If you ever want to kill your mood or quickly go into depression, then spend your life seeking approval from others. When you look to others for a way to feel good, you’ll find yourself doing things to impress them in the hopes that they’ll complement you. At the same time, you’re handing the power to control your feelings over to them and taking it away from yourself.

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You can learn a lot from a coach. And I’m not talking about life coaches or others that you pay to help you figure out what you really want in life, but the type that wear a whistle around their necks and make you push yourself to be the best athlete you can be. I recently listened to an old interview with legendary basketball coach, John Wooden, and was reminded of some of the things I learned as a student athlete.

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In my public speaking classes, one of the first things I teach is that you won’t improve your speaking skills unless you get up in front of an audience and speak. I was sharing this story recently at a networking event and a friend said to me “wait a second, don’t you sell CDs and books about speaking?” When I confirmed that I did, he asked then how do I expect anyone to buy them.

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What inspires you? Do you have a place that helps you think more clearly? Do you find a certain book, movie, song, video or sound clip helps you think more clearly? We all have our different sources for inspiration, but often we forget about them.

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Your email address is an extension of your business – especially if you are the business owner. This is why most companies have an email policy discouraging employees from using email for anything that’s not business related. They’re trying to avoid having their business linked to anything that might make them look bad.

It’s always a good idea to be careful about how you use your business email account and what gets associated with it.  Read more... (434 words, 1 image, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)

Do you ever find yourself so focused on your professional goals that you just feel burned out? This happens to me frequently, despite my best efforts to plan and schedule things effectively. Let’s face it: there really is a lot to do and time is at a premium.

I sometimes find with my writing that I’ll be on a roll for a while and then get stuck. When this happens, I step back and do something else. Ideally, the activity meets the following criteria:  Read more... (417 words, 1 image, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)

1. It helps me meet another one of my goals.

Have you ever noticed how often people lie during a given day? From “that dress makes you look slim” to “No Officer, I didn’t realize I was speeding” many of us are guilty of “white lies.” A while back, I actually decided to take a conscious look at my own white lies and was surprised at how many I was telling.

Fortunately, most of my white lies weren’t serious enough to need cover up lies. Lies have the tendency to multiply as you need to tell other lies to cover up the first one, and depending on how bad you are at lying, you could end up making up your own fictional story that requires you to kill off characters to make it believable.  Read more... (554 words, 1 image, estimated 2:13 mins reading time)