Advice so bad, I couldn’t have heard right — Lady Mondegreen Repeating misundertood lyrics is common enough that Sylvia Wright assigned the term “mondegreen” in the 1950s. And sometimes a mistake is the logical explanation. Take the unlikely hit, “I Like Girls” by Elton John. It was every fifth song on only the radio station that played in the lab at…

And it’s so mundane, you might not bother — In late May, 1999, my Arkansas-based client called to postpone our session, scheduled for the following week. It completely threw my metric (billable client-facing days) for the week, and that of a colleague who was scheduled to support the site visit. I fumed and held a grudge right up to…

Both, using this iterative cycle from the 1930s — It’s January, so that means every other podcaster has released an episode on How to Set Goals and Win in the last few weeks. And, adding to advice that will only work for the minority already dedicated to goal-setting and goal-getting, is the debate between Process and Results. In this…

Don’t wait for year end to check your goal progress — One of my favorite podcasts is The Productive Woman. The host, Laura McClellan, shares tactics and strategies to manage the aspects of a full life — the “time, life, stress and stuff” as she says. …

The step you’re missing to get into action — It’s possible you’re rehearsing your shopping list, cleverly turning everything into a word that starts with S to make it easy to remember, mentally going through client calls to return, conversations to have, and CRAP that financial report was due yesterday, not tomorrow! Dang it, now you can’t remember the…

Achieve more by enlisting a team — Working toward goals is a crowdsourced game. While the goal-setter is the one doing much of the work, it’s misleading to approach the journey as a team of one. More likely, it’s going to take an army.

You don’t have to cry for your why — Anthony O’Neal repeats it so many times, you might start to believe it’s true. “If your why doesn’t make you cry, then the price of commitment will make you cry.” Meh. Maybe. If you’re coming through something difficult — addiction, abuse, illness, yes and more? — you might be done…

Me, my, mine — Parts of Speech There are eight parts of speech, one being pronouns. Pronouns serve a purpose. They shorten communication by removing redundancy. “Please give Rhoda Rhoda’s order,” becomes “Please give Rhoda her order,” for example. And thanks to the second person plural “you,” I can walk into a room and request twenty-five people…

Use Harada’s method to coach yourself to win — A sports coach serves in multiple roles, and even more when coaching high schoolers. Keep the origin of Takashi Harada’s approach in mind — he developed a coaching method while working as a track coach for the worst performing school in Japan. But that doesn’t make it irrelevant to adults…