Believe it or not, 2020 is almost over.

It’s odd because it feels like yesterday that I was thinking about the idea of New Year’s resolutions and the commitments we make to ourselves at the beginning of the year.

This year has thrown us a ton of curveballs and it’s been an honor to be on the frontlines of your lives with you throughout the year. I’ve worked with young people who are starting their professional lives in the most uncertain of times. I’ve worked with established business owners who had to fortify their business against a global pandemic and an economic shutdown. I’ve worked with couples who found themselves navigating an entirely new dynamic at home as schools and offices were shut down.

Through it all, I’ve watched all my clients grow, stay committed to living with passion, and stay committed to their results.

Personally, I don’t like to wait until late December to start thinking about progress and the new decisions I must make - especially in a year as disorienting as this one had the potential to be.

I encourage you to do the same. Whether you are a client, or just someone out there looking for ways to improve, start thinking about your 2020. Did you continue to grow? Did you decide to live in a great state of mind? Did you experience more good emotions than bad ones? Did you see opportunity, or did you only see challenges?

The truth is, making huge changes in your life comes down to one relatively easy concept: raising your standards.

Everything else, all the tips and tricks, exercises, and strategies are only useful if you’ve set the appropriately high standards for yourself.

When people hear this for the first time, they often get defensive. They’ll say something like “if that’s all it takes, everyone would have whatever they wanted.” To some extent – that’s true. And that’s true because most people here in the United States do have whatever they truly want.

This can be kind of tricky because part of you is reading this saying “well I want a Porsche and I don’t have that.” Or “I have 20 thousand dollars in credit card debt and I want it to be 0 dollars.”

It’s true, you may want those things, but you also want to only work 40 hours a week and to go shopping and out to the bars every weekend with your friends. The Porsche and paying off the credit card take a level of discipline and sacrifice that you absolutely do not want.  

​Important Note:
 
A coach is not a licensed mental health professional and any advice or commentary here should not in any way be considered medical advice. Depression can be a serious, medical issue. If you are experiencing depression, please seek out a qualified mental health counselor and do not use this discussion, or any other article, blog, or material on the internet as a substitute for a qualified mental health professional. If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide call one of the suicide hotlines: 800-SUICIDE (888-487-0468) and 800-273-TALK (866-699-0189). If you have a plan for suicide then go to the closest emergency room immediately for medical treatment.
 
 
As a life coach, I’m frequently compared to therapists. I suppose I get it. We have some similarities. Our core mission is to help clients be happier and function better in their world – more or less.

There are major differences though and there are a lot of aspects of therapy that I think can actually get in the way of people thriving in their lives.

Often, I work with clients who have either done therapy or that do therapy alongside their coaching. From their experience, and from the knowledge of those who have taught me (therapist Cloe Madanes, the Peyshas, and Tony Robbins), I can see a lot of ways that therapists can get in the way of their clients’ success.
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Here are a few examples:

Tempus Fugit. Memento Mori. This is an old phrase in the Christian Faith that you don’t hear often anymore. Even in the world that deals with the afterlife, death is an unwelcome subject for so many.

Translated from Latin it means this: Time flies. Remember death.

To Christians, this phrase is used to help focus the followers of Christ – a reminder that this life is very temporary when compared to eternity; and that while it is easy to get swept away in drugs and alcohol, or Netflix, or one-night stands, remember that you only have so much time to get it right before your time is up and your judgment comes.

The phrase has a sort of whimsy to it that caught my attention when I first heard it. Often paired with skull and crossbones, I could imagine a Jack Sparrow type character saying it to me while winking. Like most people, when I first heard this phrase, death wasn’t something I thought of regularly. Nor did I want to. Death is an uncomfortable thing and we tend not to like to think that we too will meet our ends.

But then it occurred to me that even in the secular world, this phrase lives in the works of artists, musicians, filmmakers, and philosophers alike.
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Think about it for a minute. How many times have you been asked, if this were the last day of your life, what would you do? How would you live your life?

For years I resisted the idea of detailed planning since I so highly value variety and I was convinced that planning would cost more time than it would create.

Recently I’ve been re-working everything I know about planning. I’ve been a meticulous digital calendar user, but I recently switched to writing in an actual planner with pen and paper – the Tony Robbins RPM system to be exact.

I’m deep into my journey and it appears I was right on some level – planning does take a significant amount of time. It may save me some time in the end but that’s not the real benefit to me. The REAL benefit of a high-level planning system isn’t the 15 minutes you spend doing it every day. The real benefit is the clearing out of the mental cobwebs and the reactivity that dominates our brains every day.
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So many of us live with this daily sense that we’re not doing enough, or we’re doing the wrong thing, or we’re doing too much. Most of us don’t take the time to think about it in detail like this, but that nagging anxiety that plagues many exists precisely because you haven’t come up with a clear, concise vision for your life or your day (you can’t have a clear vision for your day without a clear vision for your life. 

Hypnosis is something I have been mildly interested in since I worked in a comedy club back when I was in college. At the club one of our regular performers was a guy named J. Medicine Hat – a stage hypnotist. He created ridiculous spectacles on-stage ranging from the typical “human acting like a farm chicken” to the more extreme “adult show” where things happened that aren’t necessarily designed for this professional forum.

That is what most people think of when they think of hypnosis. People do not realize that hypnosis, or “trance,” is a regular part of your everyday life. Think of hopping on an elevator, hitting the button of your floor and then glazing over while your elevator takes you to your destination – awakening you with the jolt of the elevator and a simple “ding.” Or maybe your routine drive to work where you know the route by “muscle memory” and you zone out lost in your favorite song or podcast. On that drive you are not consciously thinking about every turn you are making. You just drive. Even binge-watching your favorite Netflix show is a type of trance. Why do you think you feel uncomfortable, maybe even stressed, when you a watch a suspenseful show like Ozark?
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Hypnosis is mostly just about shifting the focus of your attention and subtle suggestions. For example, if I talk about how people’s conscious minds, while they are sitting, do not feel their feet on the floor. The overwhelming majority of you who just read that sentence will distinctly feel your feet on the floor.

​When it comes to communication and building rapport, everyone does it a little differently. There are several ways we are innately different in communication – do you communicate better standing side by side or face to face? Do you like to talk during an activity like golf or racquetball, or do you prefer to sit down face to face with no distractions of movement?

Part of my work is helping people become better at communicating. I want my clients to match and thrive in any social setting, so that effective communication is never a barrier to their goals.
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Another part of my job is helping business leaders make sure that their workplaces accommodate various personality types, so they can make every employee thrive in a comfortable environment while concurrently developing their people’s communication skills to make the workplace more cohesive in the bigger picture. 

​A global pandemic has broken out and it’s changing all our lives – maybe forever.

Not only are many getting sick and fighting for their lives, the rest of us are living in isolation while the stock market crashes and some of us aren’t sure if our jobs will still be our jobs in a week or a month.

This type of drastic, rapid change is unsettling to say the least.

Difficult times are one of life’s guarantees. For some, it will create despair and helplessness. For others, it’s a time to invest in themselves, their families, and their relationships to come out of the dark time a great deal stronger than they were when it started.
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Here are 4 tips on what you can do to thrive during uncertain times:

89 percent of employees who work at companies that support well-being initiatives are likely to recommend their companies as a good place to work.

The American Psychological Association estimates that the American economy loses 500 billion dollars and 550 million workdays every year due to stress.

Over the last decade, in large part due to newer, younger, companies like Google and the rest of the tech sector, employers have started to understand that company culture and employee happiness aren’t only important as a moral issue, but as an issue that drastically affects their bottom lines.
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“Goofy” ideas like nap pods, meditation, and life coaching have gone from flavors of the month to proven benefits in an amazingly short amount of time.
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