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By Christine Scivicque

The decision to make a major career change can trigger all kinds of nasty anxiety and ruthless paranoia. What if I fail? What if it’s nothing like what I’m expecting? What if I regret leaving my current gig? But, as we all know, you can’t live a fulfilling life if you waste your time and energy focusing on the “what ifs”. The more effective course of action is to focus on taking productive steps to minimize the fear that inevitably comes with any major career shift.

1. Self-Analyze

Take steps to understand your motivation for making this career shift. What about this new career appeals to you? What makes it feel like a smart move? How does this new career align with your values and long-term life goals? Spend some time thinking about the overall vision you have for your life and see where this new career falls into it. When you know that this career move is in line with your life as a whole, you’ll feel more secure in your decision.

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This entry was posted on July 18, 2010 and is filed under: Career - 12 Comments »

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By Melinda Elliott

There’s a lot of information out there about how to achieve your goals. About how to stay motivated, how to focus on your dreams and not be distracted by failure and set backs. But that all assumes that you know what you want out of life, that you already have goals you’re eager to achieve. Recently, in response to a comment I made about pursuing one’s goals on The Change Blog, I got a poignant reply that asked "But what if you haven’t found anything worth doing, any goal worth pursuing?"

Great question – focus is wonderful, but if we aren’t looking at the right things how useful is it? Sure we can learn from failure, but what do we do with those lessons if we’re not really doing anything? How can we find out where we should be looking for our satisfaction in life?

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This entry was posted on July 15, 2010 and is filed under: Meaning & Purpose - 10 Comments »

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By Stacey Porto, CC

“Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” ~Aristotle

Moral excellence, as Aristotle says, is a result of habit. Like anything else we want to master, to become morally excellent or more virtuous takes practice. Typically, we don’t go through our day thinking about whether we need to practice more kindness or more commitment or even more love. Morals or virtues are usually ingrained in us and come naturally, right? Yes, but if we became more mindful of the difference that the practice of virtues can make in daily life, we will undoubtedly lead a more fulfilling and happy life. Mainly because we are striving for excellence; our personal best based in virtues such as love, kindness, gratefulness, courage, and integrity.

By practicing the following six virtues, your life can radically improve in the form of better relationships, peaked performance, and fulfillment of your dreams.

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This entry was posted on July 11, 2010 and is filed under: Life - 11 Comments »

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By Srinivas Rao

Several months back I interviewed a blogger named Jenny Blake who runs a successful blog called Life After College, and has actually just signed her first book deal. As I was going back through my chat with her about the process of writing a book, she said one thing that really stood out to me. She said that far too many people are victims of all or nothing thinking when it comes to the seemingly daunting task of writing a book.  Most people don’t even start because they think that it has to be all or nothing: write the entire book or don’t write it all. When you think about goals in general that’s not at all how they are accomplished.

Let’s take a look at how we can overcome all or nothing thinking and actually accomplish our goals.

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This entry was posted on July 8, 2010 and is filed under: Goals - 12 Comments »

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By Christopher R. Edgar

In this post, I’ll talk about something that doesn’t seem to make sense. Why is it that, when we’re working on a project that’s deeply important to us, we tend to procrastinate the most?

I’m sure you’ve experienced this while doing a task that seemed “make or break” to you. Maybe it was a project that was for an important client or worth a lot of money. Maybe it was a paper you were writing for school that was worth a big part of your grade. Whatever it was, I’ll bet you noticed yourself putting it off more often than your usual chores.

Why Procrastination Makes Sense

Why does this happen? In my experience, when a task seems really important, that usually means our ego is deeply invested in it. In other words, our self-worth is riding on how we perform. If the project goes well, we’ll think well of ourselves. But if we screw up, we’ll see ourselves as screwups. [Click here to read more →]

This entry was posted on July 5, 2010 and is filed under: Self Awareness - 50 Comments »

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By Mark Harrison

“Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world.” – Samuel Johnson

Motion, or change, is the one constant in life.

We are always moving, whether it be forwards, backwards or in circles. Most of us would, I imagine, want to be moving forward – achieving something, becoming fitter, stronger, wealthier, more skillful, happier. Yet so many of us get stuck in a rut, going over the same ground like a mouse in a wheel.

Dreams

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – T E Lawrence

All things start in the mind. The great cathedrals and mosques of the world, the pyramids, the modern world – cars, planes and space ships – all the wonders of the ancient and the modern worlds – they all started as ideas, dreams. The idea of a flying machine would have been astonishing to people a few hundred years ago – most people would have ridiculed such a notion – but someone dreamed about it and now planes are part of our daily life.

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This entry was posted on July 1, 2010 and is filed under: Meaning & Purpose - 11 Comments »