I began this blog 18 years ago, in November 2002, before social media was even a thing. I started the dance with 100 subscribers and over the first two years I slowly unpacked The 13 Principles of Happiness that were central to my work at that time. While my focus has expanded and shifted and gone global over the years, the …
[ > Keep reading ]COVID Brain Part 3: Awesomeness One of my favorite writers has been posting daily bits of Pandemic Awesomeness. Inspired, I’ve been working on my own list. Discovering that I DO have the motivation to exercise even though the gyms are closed Having fresh baked bread twice a week for the past 20 weeks – because there’s no place to go …
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Stress is Mostly Self-Created Happiness Principle** #7 says, Choose to Respond: What happens is going to happen, regardless. Accept constant, discontinuous change as reality and instead of reacting, respond with curiosity. Wow, when I created these principles, I had no idea how useful they’d be 17 years later during a pandemic! Let’s take a moment to go back to basics: what …
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Talking About Death and Happiness Death—and its relationship to life—has been pushing onto my agenda in the past month, so much so that when I sat down to write this month’s post, I found it impossible to not write about it. “But Jim, “you are possibly thinking, “isn’t this site about happiness and leadership?” Well, yes. And as you’ll see, …
[ > Keep reading ]Case study. Client is Director, 15+ years experience. She is smart, decisive, gets shit done… and is perceived as “demanding.” She wants to shift her leadership style from Command & Control to a Coaching approach. We discussed in a coaching session different ways she can use both language and her physical presence to shift the perception others have when she …
[ > Keep reading ]Story: I’m sitting in a coffee shop, writing. Background music creates a white noise, masking multiple streams of conversation I only half-notice from within my envelope of concentration. Whenever a new customer walks in, the bright-eyed, caffeinated barista asks, “How are you this morning?” Most respond with a simple “fine,” or “okay.” Some brave a “great!” or the oft-obvious “I …
[ > Keep reading ]A few weeks ago I delivered one of my core talks, “Five Prescriptions for Living and Leading in a Turbulent World” to an enthusiastic audience. One of the participants approached me after the program to say, “Jim, I’ve been a subscriber for over a year, and I’ve never read anything about these 13 Principles of Happiness that you refer to …
[ > Keep reading ]Sometimes it seems like nothing works the way it should. If you’re a human being, you have probably experienced that place where work is no fun, relationship is a struggle or you don’t even feel comfortable in your body. At times like these, changing your life can seem overwhelming. There’s so much to do…where do you even start? It’s quite …
[ > Keep reading ]If you are totally organized and always know what you need to do next, always have control of your tasks, and always correctly forecast how long something will take… I am insanely jealous of your skillset. Starting last October, even as I started to declare 2013 as my Year of Happiness (my 15th anniversary in business, etc), I began a …
[ > Keep reading ]I recently learned that I must move my website to a new technology platform. The short story: I was one of the first of my kind to have my own website in 1998. While I’ve rebranded and redesigned the site many times, the guts of it are still written in an “ancient” programming language that will no longer be supported. …
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