Inner Growth

I was talking with Calvin the other day about my experience as a new Simplero staff member.  Somehow, we got on the subject of messing up. ;)

I ended up sharing something that happened to me years earlier.

Once upon a time, I was a social worker in a program that provided crisis intervention to survivors of domestic violence, stalking and sexual assault.  Most of the time, the crisis was emotional or logistical, but sometimes, it was literally life-or-death.

One woman called me when she was …

I had the pleasure recently of speaking with Joy Duling, creator of The Movement Summit, about how to engage with your customers, so they will be with you for the long haul.

I love that Joy has taken this approach with her summit. Technology and marketing are just not the things that are going to make the difference to the people that matter: Your customers. Your tribe.

The summit starts on Monday, and has participation from a number of inspiring teachers. Check out their thoughts on inspiring…

I've been really excited about visualizing things recently. I suddenly remembered that when we moved to New York a couple years ago and struggled to find an apartment, Gay Hendricks did a visualization with us where we pretended it was a year from that day, and we were sitting in the perfect apartment, and we were thinking back at just how easy it all had been. Just a week or two after that, we were in fact sitting in our own apartment, and it had indeed been super easy!

These days I'm "read…

After writing that email last week about knowing who you are, and Baeth's event Gifted, something magical happened.

I was upstate for the week to play around with clarifying my message, and work on a talk. At the time I wrote you, Nomi (my wife) and Yasmine (our dog) had joined me, and we ended up having some deep conversations about all of "this stuff".

And that's when I suddenly felt a flash of a new desire, something I'd never felt before.

It felt just as strong as that time four years ago…

Knowing yourself is the foundation of everything in life and business.

When you know who you are—and who you're not—you can stop criticizing yourself for being who you are, stop trying to fix what you think's wrong about you, stop doing things that don't work for you, and instead get on with doing the things that do work, that get you results, that make you feel fantastic.

There are so many people offering advice, strategies, step by step processes, and they can be useful, but are they right f…

I spent the weekend at Esalen at a Byron Katie workshop.

It was an amazing trip, even though I have to say I found Esalen to be a bit of a shithole. I’ve been wanting to go ever since Sofia Manning urged me to go in early 2011, but I didn’t make it until just now. My excitement and expectations were sky-high. And let down.

The food was crap, and I realized about a day in, that the entire place is literally amateur hour. Most people I talked to who work there come from some other background, an…

I'm very fascinated with James Dyson. I read his autobiography about ten years ago, and I very much connected with him, because of his renaissance approach to business and entrepreneurship.

He is both an artist and an engineer. He studied at the Royal College of Art and then later moved to engineering.

Back during the renaissance, the artist was the scientist, and the scientist was the artist. Leonardo da Vinci is a clear example. There wasn't this separation that we've gotten used to today.

We've all heard the phrase "Start with why" by now.

Truth is, it's taken me a while to get to my "why".

Interestingly, I've known it for a while. I guess I've kinda known it always. But that doesn't mean I've owned it, or consciously known it.

Four years, five months, and five days ago, I was living in Mysore, India. It was my birthday, and my wife had invited me for a walk around the lake near the university. She'd prepared a bunch of questions to ask me. Good, deep, inquisitive questions. O…

Sometimes when I sit down to write these newsletters, I feel blank. 

And I really don't like feeling blank.

I like knowing exactly what to say. I like having all the answers. I like having it all figured out and being able to tell it like it is. I love being right.

But right now I'm drawing a blank, and the best I know how to do is speak the truth.

The truth is, I'm worried that I might write something that doesn't connect. I'm afraid I'll write something, and you're reading it, and it ju…

I came across a quote from Gandhi this morning. 

God knows absolute truth. I'm a human, so I only know relative truth, and my understanding of truth changes day to day. My commitment must be to my truth, and not to consistency.

Who's with Gandhi?

The back story is that he's organized this big demonstration against England. And then a few days into it, he decides to call it off.

The people around him protest, saying lots of people have taken off from work and traveled far to join him.

An…