This is the second blog in the motivation series. You can catch up with the first one here. It seems to me that everyone likes to be motivated, so it may disappoint you to know that you can’t be motivated to do everything. The overachievers out there hate to admit this, but there is only so much time, energy, and focus. Our mental, physical, and emotional capacity has limits. Trying to push past these limits is unhealthy and problematic (more on that another time!). When you are thinking about making changes and working on feeling motivated, a crucial step is to get real with your capacity to make the change. First you have to decide how important something really is to you. Not how important you think it SHOULD be, but how important is truly is. I don’t care who     . . . read more

Welcome to fall! It’s probably my favorite season. Cool nights and warm days. Autumn colors and yummy flavors. But that’s not what this post is about…it’s about making some changes! This fall, I’m over at CrossFit 321 with a series on Strategies for Sustained Success. It’s all about the crucial psychological aspects of making lasting life changes. I’m discussing motivation, the psychology behind food and exercise choices, ways to maintain progress and how to bounce-back from inevitable setbacks. Making some changes of your own? I’m going to be featuring all the topics covered in my Strategies for Sustained Success series right here on the blog. Up first is a full week of posts on change and motivation starting on Monday. Have a question you want answered? Write me at [email protected] and I’ll be sure to include the info (without your     . . . read more

I have always heard from self-proclaimed procrastinators that they “need the pressure in order to perform.” I used to accept this as a legitimate reason to procrastinate, feeling that if it works for people then it’s fine. But somewhere down the line, this way of reasoning has lost its validity. Now I say to you procrastinators everywhere, “Procrastinate if you want, but you don’t need the pressure, you choose it.” So there. I’m calling you out on this one because I care. Really, I do. I’ve already outlined all the reasons I believe procrastination sucks the life out of you. Time to take away its power. I’ve put my health correspondent on the task of compiling all the research studies of how procrastination makes you ill. But for now, you’ll have to accept antidotal evidence that it just isn’t good     . . . read more

Change. That’s what’s on my mind. This week I have been really inspired by stories of change all around me. People always presume that my job is kind of a drag. They think that all I hear about is stuff that would ordinarily bum anybody out. Honestly, it’s truly the opposite on most days. What’s really going on all day is people showing up in my office with a lot of will to have things go better in their lives. There are certainly ups and downs and rough situations that people have encountered. However, the majority of people stick with coming to see me and they succeed with their goals. That’s incredibly uplifting. My job is pretty awesome. In a recent post, I talked about how people have to decide to make changes. Then, with intention and attention, changes can     . . . read more

I’ve been inspired lately by someone who works tirelessly to grow and change. She wakes in the wee hours of the morning practicing new skills for hours at a time. Everyday there are profound differences from the day before. It sounds quite tiring, and it is (occasionally naps are required). But since she is not quite a year old, we call this dedication to change play. Play. That’s right. Learning new things and forming new neural networks in our brain to support these changes is the very stuff of child’s play. So if my infant daughter has this much ability to change, to work, to be dedicated to new tasks like walking, talking and feeding herself, is this true of all humans? Or do we out grow it? It appears that we actually get a little complacent. Once we have     . . . read more