The Year of Fidelity
The new year is an excellent time to examine your fidelity. Are you faithful to yourself? Are you executing your life with quality?
Continue readingI Remember When I Lost My Mind
A Lesson in Cognitive Dissonance Good music is hard to find nowadays. Most pop music is formulaic and repetitive It might have a good beat, or be danceable, but it’s nothing special. A song that’s memorable, or touches you in some way, is a rare find nowadays. A few years back I found one that […]
Continue readingFive Important Lessons from “The Year of Better Decisions”
Last year around this time, I designated 2016 to be “The Year of Better Decisions”. The general principle was to stop making New Year’s resolutions, to stop making S.M.A.R.T. goals, and to stop setting deadlines for accomplishments. In other words, avoiding all the typical methods of improving one’s life at the start of the […]
Continue readingPoker Tells and Insults
When the subject of masculine games comes up, inevitably you’ll hear examples such as football, rugby, baseball, soccer, and even poker. Whereas the 1st four are physical, the last one, poker, is more intellectual. If you want to play physical games at a high level, you need to practice physical activities and develop the body. […]
Continue readingBeing Authentic – A No Nonsense Guide
When I was 12 years old, alien abductions were the rage. It seemed that everybody was claiming to be abducted. They were in all the newspapers and magazines. Plenty of books were written about them. I picked up a paperback book chronicling one man’s supposed abduction. His was a more friendly abduction apparently. He recounted […]
Continue readingThe Year of Better Decisions
Happy New Year 2016 This year I didn’t make the typical New Year’s Resolution. No S.M.A.R.T. goals. No deadlines. No stretch goals to challenge myself. None of the conventional goal setting practices. None of the typical goal setting techniques have ever worked very well for me. Instead I came up with a unique approach. Well, but […]
Continue readingLife Lessons from TV Comedy
Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net One of the most important life lessons I learned came from watching sitcoms on television. Surprising, right? Who would believe that TV comedy can teach anything, other than how to write unoriginal, formulaic stories around forgettable characters? Well, it can, but you need to add an ounce of thought from […]
Continue readingRelentless Focus
When I was growing up, I was never quite happy with my lot in life. I was pretty sure I didn’t know the secret to success, but I was also pretty sure there were people out there who did. I became attracted to the early personal success gurus and the books they wrote. I believe […]
Continue readingSpeech Video: Evolution of Not Self 2
It can be very informative to see how a speech evolved from its first iteration to the second. This is a version of the Not Self speech I gave at our club level International Speech contest in 2011. If you watch the initial version, you can see how the speech improved. My vocal variety is much […]
Continue readingSpeech Video: Not Self
Here’s a speech I did as a test speaker for an evaluation contest back in the fall of 2010. I discuss Steve Andreas’ concept of Not Self, in which a person defines his or her self concept in terms of things he or she is not, and how it applied to me. I later took […]
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