Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Alan Shelton on Awakened Leadership. Alan is a leadership coach, blogger, speaker, and the author of Awakened Leadership: Beyond Self-Mastery. The idea behind Awakened Leadership is to transcend beyond trained behaviors to awareness, and lead a life of authentic leadership. In other words, to be a more effective leader, you have to be more of who you already are.

Don’t wait for the facts to change. Life’s better when you don’t wait for the facts to change. You improve your effectiveness when you respond to life’s curve balls. You also improve your resilience and self-reliance. You also create new opportunities. One of my favorite metaphors here from sports is, “You play the ball, or the ball plays you.”

Here is a simple mental model for communication. If you have a mental model for communication, then you can move your way up the communication stack more effectively. You can also avoid more communication conflict. You can also work on your communication skills more effectively. That’s the true power of a simple model.

We can defeat or mitigate decision fatigue with proven practices. We can learn from business executives, air force fighter pilots, fire-fighters, doctors, and intense knowledge work, like software development.

You now have access to some of the best insight and action on presenting numbers. Randall Bolten shows us how to present numbers with skill. Randall’s new book, Painting with Numbers: Presenting Financials and Other Numbers So People Will Understand You, is the definitive guide to show you how. It’s the short-cut to mastering the art and science of presenting numbers in a way that’s compelling and professional.

You can use movies to fill your head with images, mental models, and examples of extreme effort. When the chips are down, you can then draw from these scenes to inspire yourself to go the extra mile and really put in the effort required. The key is to build a collection of inspiring movies and scenes that put a premium on effort and dealing with setbacks.

Like anything, BEST gets better with practice. It takes work to hit your high notes, but the more you make BEST a habit, the more high notes you’ll hit.

A PQ (Positive Intelligence Quotient) rep simply involves flexing your PQ Brain “muscles.” Your PQ Brain can help keep you centered, calm, cool, and collected. It also helps you get innovative and resourceful to better solve problems that come your way.

Groups don’t always make better decisions, and two-heads aren’t necessarily better than one. It can be “herd mentality” in action.

Writing things down is a key to effectiveness. It helps you free up your mind, think on paper, and better organize your thoughts. If you don’t write things down, your mind spends more time “paper shuffling” and creates its own anxiety.

Conflict management gets a whole lot easier when you know what you’re dealing with. The problem is, if you don’t have a simple mental model for conflict, things can get complicated fast.

This is my roundup of top blogs for insight and action. The Web is a big place, but a lot of roads lead to the same town. Collectively, this collection of top blogs helps equip you with “skills to pay the bills and lead a better life.” You’ll find it’s a mash up. The mix includes: business skills, continuous learning, entrepreneurism, fun, leadership, personal development, productivity, strategy, technology, thinking skills, and trends.

This is a guest post from Eric Brun on lessons learned from the book, Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler.

This is a 101 list of some of the best insights and actions for work and life.  This is the stuff you can use to change your frame, to change your game. I started with the simple goal to build and unleash the world’s greatest “ah-ha” collection.

We are All Rocket Surgeons. What a headline. Their point is simple. We’re all intelligent and have the ability to do wildly wonderful things, if we avoid being ruled by our emotions, and if we keep it simple.

This is a guest post by Jason Selk Ed.D. on how to apply principles of mental toughness to improve your performance at work. Jason is the bestselling author of 10-Minute Toughness and Executive Toughness.

Editor’s note: Meet Jim Camp. This is a guest post by Jim on how to use the power of “No”, to negotiate more effectively.

Why do we procrastinate and what can we do about it? Procrastination is a subtle and insidious thing. It can hold you back from who you were born to be.

If we drink from the steam of polluted thoughts, we can quickly disempower ourselves, put ourselves in a state of anxiety, and lose our motivation and drive.

“Process for process sake is not good for goodness sake.” — Lynn A. Edmark