Take a look at this diagram from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s great book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience: Flow is a state where you’re “in the zone,” performing well at a task you care about. One of the requirements for getting into flow, as shown above, is that your skill level must match the challenge. If it’s too easy, you’ll be bored; if it’s too difficult, you’ll feel anxious.1 But this… Read More »The Three Kinds of Anxiety
Here’s one of my favorite quotes of all time. It comes from Bill Bryson’s delightful book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. “Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances… Read More »Toughness is in Your Genes
“I hope I’ll make some progress on that project this week.” “Hopefully, I’ll be able to get myself to study.” “I hope I can exercise in the morning.” These are phrases I sometimes hear from coaching clients and students. And while I understand the sentiment behind these expressions of hope, I take issue with the mindset they reveal. It’s always within your power to do the thing. You have to… Read More »The Trouble With “Hope”
Picture someone who is really charismatic. A wide variety of images might come to mind, but there’s one thing they all have in common: You’re not picturing someone checking their phone. Smartphones kill charisma. There, I said it. For all its utility, your phone is undermining your ability to be well liked and influential. To understand why smartphones have this effect, we need to unpack what charisma really is. In… Read More »How Your Phone Kills Your Charisma