Tag: Pep talk

End-of-Year Pep Talk: You Got This, You Just Don’t Know It Yet

Anybody need a Sunday pep talk? A call to rally imagination and curiosity and go into the new year with hope and a sense of possibility. Ready?

Am I wrong or lots of us trudging up to the new year worn out and worn down? If ever a year kicked us when we were down, this was it. Or – did we allow ourselves to gradually be buried under relentless reporting that depended on our outrage and exhaustion until our spirits stretched thinner than we thought ever possible and still, more came, burying us deeper and deeper?

Well people, this won’t do. Viktor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning after his life in a concentration camp in WWII, and he said:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

And so we are, challenged to change ourselves and this is where it begins. There is magic in the transformation from one year to another and you can ride that wave of strange but real energy. Today. Now.

You still have time. You have all the time you need if you are ready to take your one, precious life seriously. January will be the [read more]

No-Fail New Year’s Resolutions Part 2: The Practical Stuff

Once you have your written your no-holds-barred manifesto of how you would live your one precious life if you could do anything you dreamed of, you need to turn it into something more practical in the form of no-fail New Year’s Resolutions, which is just a way to say: name the tasks you need to get you from here to there.

I know that one big reason people famously “fail” at resolutions is that they make so few of them: if you only make three big, overarching resolutions and you stumble over two, then you can wail that you knew you couldn’t do it and making New Year’s resolutions is lame. But what if you made 23 very small, very specific resolutions and kept nine of them? Or seven? Keeping up with seven, tiny resolutions might turn your life around and keep it turning.

While I sincerely hope your burner journal now contains details about your desire to live in an Italian farmhouse and grow your own olives, or be a wildly successful junk journal maker or the next Tim Holtz, let’s start with something universal: the desire to get in shape; to be sexy, fierce, lean, and bold. (I coach [read more]