Handling The Hard Stuff

Tag: Planning

  • Not Every Choice is a Decision

    We go through the day choosing A or B all day long to the point of exhaustion. I can’t get out of the house without a hundred decisions. But not every choice is a decision. A decision is a choice plus an emotion. A choice is truly just that – you try a different coffee…

  • Progress is a Process

    I’ve seen a lot of incremental process in my life. I’ll lose a little weight or I’ll be consistent with a training plan or a savings goal and then I’ll lose focus. I pat myself on the back and congratulate myself on a job well done. And then I let my foot off the gas.…

  • Who You Are and Who You Are Not

    Know thyself. As we get older we learn who we are, but more importantly we know who we are not and do not want to be. We spend our lives learning and finding ourselves – new skills, new jobs, educations, partners. We learn who we are as parents and friends and who we are in…

  • You Don’t Have to Have a Plan

    You don’t have to know everything right this minute. Sometimes life is overwhelming. There are too many places for you to focus and you’re stuck just trying to juggle everything coming at you and you can’t make progress or focus on any of them. That’s ok. We get so focused on having a direction and…

  • Don’t Expect Results for Work You Didn’t Do

    We like instant gratification. Our world is spinning faster and faster and social media is inundating us with instant kitchen transformations and hundred-pound weight loss results, without any of the process. You only see the highlights in everyone else’s life. Their process is no faster or better than yours, you just see the edited version.…

  • You May Not See the Progress

    Sometimes it’s hard, when you’re in the middle of the process, to see the actual progress you’re making. It may even be that you have no idea how the skills you’re learning will be useful in your hoped-for future. You may have to get creative to figure that out, but any new skill or piece…

  • Pivoting

    Even the best laid plans can fall apart. No matter how thorough and well-researched you are in your planning, there are factors outside your control and sometimes those factors destroy your plans. Learning how to switch gears and figure out next steps from there can be the difference between success and failure in the long…

  • You Can’t Think Your Way to Perfection

    We are overthinkers. We are planners. We anticipate problems and solve them before they happen. But there’s a limit. My dad likes to reference “the paralysis of analysis”. We overthink and plan and anticipate problems so much that we talk ourselves out of every move. At some point, we just have to risk it. We…

  • Are your Affairs in Order?

    **This is not legal advice. If you want legal advice consult an attorney that practices in your jurisdiction.** We see on television or in movies whenever there is a terminal diagnosis that people should “get their affairs in order”. But what does that mean? In the United States at least, it means be clear about…

  • You are Doing Better than You Think

    We are terrible at reasonable self-analysis. Invariably we are our own worst critics. We second-guess every choice we’ve made and consider whether things would be better if we’d done things differently. Stop. You are where you are and you’re doing better than you think you are. You are trying. You are changing. Those two things…