Nobody ever jumped out of bed in the morning and joyfully exclaimed, “I love creating new habits!” Nobody ever! That’s because we all know that forming new habits and getting rid of old, entrenched ones is a shitty process. By shitty I mean it’s long, requiring higher than normal levels of commitment, patience and grit. And yes, the failure rate is pretty high!

Are you in the middle of or considering making a life transition? Truthfully, it’s a combination of art and science. Here are 8 steps to get you from information-gathering to action.

How often do you blame yourself for making a mistake you believe you shouldn’t have made? How often do you catch yourself saying or simply thinking some version of, “I was stupid…I should have known better…I can’t believe I let that happen to me!”? If in reflection you realize that you do this often or at least more than you’d like to, I have some good news and some less than good but certainly not bad news.

You don’t need my coaching. And that may be why you are my ideal client, and I, your ideal coach. There is a paradox inherent to the business model I’ve chosen. I choose to coach people who are emotionally and psychologically well, high performing by all regular human standards, and financially comfortable. They are extraordinary for a plethora of reasons, although they may not see that so clearly themselves.

Some people have vision. I love those people so much! I seek them out. I want them as friends and clients. I’m drawn to them like a hopelessly hypnotized moth to flame. They like me too. They think I’m one of them. But I never had vision. Still don’t. What I have is balls!

A Morning Practice is the most life-changing tool in your operating system. Like a sturdy foundation supporting a tall building or deep roots anchoring an oak tree, how you spend your mornings determines how you spend your days—and ultimately, your life. When you understand that you have a high degree of control over how your day unfolds through a consistent morning practice, you stop seeing it as a chore and start seeing it as a powerful tool for clarity, focus, and productivity.

Are you a group person? I never was. Until recently. At first, my individualism bias was by chance more than choice. I was an only child for the first eight years of my life, and truth be told, I liked it. I didn’t have to compete with anyone for attention and had a default for solitude even at that early age.

Whoever coined the phrase “it’s the thought that counts” was likely trying to make themselves feel better about disappointing someone due to a half-hearted attempt or one simply not taken at all. Nobody ever meant it when they let us off the hook by saying it’s the thought that counts when we didn’t make that call, write that note, or send that check.

Worry is nothing less or more than a habit. It’s complex only insofar as our individual tendency towards it, but otherwise it’s pretty simple and, ultimately, a decision. Worry is self indulgence masquerading as concern and love for others. Worry is letting our mind indulge in thoughts and scenarios we have no control over.

Don't look away. She could have been your child or mine. Parenting is nothing but one long-held breath. We inhale as we witness our heart detach from our chest and begin its journey in a world outside of us. A world outside of our protection and control. And we hold our breath till the day we die. But what happens if that heart, that phantom limb, is taken away before we are?

There’s a secret to identifying our most robust relationships. The secret is that if asked the question, “which one of you gets more out of this relationship?”—each party would honestly and easily respond, “I do, of course!” This is a concept that our brain doesn’t like.

If you like making New Year’s resolutions, I’d like to suggest the following: Go upstream. So many of us make the kind of resolutions that are bound to fall apart (data shows that this happens by mid January, for most) because we’re too far downstream from the actual root cause of the problem we want to resolve.

I absolutely hate networking. I literally hate the word and everything it stands for. Most of us are pretty happy going through life meeting and getting to know people organically until some time in our late teens and early adulthood when we are given the message that if we want to be successful in life we need to be networking.

I used to be really angry. I thought it was my personality because, well, I come from a long line of angry people. I can feel them getting angry as they read these words. But I soothe myself with the belief that most members of my beloved family don’t actually read much of what I write. And now I’m getting a little angry!

When you experience hardships, do you share it with everyone or keep it to yourself? Do you consider it a private event only to be shared with your coach, therapist and best friend? Or do you consider it responsible, helpful and useful to share your painful experiences with the world at large?

The outpouring of support after writing about Ahmed's passing brought me to tears regularly. I didn't know so many would relate to my experience of grief. Since his death, I've discovered something unexpected: I thought I'd lost my fear of death through decades of spiritual practice. I was wrong. Losing someone so alive and foundational has me reconsidering everything. With the greatest respect for the transcendent, when we die, we are gone from this particular, beautifully material existence. I'm suddenly riddled with the worst case of FOMO known to man—not about social media, but about missing out on life itself.

Last week's blog left many readers with more questions than answers. Most wanted to know: how do I identify the things that make me feel alive and purposeful? As I wrote, 'What we are actually seeking is not happiness but rather, aliveness.' So I'm sharing the 5 steps to connecting with the things that make you feel alive.

Sit down. Close your eyes. Hear me saying the word, slack. What's the emotion that rises up in you? If you're anything like most of my clients—ambitious, high-achieving go-getters—the emotion you're experiencing is not a pleasant one. We've been conditioned to think of slack as slacking off, being lazy and complacent.

Trying to be relentlessly positive is exhausting and often useless. I work with ambitious, deep-thinking people who spent a lifetime 'being positive' and it hasn't brought them closer to clarity or purposeful action. It's shaped them into nice, agreeable members of society, but left them asking, 'Is this all there is?' When gratitude becomes a weapon and reframing becomes a prison, it's time to shift from positivity to possibility.

"Wait, I'm confused….." How often have you started a difficult conversation by feigning confusion? It was certainly my default response when I was actually angry and hurt but didn't have the language to express myself. When we regularly replace unwelcome feelings by feigning confusion, we slowly turn into an emotional version of the boy who cried wolf.