Personal Excellence
Do you annoy your customers?
I love that sign you see every once in a while in a diner or dry-cleaners: “If you loved our service tell your friends, if not tell us.” That’s a great sentiment and was probably hung on the wall to send the message that management is truly interested in quality service and being responsive to [...]
Building character through entrepreneurship
Inspired by a short article with the same title over on Dr. Jeff Cornwall’s blog, today I’d like to talk briefly about how entrepreneurship can build character, and how you can do the same even if you’re not an entrepreneur. Dr. Cornwall references a post that lists five reasons why entrepreneurship improves your life. For those [...]
What motivates you?
I had an early morning meeting with an entrepreneur last week. He’s located in an area that historically has a lot of traffic congestion to begin with, not to mention the large construction project that began on the interchange there about six months ago. I hate to be late to meetings, so I left with [...]
A Personal Branding primer
I’ve mentioned the topic of Personal Branding a few times before, but a recent post (along with a free download) on Chris Brogan’s blog got me inspired to write a primer describing my views of this concept. I’ve been hearing the term more and more, maybe you have too, so I’ve been not only giving it some thought, [...]
3 types of personal change
“Growth is change”. This seems fairly self-evident. Growth, by it’s very nature, is change. As we talk about change on this blog, we are concerning ourselves with change associated with personal growth in pursuit of personal excellence. Therefore even though you could argue the opposite statement is also true “Change is growth”, not all growth [...]
Progress?
A friend of mine, Mark Pinto, is an example of a person whose destiny was probably foretold from the day he was born. So visual and creative he can’t eat lunch with you without doodling on the napkin, Mark runs a successful consulting business providing “graphic facilitation” to clients, helping them with issues ranging from [...]
5 steps to sustained personal change
I’ve been using this concept of a “crucible” or intense life event as a backdrop lately for some of my posts. Today, I’d like to talk a little about something that has been an element of my current crucible, and what I have learned from it. The topic is change, specifically personal change. Even more [...]
Lessons to be learned
It’s rather ironic that I recently recommended a book called Crucibles of Leadership. The book sounded interesting as it is centered around creating a Personal Learning Strategy to take advantage of particularly stressful life experiences. The author calls these experiences crucibles, and his premise is we all have enough crucibles to provide the basis for a [...]
Your morning routine, interrupted
When you wake up in the morning do you have a smile on your face and a sense of happy anticipation for the day you are about to enter into? Or do you wake to “just another day”, or worse a sense of dread or depression? If you fall into the second camp, ask yourself [...]
Stop being so hard on yourself
If you are interested in the pursuit of excellence, it is often too easy to focus on what you perceive as your flaws. A little critical self-evaluation is a good thing, too much focus can be destructive. This is one of my growth areas, as I tend to dwell on what I need to change [...]
