“They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.” — Confucius

I’m testing my new tag line and taking it for a test drive. It’s Insight and Action for Getting Results. I’ll share my story and what I’ve learned since it might help others whether you’re branding you, your blog, or your business.

I’ll be back. Rather than keep it indefinite, let’s just say I’ll be back in November. Every now and then I take some down time. It’s one of my renewal patterns. It’s partly why I like doing projects and why I like the change of seasons. Great down time, helps me with great up time. I remember Deepak Chopra once saying something like the child sleeps so well, because the child plays so hard.

If you know the cycle you’re in, you can make more effective decisions. You can anticipate instead of react. I’ve been trying to get a handle on the economy to know what to expect and to figure out what the best moves are. The New Economy Cycle is apparently one of the most important financial planning cycles for your life, your investments, and your business. It’s less about the day to day decisions, and more about the big structural decisions you make in your life, such as where to live, what jobs to do, what to learn in school, … etc.

In my previous post, Likeability is a Skill, we learned that likeability is something you can work at and invest in, just like working out. We also learned that improving your likeability, improves your quality of life. Now it’s time to turn that into action. Great, so how do we get going? …

You might have noticed that I’ve changed my tag line on my blog a few times. My latest tagline is “proven practices for getting results.” Choosing a blog tagline sounds like it should be such a simple thing and yet, it’s really not. Your tag line can make a big impact for both yourself and others. For you, your tag line can help remind you what your blog is all about and serve as a source of inspiration.

Here is a quick look at last month’s most popular posts. It’s purely based on traffic. I might make this a monthly practice. It’s a good forcing function for me to take a look at what’s popular as well as rekindle some sparks with some of my posts. A monthly rundown also helps me see the forest from the trees and it’s a good way to stop and smell the roses …

Sources of Insight is 10 months old! She’s growing up so fast. (If you ask me, I don’t think she looks a day past 6 months.) What started out as my practice blog is turning out to be my real blog. Anyway, it’s time for a quick check in on results. This is actually a good time for a check in since it’s review time at Microsoft and I’m already reflecting on performance.

In my previous post, I wrote about the power of Hot Spots. In this post, I’ll show you how I apply Hot Spots to life. These are the categories I use for skilled living. This is the big picture. It’s how I chunk up my overall time and energy. There are certain areas in life that if I invest in, I get rewarded. On the other hand, if I ignore these categories, I get penalized.

Inspire … “To breathe life into” …
… That’s how one of my instructors defined it.  Now, I have a new respect for the word inspire.  I find myself asking, “how do I breath life into others?”
Photo by km33068.

I’ve been thinking of my life as a business. Without getting too carried away with the analogy – after all, life’s way more than business – it gives me a helpful frame, along with patterns and practices, to draw from. Rather than think of a business that makes money, I think of a business that creates value (the mark of an enduring business.) In this case, value for yourself and others.

Whenever I hear people debating whether life is an intelligent design or an evolutionary process, I can’t help but think that evolution is an intelligent design! When I think of design, I don’t think of veneer or appearance. Instead, I think of it as the soul of a thing, a sort of creator’s signal of intention.

What’s the difference between motivation and discipline? I like to think of discipline as “what to do” and motivation as “why to do.” Discipline has a Latin root, but the gist is it’s about teaching. So I think of self-discipline as teaching yourself self-control and shaping your behavior, so that you’re not a slave to your motivations. Primal motivations served us at one point, but society’s changed what survival means. For more precision, you can think of discipline as shaping your thinking, feeling, and doing to adopt a new behavior. Discipline serves you most when motivation says do otherwise. At the end of the day though, I think a key is to find ways to link things to feeling good.

I’m a fan of “living your process.” To put it another way, this is about “approach over results.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of results. The problem is you can’t control all the events in your life or what happens to you. In life, you control your attitude and response … and it’s not what happens to you, but how you react.

You can tell the maturity of a market by the consumer patterns. If you know the life cycle stages of a market you can better anticipate what level of “needs” your product needs to match to be successful. (I always think of needs in stages like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.) In the Autumn Special Edition of strategy+business magazine, Alonso Martinez and Ronald Haddock describe how a country evolves from a developing nation to an industrialized nation.

Every now and then I like to take a step back and check whether I’m on track. Sources Of Insight is now a little more than six months old. My last checkpoint was Sources of Insight is One Month Old. In this post, I share some of my lessons, take a stroll through some data, and give a bit of insight into where I’m headed.

Here’s a technique I learned back in Microsoft Developer Support. It’s called sweeping. The idea is simple. You periodically “sweep” the mess. You schedule a focused batch of time and sweep your mess. In our case, it was the knowledge base (KB). What happens with content is it erodes over time. You also end up with a bunch of stuff that either doesn’t belong or can be improved. Each sweep was like a breath of fresh air.

Photo by tourist on earth
It’s a new year and many of you will be setting new goals for yourself as part of your New Year’s resolutions. I want to give you an important nugget you can use when you implement your goals and start to face some potential discomfort or pain.  This insight may be exactly what you need if you’ve ever failed at changing a habit or meeting your goals in the past.
Creating New Habits and Reducing Friction in Your GoalsI actually wasn’t sure whether to title …

I find chunking my notes from lectures and training helps me turn insights into action. I chunk them into three categories: actions, insights, and notes. This simple refactoring helps me quickly find the actions or my “ah has” without having to fish through a laundry list of reference points. I bubble these to the top so I can find them at a glance. The act of refactoring my notes also helps remind me of the most valuable parts, which is usually the new distinctions …

Photo by clspeace
Given the economic climate and some horror stories I’m hearing, I’m refocusing on some patterns and practices for feeling good.   I think motivation is one of the most crucial skills you need throughout your life.  Even if already have motivation techniques that work for you, this is a set of expert techniques from the book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated , by Dr. David Burns.
Thought PatternsBefore reviewing the motivation techniques, you should be familiar with the following thought patterns:

10 Distorted Thinking …

Photo by kairbara87
How important is determination and drive for success?   Drive is a common characteristic among successful people.  The good news is that just like luck and success, drive is a continuum.  There’s examples where people with minimal drive, but they enjoy what they do, experience great success.  On the other end of the spectrum, you find ruthless obsession. 
What if you aren’t naturally driven?  Here again, there’s good news.  You can adopt successful strategies.  What you lack in personality, you can make up for in approach.
In Tactics: The Art and …