I use a simple frame for life to help me spend my time and energy on the right things. I call this frame, my “Life Frame.” My life frame is simply a collection of “hot spots” that I invest in. Or put it another way, I think of my life as a portfolio and I try to invest wisely in my key hot spots: mind, body, career, emotions, financial, relationships, and fun. The beauty of having a simple frame is that you can balance your life through thick and through thin. If you have a life frame, you can more thoughtfully allocate your time and energy for maximum results. More importantly, when things aren’t going well, you have a tool to help you spot where you are not investing enough.

A friend of mine told me a story the other day. I liked his reminder of how your job satisfaction, is more about your perspective, than the job.

It’s Not Your Job …
The story goes like this. As he was walking to his jet, on a picture perfect day, he thought to himself, how boring … one more routine solo flight. Then it hit him. He’s doing a job that other people only dream of. He realized that day and ever since, it’s not your job that determines what you enjoy … it’s what’s between your ears.

Twenty-five years of business in 32 countries has honed my understanding of what sets successful business people apart from those whom success is an elusive quest. Five characteristics persist in leaders I have been honored to know. Although there are more than five characteristics, these five characteristics top the list.

You don’t need to get what you want to be happy. You can be just as happy if you don’t get what you want, as you can if you get what you want. It’s not just sour grapes. You can manufacture your own happiness. It’s synthetic happiness. Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, teaches us that synthetic happiness is just as real and enduring as real happiness. Dan also teaches us that our longings and worries are overblown because we have the capacity to create happiness within ourselves rather than depend on experiences.

You can’t be an expert in all things. However, you can improve your overall effectiveness by rounding out your skills. While it’s good to specialize, knowing the basics in some key areas will help you put your knowledge to work. I’ve found that while it’s important to specialize in some areas, that I get more results by adding other areas to my belt. For example, focusing on business helps me invest my time better. Learning marketing fundamentals helps me get more impact from the work I do.

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Happiness is a skill you can develop.  Some people are born happy, while others have to work at it.  Some have to work harder than others.  Rather than work harder, work smarter.  Luckily, with all the focus on happiness, we now have a better body of knowledge to draw from.  Carlin Flora shares a collection of patterns and practices for skilled happiness from a variety of sources in her article, The Pursuit of Happiness, in Psychology Today.
Key Take Aways …

It’s obvious in retrospect, but I found a distinction between low-friction communication and high-friction communication. By low-friction, I mean “person A” doesn’t have to work that hard for “person B” to get a point. It’s an unproductive energy drain. There’s a better way. It’s along the lines of Covey’s “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

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How much do your expectations shape what you get?  A lot.  According to the Pygmalion effect,  you get what you expect.  However, the latest research is showing that your expectations and attitude play a larger role in your perception than we previously thought.  David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz write about how your expectations and attitude shape your reality in their article, “The Neuroscience of Leadership”, in strategy+business magazine.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Ask others better questions.  If you’re a mentor, ask insightful questions over …

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I don’t remember who drew this on my whiteboard, but I liked it.   It’s basically personas for focus and energy.  I’ll summarize it like this:

Procrastinators – Low energy and low focus
Disengaged – Low energy  and high focus
Distracters – High energy and low focus.
Purposeful – High energy and high focus

I like new lenses.  They make an old song new.  In this case, it’s a reminder of the power of focus. 
I think Beware the Busy Manager (Harvard Business Review) is an interesting article on how this shows …

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One of the ways you can transform your ordinary day into extraordinary is to master your craft.  By thinking of yourself as a craftsman, you can think of your work as your art.  By immersing yourself in your work, you become fully engaged.   When you’re fully engaged, you find your flow.   As you improve your art, you grow your ability.  As you grow yourself you grow your job.  The opposite is to disconnect from your work and just do your time.  This not only wastes …

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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 …

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Manage energy, not time, to get more things done …  This concept really resonates with me.  I also like it because it can be counter intuitive or non-obvious.  One way to try and get more things done is to, jam more in your schedule.  Yuck!  Unfortunately, that’s a fairly common practice.
It’s Not About More Time Management PracticesI actually have lots of practices for managing time (outcome-based work breakdown structures, managing outcomes vs. activities, prioritizing outcomes based on usage and value, avoiding over-managing minutia, using outcome-based …

This is a guest post on lessons learned in leadership from Jim Kouzes.

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I finally wrote up my notes on Precision Questioning and Precision Answering, or PQ / PA for short.  It was one of my most effective training sessions at Microsoft. 
My manager encouraged me to take PQ / PA so that I would be more effective in executive reviews and our group was full of avid PQ / PA practitioners.  I had a tendency to tell stories and elaborate, so this was about cutting to the chase crisply, with brutal effectiveness.  I took the class a few …

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Don’t fall into the intelligence trap.  The intelligence trap is when you get trapped in one point of view.  The solution is to use the PMI technique to improve your thinking.  The PMI technique is a thinking technique to find the Plus points, the Minus points, and the Interesting points about the issue before your form an opinion.
In Tactics: The Art and Science of Success , Edward de Bono writes about using the PMI technique to improve your thinking.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key …

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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 …

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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 …

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What is the role of luck when it comes to success?  It’s a wide spectrum.  It ranges from a great deal of luck to no luck at all, or, in fact, some very bad luck.   What’s important is that your belief about luck can really shape your chances for success.  If you take a passive view on luck, success may happen to fall your way.  if you take a positive view on luck, you can increase your ability to deal with negative situations, as well as …

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I got some relevant training for today’s world.  The training was “Influencing without Authority” and it was based on the book, Influence Without Authority (2nd Edition).   The focus was how to succeed when you don’t have authority and control over execution.  This is a common scenario in cross-team, cross-group scenarios.  At Microsoft, you don’t get rewarded by saying, “…if only I had control over authority and execution … I would be successful.”  
This training is actually useful beyond just the work scenarios.  You can …

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Do you have to be great at everything?  If this stops you from doing things you want to try, then it’s a limiting belief.  Scott Berkun spells this out in Why You Should Be Bad at Something.   Life’s not static.  As Tony Robbins would say, you’re either growing or dying, climbing or sliding.
One of the things that can hold you back is a fixed mindset.  If you have a fixed mindset, you attribute results to innate ability and you discount learning.  You think people are …