Personal mastery

Stories that do carry some element of truth can actually be the most troublesome, because we put a lot of stock in ‘truth’, no matter how selective and partial it may be. Perhaps, as your classmates years ago never failed to point out during P. E. lessons, you were ‘bad’ at sports. Okay, but maybe you were bad at sports because you preferred

A great insight by Lisa Feldman Barrett: When someone expresses anxiety, the first thing you should do is ask: do you want empathy or do you want a solution?

Since then, the U.S. government has launched dozens of other efforts to improve our diets. For example, there was the “Five a Day” campaign, intended to encourage people to eat five fruits or vegetables, the USDA’s food pyramid, and a push for low-fat cheeses and milks. None of them adhered to the committee’s findings. None tried to camouflage

Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech, “The Man in the Arena”: The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows

Do not grieve over past joys, be sure they will reappear in another form. A child’s joy is in milk and nursing but once weaned, it finds new joy in bread and honey. Joy appears in many different forms it moves from place to place. It may suddenly show in the falling rain or in the rose bed; it comes now as water, now as beauty, or as nourishing

We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often

Use a Grounding Visualization Technique You can also use a visualization technique to bring your attention and focus to the body. One great example of this comes from Loren Shuster, chief people officer at the Lego Group, who explained that when he has important meetings or presentations, he takes five minutes to ground himself in his body by

The midlife-crisis phenomenon has taken on almost mythic proportions in the American psyche over the past century. The term was first coined by the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who noticed a pattern in the lives of “great men” in history: Many of them lost productivity—and even died—in their mid-to-late-30s, which was midlife in past