How did you fail today? What happened next?

Time for a pop quiz: how did you fail today? What sucked today? And what did you do about it?

Failure for me, today, was having a migraine strike and figuring out what to do about it. I'm the type of person that doesn't like to stop - for anything, not even a migraine. I get frustrated by inactivity and not being productive. Not because I am part of some machine that has brainwashed or forced me to work when I am not my best. It's because I am too damn proud. And it's possible that my pride and stubbornness was my failure for today.

Sometimes our body provides the signal our brain is ignoring.

The science is either emerging or simply becoming more clear, but there is a connection between the mind and body. That connection is the vessel for communicating all sorts of things - happiness, distress, contentment, and so forth. The body is an excellent teacher, if we let it.

There's a fine line between ignoring the warning lights on your car and being stranded on the side of the highway because the car broke down. Our bodies, and minds, are no different.

To be sure, go-go-go. But you can't go full speed 24/7/365. The warning lights will go off. The engine will shut down, eventually. The question is whether you will intervene, see the mechanic, go in for a tune-up or just decide that you'll ride the car into the ground.

The choice is truly yours.

When you create something bigger, your failures are given context

The first chunk of my life was dictated for me. I went to school and I was told what to do in school. I got a job and I was told what to do at that job. I went to college and I was told what to do in college. I found a better job and I was told to do in that job. My success in those different contexts was some milestone, goal, or achievement that was given to me by those different contexts. I didn't have to think about what the goal was - it was merely given to me. In some sense, that's great - I appreciate that someone was training me. But the problem is that no one told me that I was merely being trained. Without necessary communication and context, I kept drifting through the days thinking another goal or milestone would magically appear. Well, it didn't. And it took me a few years to figure this out - more than I'd like. What did I learn in the process? That you must set those goals for yourself - even if those ...

The More Good Days than Bad Days Principle

There are seven days in a week, about 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year. Not all of those can be good days. No one has 7 perfectly good days. Likewise, I've never gone through an entire year without a single bad day. I have two reactions to that: The first reaction is the whole "control what you can control" thing. You can control your effort and your attitude. And that's absolutely true. But sometimes a day is so bad that no amount of effort or attitude will fix it. The second reaction is that, in any given week, if you have 4 good days and 3 bad days, you're still winning. Even if you have a few "meh" days, but the good ones are still outnumbering the rough ones, I think we're in a good place. The same goes for our practices with our little leaguers. We've had some truly rough and awful practices. The coach's didn't show up with patience, the kids didn't show up with their attention spans, a...

The Power of Allowing Yourself to Fail

I don't know about you, but I really hate to fail. I am willing to do almost anything to avoid failing. I hate it. I am willing to do things I otherwise wouldn't want to do, only if it means I can avoid failing at something. It's not so much about not getting what I want, however. I think, in isolation, I can grapple with that outcome and figure out what to do next. The thing we seem to be afraid of is failing in front of others. We worry about what they'll think of us and our reputation. Our reputation is our brand, after all. But maybe instead of thinking about this in terms of a binary "pass, fail" set of options, what if the reputation is a set of options surrounding what you do about failure. And maybe you were putting entirely too much pressure on yourself to achieve one outcome over another. And so that is our struggle, our call to action. Fail - fail to allow yourself to grow. Fail - fail out of ...

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