Past IS the Present

Common adages like “leave the past where it belongs” or “look to the future” or “no point in crying over spilled milk” and my favorite, “just live in the present” are used by loved ones, coaches, therapists, mentors, and other very well-intentioned people in our lives. They use these phrases in an attempt for us to not dwell on things of the past, but instead on the present and the future.

Increasing Success Rate of Goals

Take a look at the graph below summarizing the findings of a study by Dr. Gail Matthews.

I shared this at a session I did last week and several folks found it incredibly insightful. It is self-explanatory. So this week, ask yourself, as it is still very early in the year, which group you belong to with the goals you have already set for 2012. What can you do to move into Group 5 and increase your success rate of achieving those goals?

Motivation (Part 2)

Last week’s blog on motivation generated a good amount of healthy dialogue. I want to elaborate on that topic and discuss ways to generate more sustainable levels of high performance, getting you to be at your best as often as possible in lieu of relying solely on the fleeting nature of motivation, which–as I discussed last week–is a great way to perform at high levels but only for very short durations. To reiterate, motivation, as most of us understand it to be, is a very short period of fearlessness based on low cortisol levels induced by very positive experiences.

Motivation–Don’t Rely On It

This time of year, the gym I go to is filled to capacity. It happens every year and somewhere around late February or early March, the “new-year crowd,” as we affectionately call them, disappears again. This is a time of year when motivation is high as goals are set for both the personal and professional year ahead.

Optimism

There have been dozens of studies over the past few years validating the correlation of optimism to success, however you define the latter. Optimism is not as abstract a concept as you might think. We typically refer to optimists as the “glass is half-full” people as opposed to other “glass is half-empty” ones.