5 Questions to Help You learn from Last Year and Make the Most of This Year

This year instead of just setting New Year intentions, I looked back first to see what I could learn from last year. The results were revealing, and I feel good about what I learned and the intentions I ended up setting. In this article I’ll share the journaling process I used. It works for New Year rituals, but it also works for other endings/beginnings too.

The Stick, the Carrot and the Gift

Most of us, most of the time, do the things we do for stick, carrot, or avoidance reasons. The problem is that these forms of motivation do not satisfy us. To really thrive, we need to do things for gift reasons.

When "Do Something" Fails, There Is Another Way

About a 3 minute read

The logical mind wants to muscle its way to the results we want; when muscle is inadequate to the task, we think we’ve failed and we’re out of options.

The heart, on the other hand, is not afraid to invoke the results we want by the quality of our attention and the power of our desire to give what we don’t physically have to give.  

Why Your Least Visible Work
is Your Most Important Work

(Part 10 of a Series: "When Nothing You Can Do Makes a Difference")

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

Part 7 of a Series: "When Nothing You Can Do Makes a Difference"
Approximately a 5 minute read

Life’s urgent and alluring distractions will always be nudging you off the high road and onto the easy path. 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 easy 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?