I asked him to send me some details of his situation to see if I could help. Here were his tweets: What do you think his mistake was? … In my mind, the biggest mistake he made was simply that he was asking me what to do next . I’m not a singer, and I don’t even work in the music industry. So, lacking specifics, I gave the advice that was obvious to me: you need to locate people who are 2-3 steps ahead of you in the kind of career you want to have. You need to talk to these people, not just random people on the internet you admire to map out how your career actually works. His response: This seems obvious in retrospect, but it actually happens a lot. In early pilo...

How to Remove the Obstacles to Your Success I have been thinking a lot about discipline lately. Everyone knows you can’t succeed without it, yet few people seem to possess it. “Can you make yourself do something you don’t want to do in order to get a result you really want?” That’s a question my friend Andy Andrews likes to ask. And if you can answer yes , then you are disciplined—at least in that area. But what’s the key? It’s focusing on a result you really want. In this sense, the key to discipline is goal-setting . Over the years, I have found that I can become disciplined in any area of my life by taking five specific steps. Whether it is trying to get in shape, maintain a blog, or develop a great marriage, the psychology is the same. Step 1: Determine Your Goal Notice in Andy’s definition that the key is in knowing what you really want. If you are going to succeed, you must be specific. You must be able to see it. Write it down and—while you are at it—add a “by when” d...