Exercise 16 of Leadership Step By Step was probably the most challenging one I’ve had so far. For this exercise, I had to do the exact same thing as in exercise 15, but now with something more difficult. Going through The Model and The Method itself was easy enough, but I found the actual new behaviors to be really difficult, […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #15: The Method
This week’s exercise from Leadership Step By Step was to build on the previous exercise (“The Model”) and to try to influence your own environment, beliefs, and emotions in order to elicit a rewarding feeling from something that you’d like to improve at, but haven’t been able to. For this exercise, Josh asked us to form groups to brainstorm new […]
Shopping Hurts Your Wallet, Happiness, and The Planet – How I Escape the Dopamine Trap
It’s 6:13am. I’m in my living room laying flat on the floor on my stomach. Chest heaving up and down as I take quick, gasping breaths. My legs and arms feel like they’re burning. My forehead is slightly damp with sweat. I just finished my second set of burpees for the day, and as usual, they kick my butt. Like […]
My Third Pillar of Sustainability – Connection
We covered my three pillars of sustainability, went into detail on how I use the lens of health and the lens of happiness to shape my behavior, and now it’s time for the final pillar and lens: connection. In a way, I feel like connection is the pillar that really ties everything together – I can be at the top […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #14: The Model
This week’s exercise from Josh’s Leadership Step By Step was called The Model, and the assignment was to watch a few of Josh’s videos on The Model, which showed me a system to begin to analyze my own emotional processes surrounding something I’d like to improve at, then try to do the analysis for a couple things I want to […]
Productivity, Distraction, and the Hidden Cost of Convenience
3/8/25 Note: This week I was hit by some kind of stomach bug which made it really hard for me to get to my computer to write a blog post about my third pillar of sustainability, connection. So, I decided to interrupt my scheduled blog post for one that I wrote a week ago that I planned on posting at […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #13: Write Your Models for Leadership and Emotions
Essay #1: What is leadership? [I want to preface this essay by saying I’m not sure I 100% agree with everything I wrote. This is one that, the more I wrote, the more introspective I got and started to second guess myself, or wanted to add more. I feel like given enough time you could fill a book with all […]
My Second Pillar of Sustainability: Happiness
In my previous two posts, I described my three pillars to a meaningful life: health, happiness, and connection. They are 3 lenses that I use to evaluate everything I do in life and see whether it’s contributing positively to my life or not. Then I went into a bit more detail about how I use the lens of health. Now […]
My First Pillar of Sustainability: Health – How Living Healthy Creates Meaning While Also Positively Impacting The Planet
In my previous post, I described my three pillars to a meaningful life: health, happiness, and connection. They are 3 lenses that I use to evaluate everything I do in life and see whether it’s contributing positively to my life or not. Health is the first and most obvious one to understand why I include it. Why health is foundational […]
Leadership Step By Step – Exercise #12: Feedforward
Exercise 12 of Leadership Step By Step was “Feedforward”, an exercise developed by Marshall Goldsmith to ask for advice instead of asking someone to evaluate something you did in the past (AKA “feedback”). In short, the exercise asks you to pick something you want to improve at, ask for advice using a specific script, ask some clarifying questions if necessary […]