Life Coaches Blog

Best personal development resources for the week:

Fast Company has a short but neat article on Leading Ideas: Don’t Stop….Start.

If you want to change something in your life, it’s common to try to stop the behaviors you don’t like. While this certainly seems logical, it seldom works. The reason is simple – it unintentionally creates a vacuum where the old behaviors used to be.

The technique has a lot in common with Solutions Focused Brief Therapy, focus on the solution instead of the problem, because what you focus on you tend to get.

Damn Interesting has a damn interesting article on the secret of lucky people: they make their own luck:

Principle One: Maximise Chance Opportunities

Principle Four: Turn Bad Luck to Good

It’s no secret amongst the Life Coaches that we often borrow animal training principles to use on our coachees with great success, and Amy Sutherland from the New York Times explains how she used it to train her husband. Good stuff to learn sneaky methods of persuasion.

(If you’re a coachee reeling from shock that we did that to you, don’t worry, we always treated you guys like our favoritest animals. Even when we used the whips)

Don’t have time to read Steven Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (highly recommended)? Catch the summary (found via Lifehacker).

Wait a minute, money doesn’t bring happiness? Then what does? Semissourian.com has the scope at Be Happy: What is Important;

The ambitious review of studies on happiness found that once one’s basic necessities are met, happiness derives from the following: Work that is satisfying, a sense of meaningfulness in life, affiliations … and, like my colleague’s testimony, good relationships.

I think we can all intuitively grasp these truths. But so often we do forget them as we become gripped by the fantasy of a bigger and better life through stuff.

(found via Mr Wang who has his own take on Money & Material Things)

Tom Chiarella shows you the good things that can happen when you use the invisible grip: looking people in the eyes;

The eye contact changed all that…They didn’t know me, but then, suddenly, it seemed they did. I thought of it as a kind of dominance, holding them in the kind of invisible grip you might have once seen employed by a villain in a DC comic. I got discounts I didn’t deserve, a room facing the water. I was warned off the calamari and onto the crab cake. The desk clerk perked up when I arrived at the hotel and stood up straighter when I checked out.

Guy Kawasaki has Ten Questions with Seth Godin showing Seth isn’t afraid to look bad.

Have a glorious weekend