The Unlikely Artist

You don’t need to make a big leap to improve your life. A series of small leaps will take you where you want to go. This episode is about how decide whether to take a leap, big or small...

There are times we each feel submerged in the overwhelm and complexity our lives. Our problems strike us as complicated and difficult to resolve. We often miss the simple solutions available to us. When we face too many decisions and too many options, we can become frozen in inaction. This is the perfect episode to listen to and think about before you set your goals for the year. Tune in to learn some simple ways to focus your attention and reduce the overwhelm...

Before you set your goals for next year, there’s one question I’d recommend you ask yourself. This question will reveal answers, possibly surprising answers, about what’s most important to you. Your answers will provide useful guidance for your decisions about what you want in 2023. In this episode, I reveal the question, and then I ask it of myself. Before I recorded this, I wrote the first five answers that came up for me in point form...

“I’m SOOOO busy.” My guess is you’ll hear yourself – and the people around you - saying this A LOT over the next few weeks. Perhaps this is a constant refrain for you all year long. Let’s face it, there’s a part of us that secretly believes it’s a good thing to be busy. Our commitment to being busy has a lot of benefits, and those benefits drive us to keep creating overly busy lives. In this episode I take a candid look at our need to be busy...

Nature helps us discover a depth of beauty in our surroundings that connects us with who we are. In this episode, I share the reason I’m spending more time in nature, how doing that is elevating the way I think and feel, and how more time in nature can do that for you too. Nature evokes a sense of, “Yes, THIS is it” more than any other experience I can think of. That’s because nature resonates with the deepest part of us...

If you doggedly stay within the role you’re playing, you’ll miss out. And the people around you will miss out on your full genius. All the different roles you play in various contexts have one thing in common – you! When you stick only to actions you judge as fitting within your role, there will be times you don’t share something useful you learned in a different context. There will be times you don’t express yourself as effectively as you could...

In this super fun episode, my amazing, wise and entertaining peer coach and lawyer friend, Angela Han, interviews me on her podcast, Fit to Practice. Angela has kindly let me share her recording on The Unlikely Artist. I think you’ll enjoy this episode because you get to hear what it’s like when I’m the one in the hot seat. Plus we laugh a lot...

We can get over-coached, over-instructed, over-advised. Even if our coaches, mentors, teachers and instructors are the best in their fields and have valuable ideas to share with us. Our desire to learn and grow, to keep getting better at what we do, to accomplish personal and professional objectives, can cause us to become too much the good student. All that learning from others can help build our skills and our brains. Which is useful to a point...

A commitment to stick to your plan is not a prescription for a happy life. When you try to plan as if you knew ahead of time exactly where you’re going, you might feel more in control. Unfortunately, the control’s not real. You can’t predict what you’ll be like or even what you’ll want next month, next year, or a decade from now. That’s because as you live your life, you learn and grow and become fundamentally different. You’re changed by your experiences...

When we slow down and ditch our impatience for things to be different, our world opens. Our best ideas surface when we stop rushing. When we allow ourselves time to breathe. When our cortisol levels drop and we lose the stress associated with our belief that everything’s urgent. When our minds are quiet and not preoccupied with our quest for answers. Far too many of us pursue a dream and when we make it happen, forget to enjoy it...