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Blowing Up Your Life

“Do you ever feel like blowing your life up?” Someone said this to me recently and it made me laugh because it’s a sentiment many of us can relate to at some point in our lives.

The Reality Of Your Perception

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor Frankl A client was speaking about someone we both knew and they were telling me how ungenerous the person was in their experience. They thought they […]

The Biggest Problem I Face With Clients At The Beginning

“At this critical junction in the history of humankind, leaders that are proficient in magical thinking aren’t going to solve our problems. Creating alternative realities is not the answer.

We need a very different kind of leadership— leaders who can resist the calls of regression and whose outlook is firmly based in reality.

The problem we all have is that what most people ‘think’ is reality, is not. It’s their ‘thinking’ about reality. In fact, getting my clients in touch with reality is the first challenge I face when working with them.”

– Manfred de Vries, Professor of Leadership at the renowned business university Insead

My experience of working with people over the last 20 years has been the exact same as the Professor above. The first big problem to overcome with every client is to help them get in touch with what’s actually going on and not what they ‘think’ is going on.

The Toughest (But Most Rewarding) Work

“Nothing really works unless you do” – Maya Angelou

I remember working with someone who had achieved some incredible things in one industry but had jumped into another one and was struggling to make their new enterprise work.

When we met I advised that the best use of his time was to reflect on his leadership approach and where it was coming from. Indeed to reflect on how his inner world reflected into his outer one.

Bending Reality

“Reality is what we take to be true.

What we take to be true is what we believe.

What we believe is based upon our perceptions.

What we perceive depends upon what we look for.

What we look for depends upon what we think.

What we think depends upon what we perceive.

What we perceive depends upon what we believe.

What we believe determines what we take to be true.

What we take to be true is our reality.”

– David Bohm

This quote by the American scientist, who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century, is profound and worth re-reading many, many times. When I first read it, it stopped me in my tracks.

In essence it is saying that reality, or what we perceive as reality, is completely made up – by our minds.

So for example…

Evading Reality & Some Observations on Same…

Here’s your shot of weekly inspiration: “You can evade reality, but you cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.” – Glenn Reynolds If there’s been one major lesson for everyone over the past 3 years it’s that reality has a way of making itself noticed. Property prices will keep going up. Customers will keep coming […]