Why Your Least Visible Work
is Your Most Important Work

Approximately a 5 minute read

The smallest of the issues you care about is related to, and inseparable from, the largest.

Raising happy, healthy kids and teaching them to care for themselves and others, living a fulfilling and ethical life, animal welfare, forests, communities, species extinctions, re-building soils, cleaning up the oceans, social justice… the list goes on. And on. It is overwhelmingly long.

This final article in this Series explores how you can be sure that even (perhaps especially) the “littlest” things you do are important to the whole, if they’re done with wholesome intent.

Why Your Most Important Responsibility is
Taking Care of You

​Approximately a 5 minute read

It's not easy being green. ​Among other things, ​it can mean feeling overwhelmed and grief-stricken and inadequate, with no end to the urgent issues everywhere you look. 

​​You need ongoing replenishment if you are to have any hope of being effective in your efforts to make a difference. ​Besides that, you deserve to have someone take really good care of you. And if you don’t take care of you, then who will? 

On Making the Least Change
for the Greatest Effect

Approximately a 5 minute read

​In our make-it-happen story of rugged, heroic individualism, "goal achievement" means grunting and sweating, burning the candle at both ends, making herculean efforts.

Not only is this approach unsustainable, but also it keeps us in battle mode. It fits the story of a culture in which drama and conflict are a way of life.

To sustain positive change toward a gentler, more life-affirming story, we can use small, consistent habits, adding up over time to something significant ​— ​the same way that ​silent, imperceptible growth ​develops a seedling to a sapling, a tree, and finally a towering forest giant.

​​How to Go From "Distracted" to "On Track"
with these 2 Simple Strategies

​Life’s urgent and alluring distractions will always be nudging you off the high road and onto the easy path, diverting you from the straight and narrow onto a winding, more scenic route.

That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Knowing that your feet will often stumble onto it, here are two strategies you can use to set up the winding path so that it still ends up going in the right direction.

The first is noticing what triggers you or diverts you into behaviors you weren’t planning on doing when you started your day, and reducing those unhelpful triggers in your environment.

The second is to develop ways to put the human tendency to be easily distracted to good use, by setting up deliberate prompts that help keep you pointed in the right direction.

​Are You Going ​After Your Goals the ​Hard Way or the Easy Way?

​Approximately a 5 minute read

​​The idea that you need motivation and will power to reach your goals is part of a story, or world-view, that says that if ​you use enough of the right kind of force, ​you’ll get to the goal.

It’s also a story of scarcity – it says there’s not enough time, energy, resources to go around, so ​you have to grab what ​you can and make it happen. No pain, no gain.

In this article I’ll introduce an approach to ​reaching your goals that points ​toward a different story, one in which we can flow with life rather than struggling against it, and in which we have all the time, resources, and energy we need if we mange them wisely.

​Is it Important, or Merely Urgent?

​Approximately a 5 minute read

It’s possible to be very busy without being very effective. Rushing from one task to another, feeling like you never have enough time to get it all done and being frequently exhausted, overwhelmed and frustrated, rarely feeling that you are achieving anything worthwhile.

It’s equally possible to be less busy, to do less, and yet to live a more spacious, meaningful, satisfying life.

The difference lies in how proactive you are. Does life happen to you, putting you in a state of constant reaction, or do you take the initiative and prioritize important activities over urgent ones?

​​​Personal Responsibility ​= Personal Power

​Approximately a 5 minute read

Staying focused on your own "response-ability"—your ability to choose your own responses—increases your personal power and expands the scope of your influence.

Are You Acting on Life or Is Life Acting on You?

Approximately a 5 minute read

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this Series we talked about how we live according to an often-unexamined story, how the only thing you can control is your own responses to life, and how we can only live and act in this moment.

Here in Part 3 we’re going to explore how your focus on your own responses makes you more powerful, how to make this moment count by focusing your energy where you can be most effective, and how doing so can give you the power to begin to change your story, if you want to.

​One Moment at a Time 

​3 to 4 minute read

In Part 1 of this Series we talked about how making a difference to any sized challenge in our lives requires that we start with ourselves, at the very center of what gives rise to our ways of being in the world. 

Here in Part 2 we’ll consider a way of looking at even the big challenges that breaks them down to a manageable size.

There Is Only One Place to Begin 

Approximately a 4 minute read

January of a new year and a new decade is already over, and most of us have been reminded that resolutions and to-do lists and bucket lists don’t come to fruition via wishful thinking.

And as catastrophic fires burn into 2020 in Australia following unprecedented 2019 fires in California, Canada, Alaska, Greece and Brazil, as school children march in city streets asking for policy change, and as all of us face—or hide from—our concerns about what our future holds…

… you may have wondered, this January, whether you should be doing more than just making personal resolutions about living a better life?

But how can we do more than we already are? And how can we have any impact?